Leadership in English Language Education

Theoretical Foundations and Practical Skills for Changing Times

MaryAnn Christison, Denise E. Murray, MaryAnn Christison, Denise E. Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780805863116
• eBook ISBN: 9781135128913
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Leadership in English Language Education: Theoretical Foundations and Practical Skills for Changing Times presents both theoretical approaches to leadership and practical skills leaders in English language education need to be effective. Discussing practical skills in detail, and providing readers with the opportunity to acquire new skills and apply them in their own contexts, the text is organized around three themes:

• The roles and characteristics of leaders
• Skills for leading
• ELT leadership in practice

Leadership theories and approaches from business and industry are applied to and conclusions are drawn for English language teaching in a variety of organizational contexts, including intensive English programs in English-speaking countries, TESOL departments in universities, ESL programs in community colleges, EFL departments in non-English speaking countries, adult education programs, and commercial ELT centers and schools around the world. This is an essential resource for all administrators, teachers, academics, and teacher candidates in English language education.

Part I
The Roles and Responsibilities of Leaders

Introduction

Part I of this volume focuses on the roles and responsibilities of leaders. It contains seven chapters written by five different authors. In Chapter 1, Denise E. Murray discusses the ecology of leadership in ELT. The field of English language education is practiced in countries across the globe and any individual organization may have staff from a variety of different cultural backgrounds. Murray has invoked the metaphor of ecology to help us examine the context of our leadership in English language education so that we can better understand the contexts in which we do our work and how our work changes as a result of context.

In Chapter 2, MaryAnn Christison and Denise E. Murray present a model for leadership development known as Leadership IQ, a model that focuses the reader on eight specific roles associated with effective leadership. The authors also provide readers with an opportunity to determine their own specific leadership IQ by taking a questionnaire that is directly tied to the model of leadership IQ model they present.

In Chapter 3, MaryAnn Christison and Kristen Lindahl discuss leadership in U. S. public school settings. They focus on presenting the results from a meta-analysis conducted on school leadership and on the characteristics of effective leadership that the model presents. In addition, they discuss sustainable leadership—how to maintain effective leadership over time when school leaders constantly change. They tie sustainable leadership to the development of teachers as leaders. The concept of teachers as leaders has become not so much an innovation in education, but a necessity for effectively improving and sustaining current school leadership.

In Chapter 4, Fredricka L. Stoller focuses on an important role for leaders, that of the innovator. She discusses innovation as a hallmark of effective leadership. She does this by distinguishing change from innovation, making the point that innovation typically results from deliberate efforts to bring about improvements. She discusses the complex nature of innovations, the symbiotic relationship between top-down and bottom-up innovations, impetuses for innovation, characteristics of more easily adopted innovations, and the cycles of the innovation diffusion process. In addition, she offers leaders 12 guiding principles to inspire innovation in English language education.

Demonstrating emotionally intelligent behavior is an important role for leaders. In Chapter 5, Denise E. Murray and MaryAnn Christison discuss why the concept of Emotional Intelligence (EI) is important for effective leadership in the volatile, unpredictable world of English language education. The authors believe that EI is a key competence for successful leadership; indeed, they believe it is key for star performance for all personnel. In this chapter, Murray and Christison provide an overview of EI and explain how to develop it and how to plan for the professional development of staff.

Chapter 6 considers leadership in another way. In order to help the reader understand the different roles a leader can play, Andy Curtis revisits the well-established leadership positional metaphor of “leading from the front” by suggesting that this position may not necessarily be the most effective position for a leader in English language education. In his chapter Curtis considers an alternative role for leaders, the role of leading from the periphery. He devotes this chapter to exploring this metaphor and helping readers to see the value in this alternative positioning of leaders.

In addition to thinking about the skills associated with formal positions of leadership, we have addressed the skills that are essential for English language professionals in order to be successful and contributing members in the workplace, regardless of whether they hold formal positions of leadership or not. In the final chapter in Part I of this volume, Chapter 7, Neil J. Anderson explores the concept of leading from behind. The chapter is meant to encourage all English language professionals to think about leadership and focus the reader’s attention away from leadership as defined by one’s title or position and towards leadership as defined by one’s behaviors.

Chapter 1
The Ecology of Leadership in English Language Education

Denise E. Murray

Introduction

The leadership theories discussed in the Introduction, apart from situational leadership, are all based on a sense that leadership is universal. Situational leadership, on the other hand, acknowledges that different people respond to different leadership styles. Just as leaders need to adapt to the variation among their staff, so too do leaders need to respond to the context of their organization. This is undoubtedly as true, if not more so, for the field of English language education, which is practiced in countries across the globe and where any individual organization may have staff from a variety of different cultural backgrounds. I have invoked the metaphor of ecology to help us examine the context of our leadership in English language education.

Ecology has been used as a metaphor to describe the situation of language maintenance and death and to describe the work of language teaching. Tying ecology to language was first suggested by Einar Haugen (1972) who defined language ecology as the study of interactions between any given language and its environment. Haugen states that linguistics should be more than descriptive; it should be concerned with the status of languages, functions, and attitudes and with a “typology of ecological classification, which will tell us something about where the language stands and where it is going in comparison with other languages of the world” (ibid., p. 337). Mühlhäusler has applied this concept to language teaching:

When speaking of linguistic ecologies we focus on the number of languages, user groups, social practices and so forth that sustain this language ecology over longer periods of time. Language teaching involves the introduction of a new language into an existing language ecology.

(1994, p. 123)

Murray (2001) has used it to describe the practice of English language teaching, discussing how, in introducing a new language into an existing ecology, the relationship between culture and language needs to be deconstructed.

It is a useful metaphor because, as defined in the Australian Learners Dictionary, it refers to “the study of how living things work and live together in the earth’s environment” (Candlin & Blair, 1997). Its etymology is from the Greek “icos” meaning “home,” so it is the study of the system that supports and sustains the home. I use it here to evoke an image of leadership in English language teaching that is context-sensitive. The position I take in this chapter is that, while global issues impact on language and teaching programs and their management, all leadership is local in that it needs to be responsive to and support and sustain the environment (home) in which the leadership occurs. I will therefore focus on two aspects of the context that we need to study in order to determine how leaders work with others to create a sustainable organization—the challenge of constant change in our environment and the intercultural¹ nature of our work of English language education.

The Changing Context of English Language Education

This is an era marked by rapid and spastic change. The problems of organizations are increasingly complex. There are too many ironies, polarities, dichotomies, dualities, ambivalences, paradoxes, confusions, contradictions, contraries and messes for any organization to deal with.

(Bennis & Nanus, 1997, p. 8)

Their view reflects the work in chaos/systems theory such as that discussed in the introduction (Wheatley, 1999), which describes human organizations such as language and teaching programs as open, not closed, systems. Bennis and Nanus note the tremendous changes not only in the environment in which organizations operate, but also in “our view of what leadership is and who can exercise it” (1997, p. 3). They list three aspects of the environment that impact on organizations today: commitment, complexity, and credibility. In the early 1980s in the United States, many workers were not working to their full potential, which led managers to downsize, reducing work-forces by half or more. The remaining workers often had increased workloads, but did not object for fear they too would be fired. But, like the workers before them, they too are not committed to their workplace. Bennis and Nanus argue that this failure in commitment is because “leaders have failed to instill a vision, meaning, and trust in their followers” (ibid., p. 7).² Their second contextual condition, complexity, is often spoken of as constant change by other researchers. In this constantly changing, complex environment, traditional linear approaches to controlling the environment no longer work, an issue discussed in more detail below. Their third point is the almost uncontrolled desire for accountability, often led by media enquiries and scrutiny. This trend has led to uncertainty—of what workers are expected to do, of how they will be measured and of what will happen if they are found wanting.

In the educational arena, we have seen our context change in these same three ways. Many teachers feel that, with the casualization of their work (at least in Western countries), they have no desire to commit to an organization that is not committed to them. Even the lifelong employment of Japan Inc. has evaporated. Teachers’ work has become more and more complex. Theories of language learning keep changing, textbook production brings new materials out each year, online learning has been imposed on many teachers, teachers are often expected to juggle instruction with counseling and curriculum development and marketing and many more activities. And teachers are being asked to become more accountable for their work. In some states in America, for example, merit pay is the norm and merit may include how well students perform on standardized tests. Walker (1999) notes that the English language education industry has become customer service-oriented and identifies one way of measuring an organization’s accountability to its customers—a customer service questionnaire. He also cautions that questionnaires (and other measurement tools) found reliable in other industries may not be valid and reliable in English language education largely because of the cultural definitions of what constitutes customer service.

Bennis and Nanus (1997) describe four strategies leaders need to employ in order to lead in this new environment:

1. attention through vision
2. meaning through communication
3. trust through positioning
4. the development of self.

Leaders as Learners

A key element of their strategies is that effective organizations and leaders focus on learning. Murphy’s empirical research (1996) demonstrates that leadership can be defined and measured as a form of intelligence, but it is an intelligence that is only activated through experiences, and then only if the person learns from those experiences (see Chapter 2 for an in-depth discussion of Murphy’s theory). So then, leadership is essentially learning. To focus on the learning organization, Bennis and Nanus note that

Leaders can provide the proper setting for innovative learning by designing open organizations in which participation and anticipation work together to extend the time horizons of decision-making, broaden their perspective, allow the sharing of assumptions and values and facilitate the development and use of new approaches.

(1997, p. 198)

While Bennis and Nanus’ research has identified activities that lead to effective leadership, Covey (1990) and other researchers (for example, Goleman, 1998), show that for effective leadership, leaders need to focus not on learning new skills, but on changing habits, developing virtues, learning basic disciplines, keeping promises, being faithful to vows, exercising courage, or being genuinely considerate of the feelings and convictions of others (adapted from Covey, 1990, p. xiv), a leadership style Covey has identified with transformational leadership, compared with a more transactional style, as discussed in the Introduction. Parry (1996), who also makes a distinction between transactional and transformational leadership, takes a slightly different approach from Bennis and Nanus, while still agreeing that leadership is about change and can be learned. He identifies mechanisms for establishing an organizational culture through visionary leadership, organizational structures that support that vision, and leaders who are considerate, stimulating,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I The Roles and Responsibilities of Leaders
• Part II Skills for Leading
• Part III ELT Leadership in Practice
• Index