Mary Lugg

Leadership for Environmental Educators: Gary Thompson

Portfolio Reflection

This course, Leadership for Environmental Educators was critical to the

development of a functional cohort team while at MOSS during teaching weeks and

my first introduction to leadership theory. I plan to utilize my knowledge of

leadership theory, knowledge of my personal and professtional strengths, and my

practice with effective leadership within my cohort team to continue to be an

effective leaders in my roles in the future.

The main theory we explored during this class was Adaptive Leadership.

Adaptive Leadership is, the practice of mobilizing people to tackle tough challenges

and thrive (Heifetz et al., 2009). Through this class I learned to be an adaptive

leader by identifying events and patterns around me, interpreting what I am

observing, and then designing interventions to address adaptive challenges. The

main tools I learned to identify and interpret events and patterns were being on the

balcony and on the playing field. Being on the balcony is the ability to take myself

out of the event and patterns of what is happening and see them as a third person.

This gives me the ability to take my personal interests out of the equation when

designing solutions. Being on the playing field gives me the ability to identify my

role in the event and patterns of what is happening to design a solution that includes

personal adaptive changes. I got the opportunity to practice this leadership theory

by being program host several times throughout the year.

 Program hosts were cohort leaders for a designated teaching week. As a

program host my duties included management and communication of school

logistics, leading morning meetings, and facilitating end of the day and week

debriefing. End of the week debriefs were critical to the functioning of our team

because it is here where we identified adaptive challenges and designed solutions to

ensure better results in the future. I was able to practice physical setup of meetings

and my personal brand of communication during my weeks as program host. At the

beginning of this class, we were asked to take a test that would identify our

strengths. My top five strengths were as follows; 1) Positivity 2) Empathy 3) Input

4) Includer 5) Harmony. I practiced leveraging these strengths to best support my

team members during teaching weeks am better equipped to use these in the future.

I think that every team should take this test to better understand themselves and

create harmony by gaining an understanding of others.

This course, Leadership for the Environmental Educator was a great learning

opportunity. I gained insight and practice surrounding topics such as leadership

theory, team-building, communication and facilitation techniques, and personal and

professional strengths. I will continue to use and develop my leadership toolkit in

the future.
References

Heifetz, R., Grashow, Alexander, & Linsky, Martin. (2009). The practice of adaptive
leadership : Tools and tactics for changing your organization and the world.
Boston, Mass.: Harvard Business Press.