Educational Leadership: Change through Self Understanding

In the recent past there was a realization of the significant role a head teacher can play to initiate and sustain change in educational institutions. To have a fuller understanding and to bring a meaningful change in the educational leadership practices we need to study lives and beliefs of head teachers and the way they view themselves as a person and as a head teacher. Inspired by this perspective the belief-practice relationship is now considered to be a powerful strategy in the reconceptualization process of teachers. Marland (1993) refers to this relationship by suggesting that teachers' classroom actions are guided by internal frames of reference which are deeply rooted in personal experiences. Tillema (1998) supports this view by suggesting that in a teacher education programme, study of teachers' beliefs becomes more important as teachers view new concepts through the lenses of their existing beliefs and do not practise new strategies unless these strategies are congruent with their beliefs. This view advocates that head teachers cannot become change agents unless an inner change, at the belief level, takes place. To tap the belief system "Metaphor" is considered to be a powerful tool. The essence of Metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of thing in terms of another. This paper is based on my experience of working with heads of educational institutions in a course organized by the ICI Pakistan-British Council Management Centre on Educational Leadership in Pakistan. The core of the metaphor activity, which was just an opening activity for the course, was to facilitate the course participants to critically review their existing beliefs about educational leadership and reflect on the potential alternatives suitable to their own context. In most of the cases the metaphors selected by the head teachers depicted the notion of a 'giver', placing their colleagues/subordinates at the receiving end. Some ways that helped the course participants to re-conceptualize the notion of educational leadership were pair work, group work, brainstorming, debriefing session, cooperative learning and presentations.