Brief notes on the role, responsibilities and duties of school management

A very remarkable trend in the field of educational management during recent years has been the tremendous emphasis on scientific management of human, material and financial resources. The spokesmen for scientific management advocate that the method of science should be applied to achieve the greatest possible efficiency in educational manage­ment. It calls for the scientific study of method of production and scientific management of the output.

Bobbin, a spokesmen for scientific educational management advocates that scientific management will help for the elimination of waste, efficiency of workers and continuous use of facilities. But he was also concerned with finding the most efficient and effective educational methodology and utilizing supervisions that teachers carried it out.

To move towards standardization and particularization of educa­tional objectives and methods has important implications for the evolvement of educational management. After objectives has been pro-determined and the best way of achieving them has been scientifically established, it is the function of management to sec that human material and financial resources are duly managed. In this chapter let us focus our attention of the management of human resources in education.

Management of Human Resources

Management system during the last decade has been characterized by a growing concern with the nature and needs of human beings in the educational organization. The assumption that human beings in the or­ganization have their own goals, values, feelings, emotions and needs which affect their need to behave in certain ways and that the organization expects members to behave in ways consistent with organizational needs and goals and that organization needs and human needs are not necessarily congruent is a dominant factor in the theory and practice of educational management.

Role of Management to Release Human Potential

Management system must try to create an environment conducive to the release of human potential involved in educational management process. The supervisor’s who happen to an important part of human resource in management process should use of their position lo create proper environment to release the potential of person’s involved in the teaching learning process. The supervisor’s who desires to release human potential in the management system use their power to create a working environment with the following elements.

1. All Persons have a sense of belonging

Teachers want to feel that they belong to the group with which they work. Studies of work groups in industry have found that this desire is one of the most important in determining how a person produces. Desire to be accepted or to remain a part of the group is more powerful in conditioning the amount of work a person will do than is even his take-home pay. For example, a person working on a piece rate will slow down and decrease the amount of money earned in order to avoid the charge of rate breaker by his fellows. These may be the psychological groups in which there is a lot of interaction as in a departmental or grade-level group; they may also be members of groups that drink coffee or been together or bowl together. Industry has discovered that these small psychological groups are the basis of morale rather than the things done by the whole organization super­visors have to be careful in fostering change and innovations. So that they do not destroy the psychological support of the groups that already exist.

In addition to existing psychological groups, there is need for a place where there can be free interaction in the exploration of a new area without reference to assigned [ask and present duties; a place where people may explore new frontiers in ideas and form cooperative projects to work together.

2. Many stimuli are available

Not all people have a common degree of readiness for an experience. Each person marches to his own music. He sets his own goals and he looks for the elements in his environment that will enable him to move at his speed in the direction he desires. If each staff member is to find a stimulus to excite him and release his potential, the setting must contain many challenges and opportunities. Routine successes or intense failures will not suffice. Sufficient frustration to cause expenditure of effort must be present.

3. Encouragement to explore

It is important for a person who is in an official leadership role to try to make some judgments about readiness for change is the members of the staff. He must not pretend they’re all alike. He recognizes there are differences and tries to be as accurate as possible in his assessment of those differences: he does not rate them, but uses them to give himself guidance in planning his strategy to help people grow. His job is placing the major portion of his energies in helping and facilitating the venturing, the in­novating, and the exploring of the people who arc most ready. Not the ones who arc least ready, but the ones who are most ready!

Some people arc less willing to change because of firmer commitment to the values they hold. They find that they anything that represents much change is threatening to them. The people who hold to status quo are valuable people on the staff.

They are the people that help keep the programme stable, making it possible for other people to venture. This stabilizing group helps us to determine the norms of the staff, and the innovation group, as it works, helps to shifts the norms, present group norms move in the direction of the venturing if the structure is such that it is possible for some people lo venture. But the innovators must be valued and encouraged if the stains quo adherents are not to create rigidity with little development of additional potentialities.

A strategy for change must be a strategy for releasing the potential of people, otherwise it becomes a change that decreases the possibility for continuing change. Some people who are most ready to change may at present, be much less able professional people than some who careless ready to change. But if the release of potential is strategy, the person who is ready to change will be more powerful and able lo produce further change.

4. Opportunity to explore

All groups level of norms, and these norms determine the extent to which people may change and still remain a part of the group. Even though there is a degree of permissiveness within the norms of groups, there musl be an administrative operation in which permissiveness is fostered and implemented.

