Sergiovanni's Concepts This paper is a summary of Thomas J. Sergiovann

that virtue and morality, as essential components of professionalism, are the keys to improving schools. In two articles written in 1992, Sergiovanni contends that leadership, as it is most often practiced, is frequently responsible for reducing individual responsibility for making educational systems effective. Instead of the corporate model, he suggests a method of administration he calls "moral leadership" which relies on building a sense of community within the school. Sergiovanni believes that this will create a climate in which teachers will embrace professional virtues, work together to help one another, commit themselves to ongoing professional development instead of having it imposed on them, and focus on the overall effectiveness of the school's work, rather than simply worrying about their individual classrooms. Although some of his points are disputable, moral leadership does offer a promising approach and has been shown to work often enough to prove a useful concept.

Sergiovanni contends first that schools should consider themselves to be communities rather than organizations. He proposes that the concept of an organization, like that of leadership, is something that is imposed instead of coming naturally from within the school environment. In his opinion, this is appropriate for corporations, where the focus is on the bottom line, but is not especially useful in education. He suggests th

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heir own classrooms. The second is "commitment to the professional ideal" (Moral, 1992, p. 44) or "a commitment to practice in an exemplary way" (Substitutes, 1992, p. 43). This specifies teachers who are dedicated to ongoing professional development without having outside requirements imposed on them. Teachers who embrace this concept do not need administrative badgering to keep current in their field; they instead embrace the necessity as part of their own expectations as members of their educational community. The third substitute for traditional leadership is "responsiveness to the work itself" (Moral, 1992, p. 44) or "a commitment not only to one's own practice but to the practice itself" (Substitutes, 1992, p. 43). This defines teachers who look beyond their own classroom walls to work toward the effectiveness of the whole school community. They help other teachers and know what happens in other classrooms. They understand how the work they do fits with the work of the whole school. Sergiovanni does not specifically state it, but this concept implies that teachers know and care about what happens to students before and after they come into the care of a particular teacher. In this model, the school as a whole inte
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Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)