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

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46Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferenceneglected to take in earnest the role of the teacher as a leader. Reforms that do notput teachers in the vanguard of educational change are bound to fail. As has beenreported by The Carnegie Forum on Education and Economy (1986), for schoolreforms to succeed, it is necessary to empower teachers by allowing them toparticipate fully in the fulfillment of these changes. Teachers should no longer beviewed as “semiskilled functionaries” (Institute for Educational Leadership,2001); instead, they should be treated as equal partners in leadership.In Morocco, the management of school business is still regarded as the task of thefew. The business of decision-making is heavily centralized, and teachers,especially at the primary and secondary levels, have virtually no voice in runningschool business. They have little say in selecting course material, hiring theirfuture colleagues, and shaping school policies. Anecdotal evidence suggests thatteachers view themselves as disempowered employees whose job is to executethe orders of the powers that be. They receive orders from the headmaster, who inturn executes the orders of the high authorities, herein a chain of command that ispredominantly hierarchical in its structure.Such hierarchical approach to leadership presupposes that there is a hero sittingatop the educational pyramid who can single-handedly be in charge of all majoradministrative tasks and duties. It also assumes that there is only a selected fewwho can be entrusted with the business of decision-making. The people located atthe bottom of the pyramid are, so to speak, “out of the loop”, and henceforth theirvoice is not worthy of consideration. This approach to leadership, which is,unfortunately, still widely prevalent in the Moroccan system of education, hasbeen foregone in several countries, such as the USA, Canada, and Australia. Oneof the reasons why the idea of a heroic leader has been dispensed with is thatwhen it is time for this type of leader to leave, progress comes to a halt andpractices that were supposed to be gone reappear (Copland, 2003). Indeed, it istime to reverse the pyramid by allowing people located at the bottom -that isteachers -to play a key role in running school business.2. Paradigm shift: Distributed leadership as a means of empowermentThe kind of leadership that is needed in our educational institutions, and withoutwhich educational reforms are likely to proceed clumsily and ineffectually, isdistributed leadership. It can be conceptualized as follows:A shared process of enhancing the individual and collectivecapacity of people to accomplish their work effectively… Instead
47Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferenceof a heroic leader who can perform all essential leadershipfunctions, the functions are distributed among different membersof the team or organization. (Yukl, 2002:432)As this definition explicates, inherent in the concept of distributed leadership isthe idea of sharing or spreading leadership amongst all stakeholders. Theseinclude headmasters, principals, teachers, parents, and students. In this way,distributed leadership becomes synonymous with teamwork. It is a collectiveendeavor in which all those concerned bring their efforts together to see to it thatmeaningful contexts and opportunities for learning are being created. In this way,a teacher’s duties, for instance, do not stay within the confines of the school;rather they transcend it by contributing to the creation of a community of learnersbeyond the classroom (Katzenmeyer & Moller, 2001).Several terms are often used interchangeably with distributed leadership, such as“lateral leadership” where organizational participants interact more or less on anequal footing, “self-managing”, “democratic leadership”, and “participatoryleadership.” The common denominator amongst all these appellations is their callfor the necessity to treat employees -teachers in our case- as equal partners inleadership, rather than subordinates who must execute the orders of an elitegroup. In other words, the need to move away from the vertical, hierarchical,bureaucratic style of leadership is a stepping stone toward empowering teachersand democratizing education.One way of empowering teachers through distributed leadership is byencouraging them to voice their views more openly and vigorously, without fearof retribution, regarding school policies, curriculum design and educationalpractices. In this regard, Allen (2004) makes a distinction between four types ofvoices:Voting voice, where teachers cast their votes on issues pertinent to schoolpolicies;Advisory voice, where teachers provide their input regarding school decisions,policies, and governance;Delegated voice, where teachers are involved in leadership teams that makedecisions about their colleagues’ promotions, creation of new programs, andso on;Dialogical voice, where teachers are encouraged to express their views moreopenly and use their potential as leaders to create change in their schools.
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