TEACHER-EDUCATOR VERSUS TEACHER-LEADER

Recently, in Lithuanian educational discourse there has been a lot of discussion about leadership. This has become so popular phenomenon that quite often one even does not go deep into the most important parameters of this phenomenon. Leadership phenomenon is not a very new thing, having started to be investigated more exhaustively as far back as the second half of the 20th century, however, over the last decade a lot of attention has been devoted to this in Lithuania. One can reasonably assert, that this is even a matter of fashion. During the aforementioned period, various questions such as teacher leadership, leadership development in schools (as if everyone has to be only a leader), leadership influence on organisation management and other have been investigated in one way or another. On the other hand, quite a lot of attention has been devoted to school managers, having in mind that they should not be just managers, but real managers – leaders. There is no intention to discuss various leadership concepts or to give any recipes how to turn teachers and managers to leaders. Moreover, there exists a vast diversity of concepts. It is obvious, that poor, ineffective and unsuitable management affects the teachers and the teaching learning process itself. It is logical, that this aspect has to be evaluated, and only people suitably prepared and ready for this should become managers of educational institutions. On the other hand, it wouldn't be fair to identify managers and management with leadership.