Personal Philosophy of Educational Leadership in the 21st Century

My personal philosophy of leadership holds that educational leaders can play a vitally important role in providing students with the critical thinking skills required in the 21st century workplace and in helping them develop into good citizens who are actively engaged in the American political process. While many people view education as a lifelong enterprise, educational leaders today are confronted with a situation in which the timeframe for evaluating the adequacy of learning is clearly demarcated, and student success is measured by metrics such as grade point averages and graduation rates. Such metrics, however, fail to take into account the enormous differences that students bring to the classroom — differences in learning potential, language fluency, motivation, and the infinite range of other factors that combine to determine how well young learners acquire skills and knowledge.

Today, the United States invests enormous sums in its public educational system, but these scarce taxpayer resources risk being wasted without the positive long-range impact that effective leadership should have on stakeholders and on the community. Because effective leadership has been shown time and again to be inextricably associated with organizational performance, it is not surprising that a growing body of scholarship has been devoted to this topic. Drawing on this body of knowledge, it is possible to improve the effectiveness of educational leadership in a number of ways, including encouraging the involvement of parents in their children's education and lobbying policymakers for additional classroom educators. The purpose of this paper is to explicate a personal leadership philosophy as it applies to education, as well as to present the rationale in support of this philosophy.

In an era when simply memorizing multiplication tables or all of the state capitals amounts to little more than rote learning — given the ready availability of this type of information online — the question arises concerning what role educational leaders should play in shaping the curricular offerings and teaching strategies used in their schools. Certainly, educational leaders must conform to local, state, and federal standards when making these types of decisions, but there are legitimate and viable alternatives available that require careful decision-making to identify optimal teaching strategies.

One of the overarching needs for students today is the ability to sort through the flood of information they confront each day and reach their own informed conclusions. According to Erstad (2018), "critical thinking skills allow you to make logical and informed decisions to the best of your ability" (para. 3). Moreover, critical thinking skills are needed for students to determine for themselves what they should do or believe. In this regard, Demirci and Ozyurek (2017) report that "critical thinking as the ability of the individual to make analytic and assessment-oriented conscious judgments and express these judgments to reach a decision as to what s/he shall do or believe" (p. 243).

A salient example of critical thinking skills among young learners involves Santa Claus. Young people who have not yet developed these skills may sincerely believe that the Jolly Old Elf slides down their chimney to leave the Christmas presents they requested. As Erstad (2018) points out, "a critical thinker, however, can quickly conclude that the existence of such a thing is probably unlikely" (para. 4). This is not to say that children should not believe in Santa, but rather that at some point they must be able to make their own decisions concerning whether such things are possible.

Certainly, parents play a fundamental role in helping inculcate these types of thinking skills in their children, but educational leaders can also help ensure that students learn how to develop and apply critical thinking. For instance, according to Tolman and McBrayer (2019), "it is through and by means of education that individuals can be provoked to reach beyond themselves in their intersubjective space. It is through and by means of education that they may become empowered to think" (p. 86). The term provoked is telling, because learning how to think critically means stepping outside one's comfort zone and acknowledging that there is more involved in education than the three Rs.

In addition, educational leaders have an obligation to their communities to help young people become good citizens who are informed about important issues and become politically active during their adult lives. Although educational leaders are increasingly under pressure to effect meaningful changes in their schools, one of the foundations of education is the need to help students become good citizens who recognize their responsibilities to the community and nation (Cushman, 2009). According to Black's Law Dictionary (1990), a citizen is "one who, under the Constitution and laws of the United States, or of a particular state, is a member of the political community, owing allegiance and being entitled to the enjoyment of full civil rights" (p. 244). In sum, this philosophy of education extends beyond the provision of high-quality curricular offerings to include the ability to think critically about those offerings, as well as the need to develop good citizens for the future. Clearly, this is a daunting enterprise, but there are strategies that can be used to facilitate these outcomes, as discussed below.

Similar to other settings, being an effective leader in education means taking the initiative to pursue courses of action aligned with the desired outcome rather than merely muddling through the process in order to avoid making waves. Besides implementing coursework that helps young learners think critically, teachers must also challenge students to question the various perspectives they encounter rather than meekly accepting them at face value. This approach applies equally to helping young people become good citizens — a need that has become especially pronounced as an increasing number of public schools discontinue civic classes due to budget constraints (Litvinov, 2017). The desired outcome is a generation of young learners who possess the critical thinking skills they need to achieve their full potential, as well as the capacity to become active members of the political process.