Educative Essays: Volume 3

By Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD

This book contains a collection of essays related to assessment and supervision within the teaching profession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD
• Release date: Jul 16, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301279104

Benjamin L. Stewart, PhD

Benjamin Stewart holds a PhD in curriculum and instructional leadership and a master’s degree in education, curriculum and instruction: technology. He is a full-time EFL teacher educator and researcher at the University of Aguascalientes in Mexico with an interest in researching personal learning networks and language teaching and learning.

Book preview

Dedication

This book is dedicated to Beny and Oliver, who have taught me how to truly appreciate my own educative experiences as a father.

Preface

Why a series of educative essays?

I began studying a doctoral dissertation from Northcentral University (NCU) in September of 2007.  NCU is an online university, accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and is a member of the North Central Association. The first two years of the doctoral program consists of graduate courses whereby learners upload essays to the NCU platform for credit.  Having completed all of the course work for the program, I realized that I had accumulated quite a few essays over the years, covering a variety of topics within the field of education.  So, why a series of educative essays?  Here are a few reasons:

1. I realized that I had no personal copies of any of the essays that I had written for NCU - they all resided on the NCU platform for a definite period of time.

2. The essays were all spread out over various courses and quite difficult to find.  Having them all in a book format would allow for easier access.

3. I’ve been blogging for several years and have never gotten into the habit of reading prior posts, even when someone would post a reply. It was just something I hardly ever did, for better or for worse.  The same applied to the essays written for my doctoral program.  I thought having them as a single collection would force me to look at how I viewed various educational topics in the past as well as my own writing style.  It has now been long enough that I feel that I can step back and appreciate them for what they are.  Not literary classics, nor excessively profound statements on education written in clear, academic style and tone, but a realization and some satisfaction in reflecting on how my perspective in some cases had changed over the years while in other cases a perspective that continues today.

4. Never having published a book before, I thought pulling these essays together would justify going through the self-publishing process from start to finish.  I will leave it up to the reader to judge whether doing so was actually worth it or not.

5. I wanted to offer a book on educational topics under a Creative Commons License so that others could reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute it to give back to the profession of education in some way.

Why order essays by date?

The essays are ordered by date so to respect the order in which I wrote them, spanning a period of about two years.  It also provides a way to reflect on how my writing style and ideas developed during this period.  Some topics jump around between chapters while others are more aligned.  Thus, you may want to skip around to different chapters of the book to read those essays that interest you the most, or you may decide to read them in order, from start to finish.

Yielding to Dewey (1938), the term educative in the title of this book is meant to promote, the growth of future experience (p. 13).  My sincere hope is that to some small degree that this will be the case for the reader - I know the process of putting these essays together has certainly been educative for me.

Benjamin L. Stewart

July 4, 2013

Becoming a Community of Leaders

October 12, 2008

This essay begins by defining leadership and then connects leadership to community building.  The community is laid out in terms of a social network that includes individual nodes and ties in depicting interactions between individuals.  The number and strength of ties an individual has dictates to what degree knowledge, influence, and power exist.  Power laws can present learning inequities if relationships within the network remain central to only a few individuals providing the knowledge and having the majority of the influence.  Collectives, connectives, networks, groups, and rhizomatic communities are laid out in terms of community building, all stressing the importance of achieving group goals while at the same time achieving individual goals as well.

Leadership and its connections to community building rely on a connectivist approach in how the overall dynamic of the social network influences equitable learning.  Although current literature expresses the importance of leadership in schools (Copland and Knapp, 2006; Gupton, 2003; Blase and Blase, 2004; DuFour, DuFour, and Eaker, 2008) and establishing a community of leaders as a whole (Sergiovanni, 1999), the actual interaction between the stakeholders (i.e., the actors within the network) and the power within those relationships provide a better means for describing the effect the networked community has on improving education.  In order for community building to be an effective means for improving education, leaders must understand their role and its influence on the community, always acting in the best interest of an improvement to education in schools.

The notion of instructional leadership generally relates to the behaviors of administrators and teachers as they relate to instructional outcomes.  Hallinger and Murphy define instructional leadership as …interactions between leaders and followers wherein the follower’s beliefs and perceptions are viewed as important (as cited in Blase and Blase, 2004, p.11).  Given this definition for instructional leadership, Sheppard went on confirming a positive and strong relationship between effective instructional leadership behaviors exhibited by principals and teacher commitment, professional involvement, and innovativeness (as cited in Blase and Blase, 2004, p.11).  Although this perspective is focused primarily within the school, the essence of teachers working with administrators in a non-hierarchial way, administrators providing teachers the space to try new teaching practices and then reflect on them, and administrators promoting individual goal-setting as part of the overall school policy applies to teacher and student relationships as well.  Extending the idea of instructional leadership to an idea of leadership in general removes the centrality position from within the school and applies it to the entire community.

Leadership at the community level requires a commitment of becoming a community of leaders (Sergiovanni, 1999).  Instead of emplacing leadership as a dyadic phenomena in terms of employment position (i.e., administrator-to-teacher, teacher-to-student, etc.), all stakeholders are allowed to take