2.2. SEVEN STRONG CLAIMS: WORD, PHRASE, SENTENCE

"SEVEN STRONG CLAIMS ABOUT SUCCESSFUL SCHOOL LEADERSHIP"

Claims 1, 2 and 3

Claim 1: "School leadership is second only to classroom teaching as an infuence on pupil learning."

Claim 2: "Almost all successful leaders draw on the same repertoire of basic leadership practices."

Claim 3: "The ways in which leaders apply these leadership practices – not the practices themselves – demonstrate responsiveness to, rather than dictation by, the contexts in which they work."

Word, phrase, sentence

    Word: 

  I chose INFLUENCE because I think it summarizes what successful school leadership aims to according to claims 1, 2 and 3. This “influence” leaders have in others would result in a set of effective practices that are more useful than others.

Phrase: 

   I wrote DIFFERENT CONTEXTS because in claims 1, 2 and 3 take into account first the necessity of analysing and adapting to different contexts in order to be a successful leader.
  

    Sentence: 

   I wrote: “The influence and effects of leadership depend on the context, and successful leadership can be accomplished by some universal practices." With this sentence, I tried to capture the main message I had got from the three first claims.

       Group part:

For this part, we made a poster with our words, phrases and sentences. Then, we chose the main themes and the implications of our choices:

What the other group wrote:

The other group did the same, they also wrote themes and implications:

REFLECTION

I think using this routine was a great idea as it enabled us to better reflect about the text. Thanks to the collaborative part, we were able to explain to our classmates why we had chosen each of the words, which led to a discussion about the differences between concepts that were similar. The last part, where we chose some themes and their implications, was successful and meaningful because we had to reach agreements and summarize our main ideas. I liked a lot our final product as it made me think a lot about different ways of extracting and processing information from texts.