Leadership Dimension - Providing Instructional Leadership

"The Principal ensures that all students have ongoing access to quality teaching and learning opportunities to meet the provincial goals of education."

This is my second weakest dimension of the PQPS. Managing School operations and resources being my weakest. The latter is much easier to remedy with direct mentoring and knowledge. The former is more complex. Given that there is some circular logic within the goal" ensure teachers meet the Alberta TQS, to me this reads like too many bullets underneath bullets.

My approach to teacher motivation and instructional leadership has always fallen under Daniel Pink's version of motivation ie) autonomy, mastery, purpose (AMP). After a discussion last Friday with a teacher about this, however, it is clear that this model is lacking in what I can now recognize as acknowledgement.

Pink's AMP is by far more important than acknowledgement, but acknowledgement is where administration gets to signal what is the preferred approach. Autonomy, but this is what will be celebrated. Mastery and when achieved, this is what can be expected. Purpose, well we are teaching students to love learning, so that one is easy, but is excellence in meeting and caring for purpose ever acknowledged.

While studying the motivation and management of people the idea of incentive's often comes up, but there are no meaningful carrots and sticks within education. This is good from an AMP perspective, but how does one lead without incentives. The incentives signal what is valued. So how can that signalling take place? Public acknowledgement I suppose.

I always received lots of public acknowledgement, and it usually made me cringe to hear about it at a staff meeting, but I suppose that it is necessary. There still is something cringe worthy about just saying someones name at a staff meeting. I wonder how other leaders have handled this in the past? It can't be forced, and it can't be watered down.

The PQPS points to assessment, "appropriate and effective pedagogy that honours student diversity," "programming that meets individual student learning needs," new and emerging practices being integrated, communication with families, use of community resources, and of course AB. TQS adherence.

Thinking about this now, I suppose it is beholden upon me to find opportunities to acknowledge excellence in these fields.

Here are my big take-aways from this reflection on leadership dimension #5:

1. Instructional Leadership - supporting, promoting, and being present for PLC work. This means showing up to team meetings, finding out what they are doing, and actively celebrating the good work being done here. 
2. Communicate that non-involvement in the classroom is due to my adherence to AMP for motivation and my deep faith in teacher ability. 
3. Using every public address to acknowledge one of the Leadership dimensions foci. 

Personal Vision

What is my personal vision for the work that I do? At this point I have only pieces of understanding. I do not have a clear understanding of my own purpose.

• Improving educational attainment for First Nations, Metis and Inuit students
• Leading schools to more equitable treatment of students
• Connecting students to real world change projects
• Creating a world that is kinder and more self-aware for my children.

Now how do I turn this into a personal vision?


The above was written as a final reflection for an MBA class on strategy. I left out some of my ideas on capitalism and environmentalism because I thought that the last two points captured my philosophical ground that the world is changing and that change ought to be good. I always thought that it was in Chinese philosophy, but the google (more specifically the Internet encyclopedia of philosophy), tells me that it was Heraclitus who talked about the nature of existence always changing and used the metaphor of the river.

According to both Plato and Aristotle, Heraclitus held extreme views that led to logical incoherence. For he held that (1) everything is constantly changing and (2) opposite things are identical, so that (3) everything is and is not at the same time. In other words, Universal Flux and the Identity of Opposites entail a denial of the Law of Non-Contradiction. Plato indicates the source of the flux doctrine: "Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things go and nothing stays, and comparing existents to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river"

"On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow." Heraclitus

My personal application of this idea follows that every student is always different and how to reach them will continually change (the water), but the endeavour of teaching the love of learning (the river) will still remain the same. In this way, as I understand it, the river is always changing, and it is in awareness of this change that I am able to achieve unity of purpose.

So the world is changing, and my personal vision embraces this idea of change because it allows for the possibility of improvement. The horrors of the world and the cruelty that we all know is out there can be debilitating. Raising my family into this world I have to believe that improvements are not only possible, but inevitable. This foundation also suits the first two aspects of my personal vision from that reflection paper.

The EPSB vision is "Transforming the learners of today into the leaders of tomorrow."

I like that word transforming, but for now I am going to start crafting my own personal vision with the word change.

So far my personal vision is this: "Change ..."

The Goals of this Blog

There are three main goals that I wish to pursue in writing this. When I decided to get back into blog writing I thought this would be strictly to help me understand the PQP Standard. This would be an exercise in preparation and professional development, I thought. Since that time, however, I think that this could serve a bigger purpose than helping prepare me to be a principal. The last lecture I received from Dr. Marvin Washington challenged me to develop my own personal vision. One must be clear on what they want to lead and that takes consciousness. The EPSB vision: "Transforming the learners of today into the leaders of tomorrow" seems simple to understand at first, but there is much more behind this vision than a simple, build leadership skills kind of interpretation. Which leads me to the reasons I have for writing (these are not rank ordered),

• Deepen my understanding of the Principal Quality Practice Standard
• Application
• Examples
• Building up a PQPS segment in my brain
• Develop and refine my own personal Vision
• Clarity
• Not confined to my career only
• Reconciled with EPSB vision
• Deepen my understanding and application of this vision
• Explore career pathways for my future 
• Based on clarity of vision 
• Experimenting with what is possible

Now that I have started writing I can tell that this is often going to be a personal journal that is written only for me, but in the spirit of the millennial generation that I am not really a member of, I am going to put the whole thing out there online. 

Vision determines Action