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Leadership Assessment

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Background

Although the themes of "leadership" and "assessment" are highly relevant in education today, "leadership assessment" is a concept that has not received a great deal of attention. It is difficult to isolate leadership assessment completely from leadership development, and in fact most of the Internet sites currently posted address one within the context of the other. Assessment programs can help school officials at the local, district, and state levels to work more effectively with teachers and other members of the school community to create cohesive learning and working environments. The concept behind leadership assessment is that by identifying an educator’s leadership strengths and weaknesses, one can construct a suitable professional development program to address those issues.

The practice of leadership assessment has traditionally been associated with the corporate world, as businesses in search of executive candidates have utilized screening methods to narrow the talent pool. Although the education sector has been slow to implement such practices, the principle is equally as applicable. School officials require many of the same managerial and interpersonal skills as a CEO of a corporation and are often obliged to work within seriously constrained budgets to affect positive results. Leadership assessment can help to identify those candidates who will not only flourish in administrative roles, but will encourage those throughout their school communities to do the same.

Benefits

There are several methods of leadership assessment currently available on the Internet. The most readily accessible, and perhaps least comprehensive, is self-evaluation. That is not to say that self-assessment is not a valuable tool. While necessarily informal in nature, these self-evaluations provide the inquirer with a means to begin considering his/her ability to serve as an effective leader. The self-assessment tools are composed primarily of either checklists or a series of questions to which the participant is asked to respond. In sum, self-assessment provides educators with an introduction to thinking about leadership skills, but lacks potentially revealing input from colleagues.

Another method of leadership evaluation is the 360-degree feedback method. This requires participation from the community at large, in the form of either surveys or written evaluations. Respondents should ideally include not only teachers, but support staff and district personnel. Due to the highly personal nature of the task, this method is generally more effective when completed anonymously. That being said, it provides the leadership candidate with a much more thorough picture of his/her leadership strengths and weaknesses. Only by addressing the specific concerns of the school community can one become a more effective leader.

The most standardized method of leadership assessment is the School Leadership Series, offered by the ETS, and mandated by a number of states as part of their licensure requirements. This series is composed of two distinct assessments, the School Leaders Licensure Assessment and the School Superintendent Assessment, and are based on both national job analysis studies and a set of standards for school leaders identified by the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium (ISLLC).

Finally, it is interesting to note that among some educators, the notion of leadership is closely linked to technological savvy. A school official is considered a leader if able to introduce technology into the school’s daily life. In these circles (i.e. MFF), leadership assessment seeks to evaluate the administrator’s ability to utilize technological resources as part of the school’s curriculum.

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