Introducing teachers to leadership skills in complex educational environments
Abstract: This paper discusses the extent to which student identification of valuable leadership skills in complex real-world environments is supported by ‘ideal’ responses suggested in relevant literature. A cohort of 59 masters’ students were divided into small groups. Each group was assigned a shared digital folder and a group social software environment (Slack channel). Each student was asked to identify an instance of leadership in a real-world educational environment that they had witnessed. A table, populated with relevant prompts, was provided to students so that they could formulate these instances as individual cases. Subsequently, students were asked to evaluate their individual case studies in terms of effective leadership in complex environments. These evaluations, informed by the Cynevin Framework, were completed in tables, adapted from Snowdon and Boone (2007). Analysis of data obtained from the two tables indicated that students’ ability to identify – and justify - leadership environments as Simple, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic after engaging with a practice-oriented framework in small groups was unexpectedly poor.