Individualised consideration and externalisation 1

A common theme emerged with respect to the leadership style of Individualised Consideration and how it is used to encourage Knowledge Sharing through Externalisation. This theme is ‘Mentoring’.

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6.12 Mentoring

'As I explained yaani when I mentor people it’s based on my observations so I visit their classrooms when I see something is not happening in their classrooms I the give the advice and obviously if it is a problem shared amongst a big number of my teachers then I conduct a workshop or I invite someone with more skills at the subject to give them the training' [transcript 1]

'I mean basically the main thing we’ve had here is with the teachers, one of the teachers we went into an English teacher, and I found that he couldn’t control the class. He’s an American actually but no classroom management skills. He seems quite a committed teacher, quite a religious teacher, quite committed but just can’t… So when I went in fact he was giving sweets, he was giving them candy at the end. And then I told him well “A” we don’t, this is not school policy and “B” they will have no teeth left at the end of school. I don’t think the parents would approve and coming to me with their dentist bills or the doctor for obesity, one or the other. And I said and this isn’t school policy of course apart from all of that and I said we have to look at why you can’t control or what you can do and we gave him tips of what he can do and how he can change it, then the head of department said he will daily go in and support him, check him, see what he can do. So we tried to give some strategies of what he can do but not do what he is doing right now.' [transcript 7]

'Yes we have a mentoring program, it’s very important for us, often people come from Australia here and it’s their first time being out of Australia. So some of the mentoring is about understanding our school, why we do things the way that we do it, what life is like in this part of the world, how you adjust has a teacher to live and work in this part of the world. And so we attach mentors, I tend not to be mentor but if we find hard to match somebody who’s about my age for example, then I might mentor.' [transcript 6]

'The more between teacher and teacher, we setup a number of mentors. So new members of staff get given a mentor when they come, so going back to your question about transfer of organizational knowledge. You know we setup each new teacher with a mentor, somebody who’s been here for a year or two years, you know this is your reference point, this is the person you can talk to and so on.' [transcript 9]

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'So evaluation is ongoing regularly, checking the results, checking the pacing, whether he is under-pacing or not, he’s following actually the guidance given to him by the head of department where they need help. If somebody is doing very well like an extreme, we would like to know how he is doing it so we can learn from that person. So it’s not only evaluation to look down, always the idea of this is constructive and the teachers expect us to do that and they know I’m doing it and we discuss these thing with them and then we put a plan for them.'

[transcript 8]

'Generally we don’t employ people who have less than 2 years’ experience, so they would all have some level of experience. Before they come they are connected with a buddy who sort of does the transition and the introduction so even prior to the arrival they have some information coming to them. Not just about school, but about accommodation and life in Sharjah. When they come then there is a period of probation obviously, so they get support and induction in the first couple of weeks, they get again there is a mentor usually the head of the department, they are observed at least twice in the probation period, they’ve opportunity to give us feedback as well.' [transcript 2]

Summary and conclusion the importance for mentoring

Many of the principals who were interviewed mentioned the importance of mentoring teachers to share their tacit knowledge developed through years of experience in teaching and articulating this as explicit knowledge to teachers. Individual consideration is effective in sharing knowledge through Externalization. Principals try to find out areas of improvement in individual teachers or by assigning a mentor to give them advice and guidance. The common ways discovered during the qualitative study that principals use to discover areas of improvement are through observations or ongoing teacher evaluation. Principals when mentoring teachers take the tacit knowledge they have developed from years of experience and they articulate this to the teachers as explicit knowledge. Therefore, the knowledge sharing attribute type is Externalization. This is done by giving person advice when the principals are aware that an individual teacher needs to improve in a certain area or the principals will conduct workshops if the problem is shared amongst other teachers. For some workshops principal will get other teachers skills in a certain area or invite someone from outside the school with more skills to run these workshops. When principals are observing teachers or listing to their needs and then tailoring advice to individual teachers the style of

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leadership used is Individual Consideration. When the teachers are observing and modelling between one another, then the type of knowledge sharing is externalization.