Characteristic Management Skills for School Leaders

Course details

On completion of this course, participants will be able to identify and describe the roles and skills of management in a general school environment. Participants will be provided with the techniques and skills to analyse, evaluate, and prioritize your daily work to help in the efficient running of an educational establishment. Using SMART goals and applying Pareto’s Principle to school issues, the course will guide participants to becoming more effective leaders.

Course Modules

Module 1:

• Overview of the contents of the course, its different teaching components, and its assessment procedures
• Provide a basic understanding of the role and skills of management
• What Principals as managers do?
• Basic management skills involved in the school context
• Analyse the organizational structure of your school
• Analyse the power disparity within you school
• Analyse the context within which School Self-evaluation must take place

Module 2:

• Use techniques to encourage creative ideas (Reverse brainstorming, Star bursting, Random input)
• Barriers to creative thinking and resistance
• An overview of creative teaching
• Evaluate the creativity and innovation in your school community
• How Principals and other school management encourage creativity

Module 3:

• Apply the theories of motivation within your school community
• Describe what motivates learning
• Assess current motivational environment to identify areas where you are currently motivating and satisfying members of staff
• The motivational factors that stimulate and sustain student learning
• Learn some tools and strategies to help increase motivation that you can start applying today to help motivate your school team(s)
• Measure your ability as a motivational manager

Module 4:

• School examples of how the ‘problem’ arises
• Multiple factors contributing to a problem using Cause and Effect diagrams
• Describe ‘stopping’ and ‘mopping’ school based problems

Module 5:

• Apply Pareto’s Principle to school issues
• Prioritize tasks by understanding how to apply the Urgent/Important matrix
• Reduce and control interruptions
• Analyze the types of activities that take up the majority of their time
• Be able to set appropriate SMART goals and objectives
• Effectively manage your inbox using delegation and prioritization techniques
• Organise other people in the school community in order to better manage your own time

Assessment

Each module will require participants to contribute a post to the course forum in response to a question posed by the course facilitator. Each question will require critical thinking and stimulate discussion among the community of learners, all of which will be discussed using the moderated forum and will in turn develop a community of practice. During the course, participants will answer multiple-choice questions to encourage knowledge retention.

When finished the five modules the learner is expected to do an end of course assignment.

This is to be presented in printed or electronic format:

A detailed Mind Map of any one of the modules (This may also be drawn by hand)

Give an account of how you have used or how you intend to use in your school community, the ideas, concepts, skills, or/and techniques discussed in any of the modules in this course.