Leadership and Values in Language Education - Al Akhawayn ...

10Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferencenecessary condition for the implementation of the approach and hence leading tocompetent students. Likewise, being a teacher leader is a prerequisite toproducing leading students. Another underlying assumption relates to thenecessity of designing and implementing a set of standards for teacher education.Supervisors’ and to some extent teacher educators’ conceptions of a ‘goodteacher’ or a ‘competent teacher’, have largely been limited to pedagogical andtechnical concerns. While this view is legitimate, it is incomplete with regard tothe current demands of the profession and the expectations of all stakeholders.There is an urgent need to review these conceptions and practices. Beforedealing with the main features of teaching competencies, the following sectionwill be devoted to the context of the current reform, including its main principles.Indeed, teacher competency is deeply anchored in the main aims of the reform ingeneral, and ELT general orientations in particular.1. ContextThe general principles of the current reform give priority to students’ needs andthe needs of the socio economic and cultural environment. The specific measuresfor foreign language education advocate clearly a competency based and astandards-based approach. The national curriculum, the guidelines as well as thenewly produced textbooks are built around this approach. In terms of teachingrequirements, this orientation has important implications for teacher education,including in-service training, both at the academic and professional levels.On the other hand, talking about being a teacher leader is tantamount to talkingabout being a competent teacher since the former involves, among other things, anumber of attributes, including personal qualities, professional skills, personalstyle, etc. In other words, it can be safely said that educational leadershipattributes largely correlate with attributes of teaching competence. Furthermore,professional attributes can contribute to the achievement of leadership. To furtherclarify these concepts, the following section will attempt a definition ofleadership.2. What is leadership? What is a leading teacher?A cursory look at the literature on leadership indicates that the concept can bedefined in many ways according to the perspective adopted and the context inwhich the concept is being applied. For the purposes of the current discussion, thefollowing definition is offered: