Collaborative Leadership Through Leaderful Classroom Practices: Everybody is a Leader

By Soyhan Egitim

Revisiting our leadership identity each time before we walk into a classroom can give us an opportunity to re-examine what leadership tenets we demonstrate in the classroom and to what extent our leadership practices foster or limit our students’ growth. This book attempts to shed light on the impact of language teachers’ leadership identity on their pedagogical and class management choices. It proposes a new pedagogical framework, Leaderful Classroom Practices which emerge through social, relational, and dynamic interactions between the teacher and students. Establishing an open, democratic, and participatory learning environment for all learners is a major leadership responsibility of teachers, and this book intends to demonstrate how to accomplish this mission both in theory and practice.

Excerpt from the author's preface (slightly modified): "One of the objectives of this book is to question whether my perceptions concerning language education align with the notion of providing students with open, democratic, and participatory educational environments. Furthermore, the book also intends to delve deeper into the pedagogical implications of leadership based on power and authority in the language classroom. Leadership is no longer about information sharing and decision-making. It is about listening intently and being open to learning from others, even when those others are meant to be your students. Given that language learning is a collaborative endeavor, where two or more people need to interact with one another so that some learning can happen, everyone needs to become an initiator. This notion aligns with the leadership identity I present in this book. Collaborative leadership is based on the premise of sharing leadership with others. It is fostered through the humanistic values of liberty, equity, and justice. Promoting these values to establish an open, democratic, and participatory learning environment for all learners is a major leadership responsibility of teachers. This book demonstrates how to accomplish that mission both in theory and practice."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Candlin & Mynard ePublishing Limited
• Release date: Mar 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005383138

Soyhan Egitim

Soyhan Egitim, EdD, has lived and worked in multi-cultural societies including Turkey, where he is originally from, Canada, and Japan. Since 2006, he has worked as an English language teacher in a range of educational settings in the Greater Tokyo Area. Upon completing his MA in TESOL at the University of Chichester in 2011, he pursued an academic career in Japan. In 2020, he was awarded a Doctorate in Education from Northeastern University in Boston, where he concentrated on collaborative leadership in the Japanese higher education contexts. Currently, he serves as an assistant professor at Toyo University where he teaches English and intercultural communication courses. As a multilingual expert in intercultural communication, language education, and inclusive leadership practices, Dr. Soyhan Egitim has strived to promote open, participatory, and equitable language education through academic lectures, publications, presentations, and training workshops. His publication, “Collaborative leadership in English language classrooms: Engaging learners in leaderful classroom practices” (Egitim, 2021a), laid the foundation for the main ideas discussed in this book.

Book preview

Collaborative Leadership

Through

Leaderful Classroom Practices:

Everybody is a Leader

Soyhan Egitim

Candlin & Mynard ePublishing

Published by Candlin & Mynard ePublishing Limited

Unit 1002 Unicorn Trade Centre

127-131 Des Voeux Road Central

Hong Kong

ISBN: 9781005383138

Collaborative Leadership Through Leaderful Classroom Practices: Everybody is a Leader

Copyright 2022 Soyhan Egitim

Candlin & Mynard ePublishing Limited was founded in 2012 and is incorporated as a limited company in Hong Kong (1830010). For further information, please see the website: http://www.candlinandmynard.com

Cover image: Human Connections by Wildpixel

(iStock by Getty Images)

This book is copyright material and may not be copied, reproduced, printed, distributed, transferred or used in any way that contravenes the relevant copyright law without written permission from the publishers.

The Positive Pedagogical Praxis Series

The Positive Pedagogical Praxis Series is edited by Tim Murphey and focuses on practical activities, procedures and principles that can create more profound learning in a variety of ways. The books are written in a teacher-friendly style and seek to provide teachers with ways to implement profound ideas into their classrooms. The books could be used for in-service training, professional development workshops and teacher-development.

https://www.candlinandmynard.com/ppp.html

Titles in the series

- Learner-Controlled Tasks for the Autonomy Classroom: A Teacher’s Resource Book by Christian Ludwig and Lawrie Moore-Walter 

- Voicing Learning by Tim Murphey

- Conversation Strategies and Communicative Competence by Christian Jones

- Collaborative Leadership Through Leaderful Classroom Practices: Everybody is a Leader by Soyhan Egitim

- The Personalized Learning Module: A Collection of Learning Advising Tools by Stephanie Lea Howard, Gamze Guven Yalcin, and Tarik Uzun

Reviews

In this book, Soyhan Egitim has established himself as a trailblazer in classroom pedagogy bringing leaderful practices directly into the classroom. In doing so, he has become a one of the first to equate the hierarchical manager-subordinate relationship in the organization to the teacher-student relationship in the classroom. So, as we begin to deconstruct individual leadership as a sole authority in managerial relations, so too must we begin to deconstruct the role of teacher as supreme authority of the learning experience. Knowledge need not be necessarily passed down from those who know to those who don’t; knowledge can too be created as we interact with one another in our respective environments.

