Leadership Training 

Last week Lusine and I attended “The Principle: Three Keys to

 Maximizing Impact " seminar organised by the CASS. The seminar was dedicated to exploring the new role of a leader in 21^st century educational setting. Michael Fullan, the speaker of the seminar, a recognised worldwide authority on educational reform, introduced his findings in this area. He mainly focused on Leading Learning, the first key to successful leadership in educational institutions. According to Fullan, the leader’s new role in schools, colleges, and universities is to “model learning and shape the conditions for all to learn”. They should lead their faculty “…in a process of learning to improve their teaching, while learning alongside them about what works and what doesn’t”.

According to Fullan: The principal’s new role is

•    A System player
• An Agent of change
• Leading learning

In the Curriculum team we have adopted Collaborative culture as our work model, and it was great to see that the speaker of the seminar was promoting Collaboration as key to success in educational setting. Another aspect that was similar to the CEFL culture was appreciating the impact that Media and technology have in modern classroom. The speaker introduced his vision of the “unplanned digital revolution” based on the Push factor, when the school is increasingly boring for students, and the Pull factor, which is based on bringing the fascinating digital world into the classroom. Based on extensive research, he found that new pedagogy is about learning partnership amongst teachers and students built on “engaging, efficient, technologically ubiquitous 24/7, and steeped in real-life deep learning”.

The seminar was very engaging and we learned a lot about effective leadership that includes “cultivating and developing” the quality of the group, participating as a learner, and producing other good leaders.

Here is a link to further information on Michael Fullan.

www.michaelfullan.ca