Week 1: Leadership Role Model

Photo from Microsoft Clip Art

Being a leader is something that should inspire others to do great things. The leader that I look up to the most is my cooperating teacher from when I student taught. I learned so much from her and still to this day strive to be the same type of leader that she is everyday. There are many leadership qualities that she has that I would like to incorporate into my leadership style.

The first thing is that she is very organized. This is important because if you are going to lead, you need to know what is going on around you and be able to guide others in a way that is easy to understand. She is also very patient. As a leader this is key because not everyone that we are guiding is going to know what to do and that is why we are supposed to help them. As a teacher patience is so key because it may take multiple times of teaching the same thing before it clicks with a kid. She was also very humble yet confident. She taught and lived with conviction, but if she was wrong, she was not afraid to admit it to her students. I want to be able to teach boldly yet always be open to what my students think and say. One of the most fascinating things to me was that she respected her students and interacted with them in a way that didn’t make them feel less than her. When I teach I try to encourage my students to have intelligent conversations and debates with me and not to simply bow down and follow like a monkey. Lastly, my cooperating teacher never settled for good enough. Even though she had been teaching for almost 30 years, she never just reused a test or presentation. She would research new ways of presenting, teaching, and practicing material. She didn’t want to fall into a rut as a leader but instead she wanted to press forward and offer her students the best at all times. When I teach I also try to be innovative and present in a way that is engaging. This is also one of the key reasons I decided to take this Full Sail program, so that I could learn some of the best and creative ways to engage my students.