DEVELOPING FRENCH LANGUAGE LEARNING LEADERSHIP

This Organizational Improvement Plan analyzes the leadership shortage in a French language school board and the scarcity of qualified, skilled, and knowledgeable principals and vice principals willing to lead schools as learning organizations within minority contexts. French language principals have a unique responsibility for ensuring instructional excellence and learning, and they must lead in ways that transmit the mission and values of Francophone language and culture (Leurebourg, 2013). They must understand the cultural context of leading in minority environments and that organizational survival depends upon adaptability and the capacity to learn as an organization. Organizations should have a long-term strategic succession plan to attract, recruit, hire, and develop potential leaders. However, fewer individuals are willing to lead schools since the responsibilities are taxing, the remunerations are incongruent with the invested time, and the professional supports for leadership development are lacking. Drawing on multiple directions of inquiry to identify and analyze the problem of practice, this OIP proposes a change strategy inspired by Senge’s (2006) Learning Organization, and Cawsey, Deszca and Ingols’ (2016) Change Path Model. Change progress will be measured using a Strategy Map and a Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton, 2004) that fuses the criteria of Learning Organization Dimensions (Watkins & Marsick, 2017) throughout the various phases of the organizational change strategy