The Spirit of Leadership

Concepts: Spirituality, Leadership

Enduring Understanding: It takes more than knowledge to be a teacher leader.

What does it mean to have a teacher's heart?  What is "teaching with heart?  What is spiritual teaching?

Read the article posted below: "The Spirit of Leadership".

Create a blog post in which you answer the following questions about your response to this article and connect it to your work with The Spiritual Dimension of Leadership by Houston and Sokolow.

• What are your initial thoughts about the idea that spirituality is the missing piece in the puzzle?
• My initial thought was that the author would be referring to spirituality in a religious sense.  Being a teacher in a non-parochial school, my initial reaction was to say to myself, "This article will have little bearing on my own experiences."  However, it was soon clear that the author was referring to "spiritual" development in terms of personal growth and team building, two ideas that I can get behind.

• Most teachers would want to avoid the pitfall of moving from compassion to callousness. One way to do this is to remember why you became a teacher in the first place. Briefly describe why you entered the teaching profession and mention any mentor who inspired or guided you.
• The person that I would say had the strongest influence on moving me into the career that I am is my dad.  My dad was an 8th grade science teacher for 37 years. I grew up knowing what the tasks of a teacher entailed.  I helped grade. I helped to set up labs over the weekend. In addition, my high school calculus teacher was a great influence on me because he showed me that you can be both a serious profession and kind of crazy, as long as you can pull it off.  I'm not sure if I'm pulling it off as well as he did, but I'm sure trying.

• The article concludes with the notion that the 21st Century is "the best time in history to be an educator".  Do you agree or disagree with this statement?  Why?
• With regard to the opportunities that are available for students, I would say that today is a fantastic time to be a teacher.  Access to technology has made learning occur in ways that it never did before.  Students can learn outside of the classroom. They can accomplish tasks in class in different ways than they were ever able to before.  On other side of the coin, the increase in technology has also lead to an increase in things that can cause distractions, both in and out of school.  Checking text messages in class is detrimental to learning.  Rampant cyber-bullying can be detrimental to personal growth.

• In what ways does your own notion of "spirituality" (not necessarily religious in nature) inform and affect your actions as a teacher in your own classroom and as a teacher leader among your peers?  On which of the 8 SDL principles do you rely most heavily?
• Of the 8 principles that were discussed, I would say that I rely most heavily on the idea of gratitude.  Being appreciate of those that have helped us to succeed is extremely important to me. Recently, my faith in humanity was restored when I had to unexpectedly sub for another math teacher's class when the substitute didn't show up.  I wasn't too excited to lose my prep period, but the sub wasn't there and somebody had to teach those kids, so, I begrudgingly took the class to my room.  Luckily, it was a lesson with which I was extremely familiar with and the teacher had some items ready for the sub to use.  What took my by surprise was that at the end of the lesson, when the class was leaving for lunch, I had several students thank me for teaching them that day.  As a high school teacher I don't regularly get students saying, "Thanks for teaching me some math today," but that's exactly what happened.  I was tremendous.