The fortnightly case study discussions and forum posts were an effectively designed pedagogical tool which allowed the instructional leadership of our course coordinator to guide us into effective 21st century collaboration with our peers and to experiment with other forms of leadership within the digital space and demonstrated directly the leadership and role of teacher librarians in selecting tools for information exchange of students.
The case study context was rich with detail, problems, characters, and potential pathways to resolve the issues we were asked to assess. A key learning I expressed early in communication was the diversity of people and styles that leadership encompassed and simplistic taxonomies or dichotomies were “fustrating to me that everyone gets reduced to a binary of extrovert or introvert when the reality is so much more contextual to any individuals experience” (A quiet Leader is Still a Leader, March 11). This was evidenced when we began using our private communications through the Group 2 discussion board and wiki is that the real world ramifications of a pandemic and schools transitioning to digital learning squeezed what time we had available. Because of the flat power structure the first successes were in Anne-Marie’s servant leadership. She asked us “Can we ‘give’ ourselves 24hrs to draft out some ideas and share them on the wiki’ (Anne-Marie, Personal communication, 28th March, 2020) and ‘if you are both OK thought I’d put together on this theme? (Anne-Marie,29th March, 2020) which drew several responses from the group and Anne-Marie became the go-to person for posting our group’s final responses.
I aimed to contribute differently so wrote up the characters and their traits of the Case Study context in a table thinking that this might assist other members to see the information in a more digestible format. Unfortunately I posted my text in the description rather than the body of the post. Fortunately in another case of servant leadership Kate who had created the forum was able to delete and repost my contributions in the way I had originally intended.
I felt that my contribution of synthesis and formatting was an attempt at transformational leadership to reframe things and make our goals easier but it is difficult to know if it helped anyone else. That is another realisation of leadership from this course that even if you are doing what you believe is theoretically the right leadership you may not get any immediate feedback that it is working.
Case Study 4 analysis happened around my redundancy and my posts ended up in the forum rather than the wiki where the group was collaborating which gave a certain equality as other members had missed posting in earlier weeks.
The group accepted my failure and we moved forward with the final Case Study 5.
Anne Marie summed up this final process for all of us with ‘I am usually far more disciplined about I submit, but am feeling very under the pump with work and assignment 2’(Personal communication, 15th May, 2020) so our group succeeded in crawling over the line despite the pandemic pressures as we learned about leadership roles of teacher librarian as advocate, manager, collaborator, and boss.
Reference List
CSU Forum, March 11,
Forum: Module 1: Week 1. (2020, March 2-9). Thread: Module 1. CSU Interact 2 ETL504. https://interact2.csu.edu.au/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?action=list_messages&course_id=_44236_1&nav=discussion_board&conf_id=_88817_1&forum_id=_186993_1&message_id=_2732524_1