Name: Sary MamID: u3113146Assistant Professor: Misty M. Kirby, Ph.D.Unit: Educational Leadership and Change (9086)

Peer Feedback:Evidenced Reflection

According to Northouse (2013), leadership is assumed to upgrade individual’s particular,

collective and specialized lives. From the context I have been working for Vanda Institute of

Accounting, a private higher education institution in Cambodia, I find the leadership styles my

department head of business English are possibly far behind the theory and practice from

instructional concepts which are covered in the unit of ‘Educational Leadership and Change’, which

I am taking in semester 2, 2014. In this paper, I am going to develop a brief narrative based on what

I got and what I gave during taking this unit from both face to face (designing personal leadership

framework) and discussion forum (case studies and responses) which significantly improve my

leadership qualification.

To begin with, establishing conceptually personal leadership framework was previously

introduced in the unit outline and it was additionally made clear in-class instruction by the assistant

professor. On week 10 all students were informed to hand in their draft leadership framework for a

round-table discussion to get feedback from potential peers. Being assigned in a small group of

three, I was working ethically, collaboratively with Songleng and Huma. It was slightly surprising

to have a look at their draft piece of work although the way they did the job was completely

different. Songleng built a very good leadership scaffold because he had listed the majority of

necessary models from the textbook with brief descriptions and relevant source of ideas. The

comment I just made for him was not to put everything because it seemed too much for a

prospective leader to follow those pathways, in particular it is a bit hard to achieve the desired goal.

Meanwhile Huma did not appear to finish the draft, she only made bullet points with few leadership

approach and styles; however, I was happy with the presentation she made for that, which were

meaningful and applicable to hold her future position.

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Also, as the session was going on they made some constructive feedback that partly helped

restructure my personal leadership framework because they were too general for the context I am in

as a department head of business English. Songleng was seemingly pleased with my plan which

included servant leadership, transformational leadership and trait approach, but he suggested me

add more dimensions of the path-goal theory, culture and team leadership which can be possibly

applied to build a powerful group of lecturers. He further insisted me identify how I am going to use

those dimensions of leadership. Huma shared her opinions about how to link those aspects with

experience in order that I could make certain changes to my institutional leadership. She asked me

to demonstrate how complex the traits were and discuss thoroughly the relationship between the

traits and the quality of organizational administration.

Turing to online collaboration, I structurally developed critical reading, problem solving

skills of leadership theories and practice from both five case study comments I made to peers and

responses I was given from other classmates through posting case studies on Moodle forum in a

constructive way. The materials I have been using for those activities are from the course book,

whose single chapter is relevant to the case study assigned by the professor and e-reserve which the

professor carefully organize to support the unit outline. In case 10.2, I replied Ruba Sobeih’s

discussion about Paul’s characteristics of servant leadership, which she clearly analyzed the

problems that Paul was in and how he significantly employed the servant approach to deal with his

context. In 5.2 case, I interacted with Theara Than where he discussed supportive leadership style of

Jim, who ran a training workshop to improve middle-leveled managers. I really appreciated the way

Theara contribute to the case that Jim should have used evaluation tools from previous training to

make certain changes to the present or next events. Additionally, attendance should be taken

seriously for those kinds of participants. For 9.2 case study, I precisely corresponded with Veasna

Chhay who was working transformation leadership Dr. Cook. It was very surprising that he had

developed such a nice critical reading in the case study; however, I suggested him not to include the

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page number of the ideas he paragraphed from the author because it is supposed to go along with

direct quotes only.

What’s more, I have also built in-depth understandings from two people sharing

constructive comments to my problem-solving skills. In case study 5.2, I proposed need assessment

in order to organize workshop for the experienced managers. Kakada Khiev posed a question

whether it was effective. The reason for that is they were unmotivated due to previous boring

projects; therefore, they were not willing to join the schedule seminars. Furthermore, for case 7.1, I

proposed leadership training to Art and Bob to organize their team more effectively; however,

Sedara Peou suggested hiring Carol to be Art and Bob’s mentor. I think that the company would

spend a lot of money if it agreed with Sedara’s proposal.

To sum up, this unit has provided me instructional leadership approach, theories and

practice which I. Furthermore, interpersonal expertise is also built along the way as I have online

communication with other students as a whole. I personally think that the knowledge and skills I

have gained through the outlined unit will contribute positively to my future career as an effective

educational leader.

Reference

Northouse, P.G. (2013). Leadership: Theory and Practice (6th ed.). Los Angeles: Sage.

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