The supervisor can not tell people when to move: teachers have to take the step. The supervisor’s major role is to make opportunities lo participate possible. Almost every member should become a member of an innovative group where the norms are (a) how can be learn more about the educative process? and (b) how can we better implement what we know? The major norm must be one of constant improvement rather than one of holding to what exists.

Opportunity lo explore is provided (a) by the administration indicat­ing its desire for constant experimentation designed to lead to improve­ment, (b) by the provision of funds for research and dissemination and (c) by the organization of study groups with common interest who explore hypotheses concerning ways for reaching desired goals. If the staff believes that change is desired and possible some members will sate the oppor­tunity to explore.

5. Individuals interpretations valued

Potential is realized if the individual is encouraged to develop his own judgments. Teachers are professionally trained and their education has prepared them lo make professional judgments not to be robots following a prescheduled routine. Lillle, if any, difference in professional education and experience exists between the supervised and the supervisor.

Direc­tives an demands that insists upon conformity decrease the competency of the professional by believing his judgment and thereby, his confidences or by depriving him of the opportunity to increase his skill by experience. If a supervisor wants to release potential he values professional judgment, he encourages questioning of existing policy and practices and he values the diversity of opinion that is the product of differing background.

6. Heterogeneous staff sought

If a heterogeneous community is more conducive to change, and it seems to be, the supervisor should seek teacher’s with different education, experiences and ways of looking at the educative process. Staff growth will occur through interaction, and the potential of both supervisor and teachers will be released if the difference is valued and used.

The supervisor does not have to worry about people with ideas that oppose him Each person’s ideas will have to stand the test of the intellec­tual market-place. If I he supervisor can aid the faculty to reach a norm where all feel responsible for becoming increasingly belter students of the educative process, then success will be impossible for any quack or person who advocates a point of view without presenting evidence that it will provide the growth hoped for in people. It is not the supervisor’s role to slop any proposal. His role is to make sure that the group gels to examine it and the alternatives.

7. The organizational structure and process promote communication

The only way (he potential of people is released is through com­munication—through interaction. An individual’s potential is released as he interacts with people in such a way that his vision is increased, his horizon expanded and his present limitation of though challenged. An organizational structure has value for releasing human potential only as it increases the possibility for depth communication.

8. Help with personal problems

People will grow intellectually and professionally through the inter­action involved in solving educational problems if they are not too deeply troubled with personal problems. A person’s potential for growth is not released if he is under emotional tension. Actions by supervisors to reduce tension contribute to the release of human potential.

When a teacher has a problem and wants to discuss it, the supervisor may be able to use certain helpful procedures that have been worked out by councilors.

1. The supervisor should not display any kind of authority. He is a listener. He is not there to give advice or to tell the other person what to do.

2. He listens in a patient and friendly but intelligently critical manner. “Critical” should not be mis-interpreted. By “Critical’, it is meant that the listener follows the presentation, raises questions that help to clear up points that the narrator may be over looking and singles out items that may be important but which the teacher has not correctly evaluated.

3. The questions that the supervisor asks should be of a type that alleviates the teacher’s fear and anxiety about discussing his problems. Many times when people are troubled, they have difficulty in talking about their trouble. They want to talk, but they hate to tell other people the things that are bothering them, questions have to come out of sympathy and understanding.

4. An important type of question for a supervisor to ask is one that gets al the implicit assumption that the individual is making in thinking about a situation an assumption he may not be willing to make explicit. Questions that get at basic reasons are the kind that help people think through their problems for themselves. However, such questions should not be too direct. Neither should they be asked as though the person who asks the questions has greater understanding than the person telling the story.

5. One of the techniques of the supervisor is to praise people for reporting facts or feelings adequately. Such praise leads the story teller to analyze situation more carefully and to be fair to himself and others involved.

6. Another important technique is never to argue, even thought the supervisor feels that the teacher is wrong. In a counseling situation, a supervisor should never discuss a point in an attempt to prove that the teacher is wrong. The supervisor’s function is to encourage the other person to get his problem off his chest, not to solve the problem for him. In fact there is no need for the interview to end with any solution al all, unless a solution develops through the teacher’s new insight.

7. Last, the supervisor should never give advice or moral admonition, whenever the supervisor steps into the role of moral adviser, he loses whatever chance he had of helping the other person. He gives the teacher feelings of guilt, or at least intensifies any feelings of guilt that the teacher has. In such a position, he cannot enable the teacher to work out problems for himself. Instead, the teacher becomes concerned about working out solutions that satisfy the supervisor. Instead of relieving the teacher’s tension, which is the purpose of such activity, the counselor increases the tension by having the individual become concerned about satisfying the counselor.