Values and Ethos of Learning Communities Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

Values and Ethos of Learning Communities - Essay Example The role of leaders is to create learning community culture in which understandings achieved during the course of practice, nurtured and not forgotten. Educational leadership should encourage students and inspire their interest to learning and self-improvement. Different leadership strategies mentioned above should not be used in isolation. The role of educational leadership is to maintain the community and support the core purpose of increasing the ability of all students and preparing students for the future. Leaders must remember that their words and stance on issues impact others in both large and small ways (Sergiovanni 2000). The main educational leadership strategies include blending leadership strategy, institutional leaders, instructional leadership and transformational leadership, facilitative leadership, visionary, ethical and direct leadership (Educational Leadership& Management, n.d.). Direct leadership is what leaders do when they work directly to enhance teacher learning. Substitutes for leadership are the structures, pathways, and norms leaders build that allow, encourage, and enhance teacher learning. In K-12 public education, the choice of leadership strategy depends upon the extent to which it matches the nature of the task, the complexity of the community setting, and the standards of quality expected. Many learning communities choose instructional and transformational leadership which help educators to meet changing learning environment and community's policies. Where task complexity is simple, direct supervision involving telling students what to do, watching them do it, and making correc tions as needed might be an appropriate choice. But as complexity increases, strategies closer to mutual adjustment make more sense. These learning communities rely on purposing and shared values, standardizing knowledge and skills, and mutual adjustment as control strategies if they want to be successful (Educational Leadership, n.d.). Facilitative, visionary and ethical leadership allows educators to form and correct basic moral values and preferences of diverse student audience. Using these strategies, educators become more sophisticated in their ability to develop capacity for teaching and leading in schools creating effective learning communities based on trust and respect. The task of facilitative leadership is to encourage the involvement of students at all educational levels. Visionary leadership is aimed to create a certain vision of culture and values shared by a particular community. This is one of the most important strategies which help educators to prepare students for various roles in their respective communities. Critics argue that ethical leadership "should have and be willing to act on a definite sense of ethical standards" (Educational Leadership& Management, n.d.). K-12 community leaders should create an effective environment and control that students are well served, and that teachers are suppor ted in their efforts in behalf of students. A leader's role is to engage teachers in determining and articulating a vision of excellence for all students. Communication in K-12 public education should include conversation about school issues and the needs of children with meetings to analyze data and plan

Interpretive Note on Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Essay

Interpretive Note on Sarah Orne Jewett's The Country of the Pointed Firs - Essay Example The Country of the Pointed Firs is one such work, in which, Jewett subtly shows how women can live an independent life without following certain stereotypes. So, this paper analyzes how Jewett also focuses on women-dominated space, particularly their psychic. The Country of the Pointed Firs follows the trails of the unnamed narrator in the fictional town of Dunnet Landing, Maine. She is a writer from Boston, who comes to Dunnet Landing to complete the work she has started. Renting a room in the home of Mrs. Todd, she gets acclimatized to the area and becomes captivated by the old-fashioned community. Most of the town’s population are old people with ages ranging between sixty and ninety. All of them are ‘rich’ with many interesting experiences and thus they tell small stories or anecdotes about the town, the sea, as well as the town’s people, to the narrator thereby enriching the narrator’s experience. The narrator was overwhelmed by the experience with nostalgia flowing through her mind. In course of time, she strikes a ‘close relationship’ with Mrs. Todd and that gives another perspective to the work. In most of her works, Jewett, pushed by her wish to break all dichotomies, creates female characters who are strong, confident and independent. In The Country of the Pointed Firs, apart from the narrator character, the character who symbolized the above said positive virtues of woman is Mrs. Todd. This semiautobiographical novel follows a young woman writer, who while spending a summer Dunnett Landing and completing her work, comes in contact with a group of women. These women while telling many stories about the town, become emotionally attached to the writer. â€Å"There she is adopted into a loose knit group of women who weave a web of stories about the town, the surrounding islands and the folks who live, or lived, there.† (brothersjudd.com). They spend a lot of time close to each other, sharing good rapport and so