Leadership and Management Development in Education (Education ...

THE CURRICULUM FOR LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT: CONTENT AND PROCESS414. Managing peoplePeople are at the heart of any organisation and school leaders need to workthrough other people, staff and stakeholders, in order to achieve school objectives.In self-managing schools, leaders may be responsible for the full range ofhuman resource management, including staff selection, induction, mentoring,staff development, deployment, performance appraisal, and discipline. Thesethemes should be included in modules on managing people.5.AdministrationThis term may denote routine management tasks, or refer to a wider and moresignificant set of processes. In some countries, the term ‘management’ may beused instead but the key point is that all schools have to carry out a range ofadministrative and managerial tasks in order to be functional. While coursesneed to reflect such processes, it is important to avoid ‘managerialism’, anemphasis on process at the expense of school goals. Administration should beregarded as a function that supports, not supplants, the educational purposesof the school.While these five themes provide a starting point for the construction of aleadership development curriculum, attention needs to be paid to the deliveryprocess. Significantly, in the twenty-first century, the emphasis has shifted fromcontent to process, from ‘what’ is included in development programmes to‘how’ they are designed and delivered. This is the focus of the next section.Leadership development processesSchool leaders are adults and need to be involved in determining their ownlearning needs. Tusting and Barton (2006) make two key points about adultlearning:1. Adults have their own motivations for learning. Learners build on their existingknowledge and experience. They fit learning into their own purposes andbecome engaged in it. People’s purposes for learning are related to their reallives and the practices and roles they engage in outside the classroom.2. Adults have a drive towards self-direction and towards becomingautonomous learners. Learning is initiated by the learner, and one role of theteacher is to provide a secure environment in which learning can take place.They add that leadership development is moving away from the individual andprescribed towards the emergent and collective: