Educational Leadership

The concept of educational leadership varies across societies and cultures. Different interpretations of leadership reflect the ways of looking at it and the philosophical and theoretical assumption behind them. Educational leadership is not a position but a capacity to conduct critical analysis of the schools and respond to their needs individually as each school has its own contextual challenges. Educational leadership takes schools out form units of mass production and transforms them into schools as living being; where each individual is given attention to accomplish their educational goals. Such goals are related to touching human minds and hearts with feelings and emotions. Similarly, educational leadership explores possibilities and takes calculated risks for captivating initiatives which help schools to move away from the current scenarios of dullness, stillness, deprivation and impaired teaching and learning process (Bana, 2010).

Likewise, the role of educational leader is not only to provide a shared vision but also to facilitate and contribute in institutionalizing the vision through harmonizing professional learning teams in schools. Such teams would respond to the changing realities wih their professional insights and skills. Educational leadership is all about influencing relationship amongst leaders and followers who intend real changes and outcomes that reflect their shared purpose. An effective educational leader is one that indentifies individual’s potentials and nurtures them to particular situation. Thus, the nature of the role of educational leadership demands us to sharpen our competencies, our communication, our creativity, our inspiration and our credibility by continuous learning from the context where we work.