Reflection as a Leadership Skill

Reflection is an important skill that all leaders must practice in order to become effective leaders.  As King and Kitchener (1994) stated, “reflective thinking is not given, but instead must be actively constructed within a specific context, and that individuals reasoning at these stages understand that conclusions must be grounded in relevant data and remain open to reevaluation. A practice that I do as principal is writing a weekly journal. I refer back to this journal to see if decisions I made in the past were effective and if not what can I do to improve on my decision making.  Before I make decisions that involve curriculum and at times personnel, I discuss the pros and cons with my administrative team and reflect on our discussion to make a relevant decision for our school.  In our district principals take part in book reading sessions with the superintendent.  We reflect on the material we read and have dialogue with one another to improve our leadership ability and to improve instruction on our campuses.  The book we are reading this semester is, “Teaching as Leadership”.  Some of the strategies that were discussed in the book and in our principal meetings are being implemented at different campuses in our district.  Teachers are developing Big Goals and identifying ways they are going to accomplish their goals.  Reflective thinking is constantly taking place in our Professional Learning Communities and much of this reflection is the driving force of what is learned, taught and tested in our school.  If we continue to reflect and share experiences of best practices with each other our decision making abilities as leaders and teachers will improve.  Our prior experiences will help us make better judgment.

Being part of Lamar Universities Superintendent Cohort has been an interesting experience and many of the reflective practices we took part in our course assignment activities, blogs, course and campus supervised logs, assessments and other intern reflection experiences have been helpful in improving our leadership qualifications.  Reading your own reflective experiences and those of other members of the cohort has given me an opportunity to see how others make judgment compared to mine on a same topic.  Reading many of the reflective writings by members our cohort has been a rewarding experience. Learning from one another and sharing ideas is important in education.  When an opportunity arises to become a leader of a district we can reflect back on our experiences in our cohort classes, our internship activities, experience as a teacher and experience as a principal and use them to make good judgmental decisions for the betterment of the district.  As a future leader of a district I plan to continue with book reading activities with members of the administrative team to reflect and communicate strategies that will improve student achievement in our district. I would also like to extend our book readings activities with member of the board.