Welcome to Teachers At Risk
-
Feb
16
Leadership Qualities Revisited
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Dealing With Stress, Special Education
Recently I wrote about leadership qualities here . At the time, I was responding to a challenge to identify the leadership qualities that I had that others may not have known about. I thought for a while and came up with a list of qualities informed by my “unique” sense of humour. Today, thanks to Doug Turner, I found a quality I had but didn’t think of it in terms of a leadership quality. Doug answered a question that I didn’t even ask: what leadership quality do you have that you are not aware of having? I found out it’s the quality of focusing on the positive. It’s true. It’s really almost a fault of mine. I get teased about it.Doug says he’s noticed
…that the leaders who continue to languish are still focused on the negative while the leaders who are flourishing – and happy – leverage the positive and keep the negative in perspective.
It makes sense to me when I think about it. I ‘ve been teaching at- risk kids with and without behaviour issues for over twenty years. I have chosen to do that. How have I been able to do thids for so long? I have chosen to focus on their their strengths and not their weaknesses. I’m forever telling them not to define themselves by their weaknesses. I help them discover their strengths and show them how they can choose to use these strengths to be successful.
Today after work, a group of us were talking about the troubled, troublesome and troubling kids we have in our classes that make our classes so difficult to teach. I told them that I choose to look at these kids in a positive light. They’re just kids. They have much to learn about themselves and how to negotiate their way through life more successfully. I have seen enough kids turn their lives around to keep me focusing on the positive. My glass is definately more than half full.
Related Posts
Enjoyed reading this post? Subscribe to Teachers at Risk.Comments
One Response to “Leadership Qualities Revisited”
Leave a Reply
-
-
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
-
Edublog Awards
Toronto Reading Council
[...] · Filed under The Way I See It, Teacher Support I’ve talked about leadership qualities here, and now I think it would be interesting to examine leadership experiences. I’d like to invite [...]