Good morning! I'm Andrea and I'm the Analyst this week, which, in my opinion, is the most difficult role, since you have to evaluate your classmates and make a reflection about the task, which is not easy. Moreover, we are a little bit worried about the exams coming on May and June, and also, we started the task later this week due to the bank holiday, so the situations weren't the best, honestly.
We had to choose a type of leadership among the four ones that we have to read about: the authoritarian, the participative, the transformational and the transactional. I think that one of the best parts of the activity was when we had to decide which type we were going to represent, as we all agree really quick that we wanted to do the Transactional one, and we started to think of ideas that could represent our leadership styles better. There, each of us showed our most creative part. I coincide with the rest of the members that the worst of this activity was the fact that two of our members couldn't attend the faculty this week, so the rest of us had more work than ever. However, they did everything they could at home, so it wasn't so bad to have missed them for a week. Actually, the best moment of the week was when we did a kind of "brainstorming", trying to come up with the most original ideas for Viki's presentation, as we wanted to highlight among the rest of groups. Honestly, I think we did it. Our presentation was entertaining for everyone, so I think we had our reward for our hard job. Thanks to this task, we haven't only learned the different types of leadership (as obvious) but we have learned as well how to write a speech that catches the attention of the audience, how to move in the scene so everyone would be delighted with your presentation... and how to gain easy votes (thanks to our idea of giving Heart Balloons and lollipops to everyone ;). I think that this content can be useful for us, not only if we want to present ourselves to a campaign for being the headmaster of our future school, but also to convince anyone of our ideas, to know how to expose them correctly and to make the others agree with you, to reach a consensus, which I think it's really important if you are working with a team (in our case, the AMPA, the teaching team, the school counselor...). If we really want to succeed in our professional career, we will have to act like a leader with the children, for example, but also with parents, other teachers... to assure that our ideas are going to be listened and thought. We have to think about the pros and cons of each type of leadership: for example, you may see an authoritarian leader as a really strict person, not appropriate for a Primary School, but also, you have to think that it depends on the type of school and the type of children that this authoritarian leader is going to find. To sum up, we don't think either that the Transactional leadership, based on peace and love, is the best one. Maybe it's is in some schools, but in others, it doesn't. It happens the same with the other types of leadership, as we think that each person can have different styles and use each one of them if it's needed. For sure, we are going to pass through a lot of children in our life, and we will have to learn how to treat them in every occasion: sometimes with love, and sometimes with hardness, as we have definitely learned that every leadership style has its lights and its shades.
