Are You Having Trouble with Recurring School-Improvement Problems? Take This Test!

Directions: Answer the questions below the way you truly believe and feel you practice, not by what you believe might be the expected answer. Then, if you are really brave, ask the teachers that you work with to respond to the same set of questions the way they see you in practice! Use the scale 1 = Strongly Disagree; 2 = Disagree; 3 = Agree; 4 = Strongly Agree. 1. A leader must exercise control over those in his/her organization. 2. Good leaders exploit value conflicts within their followers. 3. One of a leader's main jobs is to motivate his/her followers. 4. The best leaders have a clear, specific plan of where they want the organization to go/what they want the organization to accomplish. 5. The best way for leaders to reach potential followers is directly, rather than indirectly. 6. Good leaders realize that goals are always surrounded by a thick, sticky coating of ambiguity. 7. A good leader identifies the school purpose through discussion and then, "puts it in writing. " 8. School crises interfere with a school leader's pursuit of the school mission. 9. Mandates, policies, and requirements often distract a leader's attention from doing the important things. Directions: Find below a list of school improvement problems that you may have attempted to solve, only to have them reappear. Place a check mark by any you have experienced as recurring problems. 10. Low teacher morale. (1) 11. Begrudging, minimal performance or compliance. (1) 12. Uninspired teaching. (1) 13. Reluctance to change teaching behaviors. (2) 14. Sporadic teacher effort to improve pupil learning. (3) 15. Indifferent teacher effort to raise standardized test scores. (3) 16. Teachers "hanging back" and waiting for an external consultant to come in before they try anything new. (4) 17. Teachers working very hard and achieving relatively little in terms of student outcomes. (4) 18. You're having to repeat information to teachers over and over again. (5) 19. Teachers being confused about how to complete forms, when information is due, interpretations of new policies. (5) 20. Try as you will, your school is not goaldriven. (6) 21. Even though you have stressed and stressed the purposes of your school, it still seems to be adrift. (7) 22. You seem to continually be "putting out fires" and never get a chance to really lead. (8) 23. With all of the local district and state mandates, you feel you get little chance to do the things you know you should be doing. (9) (NOTE - the numbers in parentheses above correspond to the numbered paragraphs below) The first nine statements above were drawn from the works of Burns (1978), Fullan (1991), and Sergiovanni (1990). Each of these writers has made significant contributions to our understanding of leadership to decrease recurrent school improvement problems. Burns' work was a seminal book that identified key leadership themes from the major political leaders of the twentieth century. Sergiovanni's work was an adaptation of Burns to school settings. Fullan is the leading scholar in synthesizing our knowledge of school change. The last fourteen phrases are school improvement problems associated with misunderstanding of the leadership theory represented in the first nine statements. In other words, the problems identif ed in numbers 10-23 are linked to the misunderstandings of leadership theory reflected in numbers 1-9 indicated by the number in parentheses. These nine statements represent the most frequently missed questions from a 53-item questionnaire administered to students in a school leadership degree program at a large, regional university. Of the seventy-one students who responded to the questionnaire, 70% were female and 28% were minority. All but four were classroom teachers and were taking their first course in educational leadership. …