Technology is a subtle tool for enhancing the effectiveness of various societal systems. In education systems, integration of ICT technology may incredibly aid in shifting learning from the teacher-centered to the student-focused one.
In this context, integrating ICT technology into learning coupled with teaching calls for school leaders to focus their strategic leadership efforts on organizational improvement (Kozma, 2005).
Arguably, this process requires technology leadership. In this perspective, this paper proposes a research project seeking to determine the applicability of leadership laws including those postulated by John Maxwell in his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership in aiding to facilitate the incorporation of ICT technology in teaching and learning.
Leadership within technology constitutes one of the magnificently essential issues that may result in effective implementation of ICT technologies in schools. The responsibility of this leadership falls in the realm of school leaders who constitute head teachers.
School leaders have a noble role to lead organizational change through setting of visions, objectives, and initiatives of developments that deploy ICT to induce pedagogical changes within schools (Kozma, 2005). Within the last decade, a gap has existed in ICT support and leadership in schools.
Head teachers have shunned away from taking proactive roles in the leadership of ICT technologies in schools often leaving this noble role to small groups of teachers together with people falling in the realm of middle management (Akbaba-Altun, 2006).
The general assumption is that investments into expensive software and hardware are the symbols of schools’ adoption of technological sophistication. This implies negating of the roles that leadership plays in making the ICT technologies effective in teaching and learning.
This argument is directly congruent with the argument that even though investment in ICT infrastructure is critical, effective ICT technology leadership is equally crucial for successful ICT projects implementations (Hinostroza, Guzmán, and Isaac, 2002).
Consequently, strategic leadership is central in ensuring long-term improvements in schools.
Essentially, the negation of technology leadership reduces the utilization of most of the time available for school leaders in making decisions on heavy investments on ICT infrastructures as opposed to integration of the school curriculum with the technology.
The implication here is that leadership comes second after investment in technology. This opposes Maxwell’s law of leadership that claims that excellent leaders work on a daily basis enhancing their leading skills (Maxwell, 2007).
These are some differences between the approach of ICT technology integration in schools and Maxwell’s approach to leadership.
As a result, the purpose of the research is to conduct a scholarly research on whether incorporation of Maxwell’s approaches to leadership in ICT curriculum integration in schools may help in making the ICT leadership a continuous process, as opposed to being intermittent in Australian schools.
The main approach or procedure of this research is to garner data based on the existing cords between ICT integration in learning, teaching, and leadership of Australian schools.
In this endeavor, the research conducts focused-group interviews on the strategies of leadership adopted by various school heads on the deployment of ICT in influencing and enhancing teaching and learning.
The participants of the research are drawn from both governmental and nongovernmental schools in Australia. These participants are leaders of education in schools.
The focused-group interview questions are designed in such a way that they take into account the twenty-one proposed laws of leadership postulated by Maxwell in his book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.
To orient the mind of the interviewee into the focus of the research, printed interview questions have the key words ‘ICT’ and ‘school curriculum’. The subjects are then requested to give a response to these questions by typing in responses in computers provided to them.
These computers are linked to the database of the interviewer where the responses are stored for subsequent analysis.
This research project is laid on the foundation that for success of any change in schools’ leadership, leadership employing the top-down approach proposed by Kottler, is not necessary.
Consequently, the research is valuable in the sense that it can give different paradigms of facilitating change in schools through the exploitation of advantages resulting from full integration of ICT in Australian educational curriculum.
It is of paramount importance that the research may form a substantial link between the contributions of Maxwell’s law on leadership circles in helping enhance ICT technology integration with curriculum in schools.
In this context, the research can lay the premises behind the concepts of distributed leadership by school heads in making sure that teachers are engaged in the process of making ICT policies in schools.
The argument here is that teachers need to form inner circles to enlace the leadership that heads teachers to give in the integration on ICT technology in the curriculum.
In this regard, adoption of concepts of inner circles would disband the existing hierarchical structures that have existed in school’s leadership approaches, particularly in government schools.
This way, it is possible for teachers to alter their self reliant, isolated and silent beliefs, interaction, and pattern of altitudes to become innovative, collaborative, and adaptive in nature (Akbaba-Altun, 2006).
This change is possible since teachers get involved in all aspects and processes of decision-making. This means that leadership that is required to help in integration of ICT in schools’ curriculum rests on the approaches of network leadership besides embracing perspectives of leadership circles.
Several factors among them being time and financial constraints, will act as constraints for this research. The implication here is that it is crucial to define and schedule research activities with anticipated completion dates.
It is necessary to provide mechanisms of evaluating the process of the research so that appropriate strategies can be taken when certain activities lag behind the anticipated time of completion. The first activity is preparation and coding of interview questionnaires.
This activity is expected to take three days due to the extra task of printing. The next activity is preparation of a database for garnering the data.
Due to the need to evaluate the effectiveness of the developed database so that no bugs may result into affecting the data processing, ardent time is required to execute this noble activity. This activity will take two weeks.
During this time, the researcher will create data to test the data processing system so that debugging can be done before actual data is processed using the system. The third activity is to prepare and avail the research tools including computers.
These tools are readily available in various schools in which the focused grouped will be gathered for the research. Consequently, this activity will take two days. The most essential activity is the collection of data.
Since all participants will be invited to assemble in a central place, data collection can be done within a day. Lastly, data analysis and preparation of the report for the research will be conducted within a month. All these activities and durations are summarized below.
Reference List
Akbaba-Altun, S. (2006). Complexity of Integrating Computer Technologies into Education in Turkey. Educational Technology and Society, 5(3), 367- 380.
Hinostroza, E., Guzmán, A., & Isaacs, S. (2002). Innovative uses of ICT in Chilean Schools. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 18 (2), 459-469.
Kozma, R. (2005). National Policies that Connect ICT-Based Education Reform to Economic and Social Development. Human Technology, 5(4), 358-367.
Maxwell, J. (2007). The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson.