# Week 13 reflection - empowerment - leadership In my reflection of myself as a leader I have seen that I have certainly been lacking in some areas. One of the areas that was mentioned in the articles is an area where I have been stellar: that is in doing what was needed to be done, and not shrinking from it because I was the leader, or expecting others to do it. Pelster and Crutchley did this with going to the homes of chronically absent students and picking up trash (Berkowitz & Pelster, 2012). This lesson I actually learned from my dad. He was service oriented to a fault. When it was time to help someone move or volunteer at the orange farm our church owned, he was the first to sign up. I remember being frustrated about this when I was a kid because I just wanted to watch Saturday morning cartoons, and those hopes were often dashed by his demands that my brothers and I go with him to these service opportunities. Even when he had heart troubles, and a bad back, he taught me that serving others and working hard was not optional. This paid dividends when I, as a principal worked hard to model for my staff what good service to students and their families looked like. I fear, however, that, especially in urban or severely disadvantaged schools we put too much on principals and teachers and exemplify their "supererogatory leadership" by highlighting stories such as Pelster and Crutchley's efforts to "call every absent student and routinely went to their homes to get them out of bed and to school...[do] laundry for families at school [and staff] a ZAP (Zeros Aren't Permitted) program during lunch for ninety minutes every day. [Furthermore] they put in seventy or more hours a week, sometimes sleeping at the school. This was clearly above and beyond the call of duty, but it created near miraculous results" (Berkowitz & Pelster, 2012). This type of hero-level activity only serves to perpetuate the idea that these families can't do anything without their savior educators, and I fundamentally disagree with this. This is not a healthy way to lead a school or a community. True, it does grant miraculous results in one area, but the story is not told of what that costs the educators to abandon their own families to raise other peoples' children. I do not wish to take anything away from their achievements, but I certainly don't want to add to the pressure educators already feel to be superhuman in their efforts when they are already asked to do so much. Rather than the school leadership shouldering all the responsibility, it seems that more attention should be paid to sentiments like that of Mike Galvin, from Columbine Elementary school in Colorado, where his focus was that: > "everyone took responsibility for all the students (not just those in their own class, or those under their care at specific times of the day). The idea was to spread leadership around a bit-trying to build an ethic based on Peter Block's definition of leadership as "taking responsibility for the good of the whole" (Berkowitz, 2011). This effort to involve everyone in pulling their own weight and contributing as an individual is much better than the hero worship of the other two principals. I have lived both lives, one where I worked so hard when I left the school as assistant principal they hired two people to replace me. And in another where I modeled character in many ways, and one of them that I am most proud of was recognizing that I was not a savior for the community or the school, but that I would work extremely hard and be very focused while I was there, but not let it consume my life beyond what was required for the job. The work of a principal can be endless. And it is not worth it for anyone for the principal to give in to that endless request for their time. 70 hours a week and sleeping at the school? No thank you! ## References - Berkowitz, M. W. (2011). _LEADING SCHOOLS  OF CHARACTER_. - Berkowitz, M. W., & Pelster, K. (2012). _Leading in the Middle: A Tale of Prosocial Education Reform in Two Principals and Two Middle Schools_.