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

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32Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferenceand focuses on the long term objectives. While managers seem to be analytical,structured (prepared), compliant, deliberate and orderly, leaders areexperiential, visionary, flexible, risk-taking, free and creative 6 . Managers areconcerned with ‘how to do things’, while leaders look for the underlying reasonsbehind things. As leaders are agents of change, they constantly look foropportunities to do what has never been done before; they never seem contentwith maintaining the status quo . They never give in or let themselves be led bycircumstances, but initiate change instead of waiting for change to take place.Leadership and PowerLeadership is different from power in the sense that the latter usually connotescoercing people, intimidating them, and forcing them to do their tasksunwillingly. The non-judicious/non-measured use of power is very often contraryto the essence of nurturing leadership in members of any group, includingstudents 7 . In his famous saying, Dwight D. Eisenhower states that "You do notlead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership." Leadershipand power can be distinguished as follows:Leadership• Leadership can vest decisionsin a big number of people,• Leadership is bottom-up andcontext-bound; a context wherethe individual relates to a group.• Leadership implies influencingothers in order to attain sharedobjectives.• Leadership is where the leaderis perceived by others as beingable to influence the group.• Leadership is a form of power.But it is a power liable to beshared.Power• Power can vest decisions in asmall number of people• Power is a sort of “domination”through formal authorityflowing from the top-down.• Power can involve influencingothers against their will.• A person who has power is notnecessarily a leader and notnecessarily chosen (nolegitimacy).• Not all forms of powerdemonstrate leadership.6 http://www.itstime.com/nov96.htm. (March19th, 2007)7 Chaibi, A. 2003. Redistributing power in the EFL classroom: a challenge tomeet. An unpublished paper presented at the MATE conference of Fez, 2003.
33Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual ConferenceThe coming section will concern itself with whether leadership can find its wayto the classroom or not. Practical TEFL related issues will be tackled meanwhile.Why is leadership possible to nurture and exert in the classroom?Student leadership development at school has been a primary concern ofpractitioners for a few years now. School has been considered as a wellestablishedorganization which is daily affected with what happens in other socioculturaland economic fields. As a matter of course, students are regularlyencouraged to build leadership skills so as to assert themselves in schools andoutside in a world which is characteristically competitive. Educationalists claimthat there is a high correlation between being a leader in class and being a leaderelsewhere. In other words, leadership success in school activities might lead toleadership success in life at large. A relevant question here would be whetherthere are ways of rendering leadership possible within the classroom confines.Moreover, interest in communication, in collaborative learning, in team-orientedtasks, in the intensive use of group work, and also in the implementation of groupassignments and projects inside and outside the classroom, has become the normin our Moroccan FL classrooms. This shift of practice -that is new in the scene- issignificant because students are expected to operate with more responsibility forthe management and operation of the work groups as part of their curricularexperience. Management and operation of work groups presuppose that there issome leadership process within the group to accomplish the desired goals. It isalso reasonable to suggest that if group work requires leadership, then thestudents in the group must have or develop leadership competence.If leadership is important to classroom functioning, it is rather necessary to helpstudents get involved and work as team leaders and accountable partners.Actually, schools are almost the most suitable arena for power delegation andpower redistribution (Chaibi, 2002). Students are likely to reverse roles in theclassroom and this makes it obvious that there is the possibility of operating andcreating leadership in the classroom. There is no element that is redundant in theclassroom, and partners should work cooperatively towards self-empowerment aswell as task performance.It is evident that preparing learners for life entails training them for leadership,and by implication autonomy. And this necessitates some intervention on the partof the teacher [this nobody can deny!]. Teachers in the classroom are verydistinguished figures. They are; however, no longer regarded as purveyors of
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