I would also point out that Dr. Egitim has not made it easy on himself by choosing to introduce leaderful classroom practices in language instruction, a domain classically directed by the teacher in charge. Yet, through a range of in-person and online novel, interactive, and intercultural activities, he demonstrates that it is not only possible but highly effective in learning terms to bring democratic values to the classroom based on the core frame of leadership as a concurrent, collective, collaborative, and compassionate endeavor.

Professor Joseph A. Raelin

Donald Gordon Visiting Professor of Leadership at University of Capetown

Asa S. Knowles Chair Emeritus of Practice-Oriented Education at Northeastern University

Although the focus of this book is on the classroom, I read it from my personal experience of corporate training in multi-national organizations and found much to learn. By definition, global teams are made up of people from different backgrounds/geographies who need to value each individual’s perspective to reach their business goal. Top-down, authoritarian leadership extinguishes the very diversity that makes a global team successful. Research has shown that intercultural teams are more effective when they are collaborative. It was very helpful to read the real-life examples from the author’s own experience and research as well as the practical strategies to apply collaborative leadership, strategies that are easily transferable to the corporate world.

Diane Sasaki

Executive Coach (Leadership Development and Diversity Training)

President of SIETAR Japan

Acknowledgments

The ideas that gave life to this book emerged from my personal experiences with university students and matured through my doctoral and post-doctoral research. Firstly, I would like to start by acknowledging the influence of Joseph A. Raelin’s works, such as The Leaderful Fieldbook and Leadership as Practice, for giving me the knowledge and inspiration to develop a new pedagogical framework, Leaderful Classroom Practices, for foreign language classes.

I would also like to thank Harriette Thurber Rasmussen for inspiring me as an instructor by creating a leaderful classroom environment and helping me recognize the collaborative leader within me during my doctoral coursework. The collaborative team project I took part in during this course allowed me to participate in collaborative leadership and experience the challenges and rewards first-hand as a student.

I would also like to thank Joseph Shaules for sharing his support and expertise on foreign language and intercultural education and allowing me to use his jungle gym metaphor, which provided a supportive pedagogical framework to promote collaborative leadership in language classrooms.

I would also like to say a big thanks to my friend and colleague, Gregory Price, for volunteering to proofread this book from start to finish. It would have been impossible to complete this project without his editorial assistance. Finally, my sincere thanks extend to Jo Mynard and Tim Murphey for offering their tremendous support and expertise during this project. Their insights were critical for me to move forward and communicate the core messages this book conveys.

About the Author

Soyhan Egitim, EdD, has lived and worked in multi-cultural societies including Turkey, where he is originally from, Canada, and Japan. Since 2006, he has worked as an English language teacher in a range of educational settings in the Greater Tokyo Area. Upon completing his MA in TESOL at the University of Chichester in 2011, he pursued an academic career in Japan. In 2020, he was awarded a Doctorate in Education from Northeastern University in Boston, where he concentrated on collaborative leadership in the Japanese higher education contexts. Currently, he serves as an assistant professor at Toyo University where he teaches English and intercultural communication courses. As a multilingual expert in intercultural communication, language education, and inclusive leadership practices, Dr. Soyhan Egitim has strived to promote open, participatory, and equitable language education through academic lectures, publications, presentations, and training workshops. His publication, Collaborative leadership in English language classrooms: Engaging learners in leaderful classroom practices (Egitim, 2021a), laid the foundation for the main ideas discussed in this book.

Preface

My intention for writing this book was to revisit the much-neglected concept of language teachers’ leadership identity, emphasize the critical role of reflective practice, and demonstrate leadership as a collaborative endeavor in the classroom through various pedagogical methods and strategies. My doctoral dissertation offered me my first avenue for exploring the influence of language teachers’ leadership identity on their pedagogical practices. The findings revealed results, which warranted further investigation into this phenomenon. While continuing my research, I also embraced the habit of regularly reflecting on my own leadership identity and observed the way it influenced my daily pedagogical approaches, which I intended to share in this book. I believe reading how I evolved as a collaborative leader may also make you think about your own leadership identity and pedagogical approaches. As Franklin said, unpack your backpacks and closely observe all your experiences in life, which account for who you are and how you perceive yourself as a leader (2014, p. 69). When this reflective practice becomes a habit, it should take you away from the deep-rooted assumption of teachers as leaders and students as followers.

As the bulk of my teaching experience has been within Japanese educational settings, inevitably, the practical and theoretical descriptions I offer in this book primarily reflect my experiences in Japanese educational settings. Evidently, contextual circumstances are different in other parts of the world or even within Japan, and issues require specific approaches depending on the region. Thus, I