I began this subject feeling quite tentative about my ability to participate as I am not currently teaching and I am on maternity leave. However, I have been pleasantly surprised by my ability to positively participate as the modules are extremely informative and the case studies and forums are presented in such a great way which enables one to not only contribute one’s own knowledge but to learn also.  I have really enjoyed reading through the case study responses as I feel I have learnt so much already and I really love reading different approaches to situations from different participants.

Case study one outlined the week of an extremely busy Director of Information Services and the task was to determine how to make her week less stressful yet still remain productive. Immediately, I believed the best way to do this was to consider her external and internal demands and collaborate with others to determine what should stay and go.  I also believed that delegation would have been an effective tool but I did not go into detail about this in this forum.

It was really interesting looking at others’ responses. I particularly enjoyed reading the comments on power and control, they were quite similar as most contributors wrote that it seemed strange to have such a large team yet not utilise all of them adequately. Obviously, delegation is key to overcoming this and trusting others. Within the comments on ‘control’ it was really interesting to read about peoples’ knowledge of using Google Docs to share information, Katrina Dawson (July 17, 2020) also spoke about One Note which I have not used before but this sounded like a fantastic tool also which would be very useful throughout this scenario.

Through reading a significant amount on delegation in these posts I decided to look into a journal article about this topic myself. I found one about distributed leadership theory which was quite interesting.  One point that stood out to me significantly was that an individual’s ability to achieve something is far outweighed when a group brings together their ideas and strengths in order to work achieve the same outcome (Johnston, 2015, p. 39). This is exactly what many participants in the case study one forum were outlining also.

References

Dawson, K. (2020, July 17). Case study 1, module 1, thread: Control. [Online discussion comment]. Interact 2. https://interact2.csu.edu.au

Johnston, M.P. Distributed leadership theory for investigating teacher librarian leadership. School Libraries Worldwide, 21(2), 39-58.

http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.csu.edu.au/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=a750c93a-9292-4112-a82a-1fa48e0aa45d%40sdc-v-sessmgr01