Moral Leadership in His Book Term Paper

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This term was coined by Abraham Zeleznik and refers to the misplaced focus on the leadership process instead of the people, ideas and emotions. Further, Sergiovanni argues that it is because of this managerial mystique that schools have been unable to capture, and build learning communities from, true leadership. Instead, schools have been obsessed with "doing things right at the expense of doing the right things." For example, school improvement plans became substitutes for improving outcomes. Teacher appraisal systems become substitutes for good teaching. in-service takes the place of changes in practice, congeniality substitutes for collegiality, cooperation moves in over commitment and compliance takes over for actual results. The result is that schools become trained in incapacity, or doing only ones job in isolation as opposed to working as a team and the loss of goals, which therefore leads to a standard of mediocrity.

According to Sergiovanni, the solution to achieving beyond mediocrity is leadership, but a leadership that focuses on the "head, heart and hand of leadership" opposed to the process of leadership. Thus, Sergiovanni's approach pays particular attention to a person's "interior world" through the use of "reflection, combined with personal vision and an internal system of values, or mindscapes." The epicenter of Sergiovanni's approach is one's individual values that allow an individual to arrive at knowledge. Accordingly, there are six models by which humans arrive at knowledge: 1) authority (faith in oneself); 2) deductive logic (testing oneself); 3) sense experience (gaining through the five senses); 4) emotion (feeling right); 5) intuition (unconscious rational thinking; and 6) science (or synthesis of the other five models).

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All of our knowledge comes through one or more of these six modes and are shaped by our values. Thus, the core of understanding leadership is understanding our personal values. The starting point is to determine whether ones values are secular or sacred. When one is able to understand their values, then they can develop a moral authority. Sergiovanni states that it is this moral authority that serves as the basis of leadership. A leadership approach that centers on moral authority will give more credence to experience and intuition, accept the concept of sacred authority, and understand that emotion is a legitimate way of knowing. According to Sergiovanni, "this kind of leadership can transform schools into communities and make our schools unequaled among society's institutions."

What makes Sergiovanni's ideas meaningful to educational leaders is its optimistic approach to improving schools that focuses on the individual educator as opposed to the use of more standards and benchmarks and other assessment-based procedures that place individuals against each other instead of creating learning communities. Under Sergiovanni's approach, education will be more of a platonic function of sharing and achieving knowledge together, not simply passing test and moving on.

Sergivoanni's ideas guide educational leaders by presenting a roadmap of sort on how to redefine leadership and then implement this definition into a school's teaching curriculum and methods. The result is that students and schools will instill the ideal concepts of a democratic community which will then trickle down into the society as a whole......

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