Leadership skills for effective learning
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This workshop based on the popular book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, aims to improve learning outcomes.
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A ROLE MODEL: School students draw the image of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan on the occasion of Teachers Day that falls on his birthday, September 5 every year. Photo: A. Devarajan
Educational Initiatives (EI), an Ahmedabad-based educational services organisation, has identified development of leadership skills among educators and students as an area that would have a significant impact on improving school effectiveness and learning outcomes.
To meet this objective of developing leadership skills, EI recently tied up with Franklin Covey, the world leader in Leadership Training, to offer a workshop on `the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People' to school principals, teachers and administrators. This workshop is based on Dr. Stephen Covey's internationally acclaimed book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide, and has been named one of the top 10 most influential management books ever.
Participants often remember most other workshops as stimulating and productive and assume that their own effectiveness will improve more or less automatically as a result of their attendance. Too often, however, the workshop experience seems to fade surprisingly quickly. The principal returns to school with little more than a few insights that have already begun to dim.
Says Vishnu Agnihotri, Head - Leadership Development Programmes, at EI: ``Our belief is that schools need to transform themselves to develop balanced, confident, and thinking individuals, people who are life-long learners, team workers and contributors to the community. For this transformation to happen, teachers need to be `Instructional Leaders', and principals `Leaders of Leaders'. There is no better vehicle than the 7 Habits to create this transformation.'' The learning experience for principals must be intellectually rigorous and must provoke the questioning of long-held assumptions. Reinforcing old patterns and hearing speakers who mouth familiar platitudes about the ``effective'' principal may make people feel comfortable, but it does not lead to substantive change. An effective workshop would deliberately encourage principals to question their practice, attempt change, and hold one another's feet to the fire.
The aim of the `7 Habits' workshop is to foster measurable change and improvement at the personal, managerial and organizational levels. It will help improve the performance of principals and school leaders and also provide them a platform to share their significant insights and experiences with other principals. The workshop also aims at helping principals make effective leadership choices, delegate work effectively, manage goals and priorities based on principles, gel with the team through effective problem solving and focus on mutual benefits, support reflection and continual improvements, and attain professionalism.
VAISHALI SHAH
(Educational Initiatives,Ahmedabad)
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