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

51Proceedings of the 27 th MATE Annual Conferencecenter is one of the teachers to whom the email is being sent, since she alsoteaches one of the sections of the same course. Apparently, the director iscomfortable taking the back seat, while one of her employees is leading the way.This is an example par excellence of teacher empowerment through distributedleadership. As Prawat (1991) explains, empowerment is not necessarilysynonymous with relinquishing power and giving teachers absolute power. Itsimply means giving them the opportunity to experience a sense of ownershipand lead aspects of the change.Collegiality: The relationship between the teachers in this center can becharacterized as collegial. Granted, it is hard to imagine that there will never bemoments of tension or friction between these teachers for one reason or another.Disagreements are not hard to come by in professional life, but what mattersmost is how these disagreements are resolved. In places where there is an absenceof leadership, disagreements are likely to remain unresolved or escalate intoperpetual bickering or physical confrontation, which will likely have negativerepercussions on teachers’ as well students’ performance. In what follows, I showhow a serious issue was resolved among the teachers collegially and withoutalienating anyone.After the first test was given, and in order to ensure a sense of fairness, Sabrina,the director, recommended that each one of the teachers grade another teacher’ssection; that is no one will be grading his or her students’ exams. Few days afterall exams had been graded, one teacher, Julia, appeared to be appalled by thescores that her students received. She complained to some of her colleagues andexpressed her vehement disagreement with the grader. She also told Leila, thecoordinator, that she is entertaining re-grading the exams. Of course, this wouldnot be fair since the policy is that teachers do not grade their students’ papers.Thanks to the coordinator’s leadership, this issue was resolved amicably. Thecourse coordinator, Leila, called for a meeting to discuss this problem. She sentthe following email:Hello everyone--We will meet on Friday at 4:30 to discuss Test 1 grading.Beforehand, please:• Do not return the tests to the students• Enter the current grades on the 'n' drive [a shared drive where teacherscan see each others’ grades and share material] by Friday morning, so thatwe can tally averages• Do not re-grade