Transformational Leadership Definition

INTRODUCTION

In this seamlessly-wired and widely-connected era, school leadership is often presented with questions of uncertainty and anxiety on how to create a conducive environment where staff and students can naturally innovate, learn and grow. (Ng, David F. S., 2004). Leadership is a dynamic process that adopts a problem-finding and problem-solving approach to challenge the organisation towards higher levels of consciousness and growth (Ubben, Hughes, & Norris, 2011). There has been consistent acknowledgement in international researches on the important role played by the leadership of school principals and teachers in contributing to effective schools and enhanced student achievement. (Hallinger and Heck, 1998; Leithwood et al., 2004;

It addresses the teacher’s concerns and needs on competency leveling-up. It helps to intellectually stimulate the learning and creativity of the SAFWOS teachers in learning science pedagogies. The professional accreditation is a good source of motivation to inspire the teachers to step forward in embracing the change and has an idealized influence on the teachers in being good role models for their learning attitude (Bass, 2008).

Jackson (2000) posited that it is not as easy to exercise transformational leadership as for instructional leadership. It will be more difficult to train and cultivate personal capacities in transformational leadership which works through relationship to accomplish goals. This may be particularly true for SAFWOS that are often staffed with senior teaching faculty members. Different people react differently towards change and may be sceptical and resistant to any change due to their fear of not be able to learn the new skills (Ng, D. & Ho, J., 2012).

Distributed

This ‘sole responsibility’ is one of the major impediments to effective school leadership (Cuban, 1998). The school leader would feel exhausted if he does not attempt to share his leadership responsibilities with others. Theoretically, a school can have distributed leadership across the organisation without the need for all school members to share the same goals. Distributed leadership is not about having more leaders but about increasing the quality of leadership capacity and quality (Harris, 2013). Colleagues in contradictory directions can still be legitimately influenced by multiple leaders to bring about a collaborative distributed leadership (Spillane, 2006). The appropriate leadership behaviours of a school leader can influence the teacher to be willingly committed, professionally involved and readily to innovate. Thus, instructional leadership can be transformational (Sheppard, 1996). With teachers in an effective integrated leadership, both transformational and instructional, the school will benefit from the instructional leadership of the teachers to improve on school performance. SAFWOS will continue to leverage on effective integrated leadership to enhance the school systems and