Leadership activity and development of personal practices/capacities

Leadership activity and development of personal practices/capacities. Write a project report, reflecting on and assessing your leadership activity and the development of your personal practices/capacities.

Educational leadership: context, strategy and collaboration

Your report should be coherent and free-standing, so that it can be understood by an audience unfamiliar with your work for TMA 02 and your professional context. The report will be assessed by two or more markers, one of whom may be your tutor. You should therefore make clear what your professional context is and your own role, as well as the purpose, objectives and success criteria for your activity. Evidence in the appendix should be clearly referred to in the main text of the report – do not expect markers to search for supporting evidence that you have not mentioned in your report.

Your project report should be titled ‘A reflective report on the leadership of …’ and should be structured as follows.

Part 1 The activity – 700 words

Provide a brief explanation of the purpose, objectives and success criteria for your activity. Explain and justify the methods you used for collecting evidence. Any adjustments made to your plans (TMA 02) and the reasons for these should also be explained.

Part 2 Evaluation of the activity – 1400 words

Leadership activity and development of personal practices/capacities

Evaluate the extent to which you have been able to achieve the purpose and objectives of the activity in terms of:

a.contributing to organisational/sub-unit improvement or effectiveness
b.developing your own leadership practices and/or capacities.
Both (a) and (b) should be assessed in the light of your success criteria, providing evidence from the activity to support the conclusions you reach.

Part 3 Reflective analysis – 3500 words

Critically analyse the processes and outcomes of the activity, providing a reasoned explanation of what took place, and supporting your arguments with evidence from the activity. You should draw widely on relevant theoretical frameworks and concepts from the module. You should reflect on both organisational and personal processes and outcomes, including: your own leadership strategy and style; teamwork issues, organisational effectiveness and improvement; and the influence of organisational and external contextual factors on the activity and your leadership of it.

Part 4 Impact on thinking and practice – 1400 words

Critically assess the impact of (a) to (c) below on your leadership and management thinking and practice, and with respect to (d), the impact on your colleagues, and provide examples for each:

a.undertaking and reflecting on the leadership activity
b.taking part in the forum activities
c.engaging with other aspects of your work on E856
d.identifying how changes in your own thinking and practice have influenced other colleagues in your organisation.

Part 5

You must include your ‘Ethics checklist’ (revised if necessary) as well as a copy of your marked TMA 02 and its associated feedback form.

Guidance notes

You may choose to present Parts 1 to 2 of this assignment in note form. Parts 3 and 4, however, should be presented in continuous prose.

By the time you come to write this report, you should have completed your study of the module material.

Educational leadership is seldom a purely rational activity in which plans are adhered to and fulfilled. For the examinable component, you are not assessed on the leadership activity itself or on the achievement of the success criteria you set yourself, but on the quality of your reflective analysis and evaluation. This depends on your ability to conceptualise and apply theoretical perspectives in order to explain the congruence (or lack of it) between actual outcomes and intended outcomes, and to explore educational leadership and organisational improvement.

It will make no difference at all to your grade if your leadership activity was an abysmal failure or a stunning success in terms of achieving its personal and organisational objectives, provided that you have undertaken a thorough critical reflection and have demonstrated what you have learned from the experience (which should lead to future improvements in practice). It may well be the case that a leadership activity that is reported in glowing terms as a great success may not be as highly graded as one that takes a more critical stance. The whole point of reflective leadership practice is to improve by learning from experience. A detached and critical account is therefore expected.