CHEVENING LEADERSHIP SKILLS ESSAY
Chevening is looking for individuals that will be future leaders or influencers in their home countries. Explain how you meet this requirement, using clear examplesi of your own leadership and influencing skills to support your answer.
CHEVENING LEADERSHIP SKILLS ESSAY PRESENTED FOR REVIEW
Although mathematics is one of the compulsory subjects in any Nigerian secondary school, the overall performance of our students in the subject was very disappointing. As a result, some parents threatened to transfer their children to other schools, while many attributed the failure to the lack of qualified mathematicians in the school.Worried by the situation, the management decided to change the head of the mathematics department with the view to provide the appropriate solutions, and I was fortunate to be chosen to accomplish this task. Thus, I felt this was an opportunity to exercise my leadership and influencing skills.
To overcome this problem, I called emergency staff meeting for thorough discussion, and individual opinions and suggestions gathered.After the meeting, I realized that the major contributing factors to mathematics failure were: Poor mathematical background- our students did not have the basic arithmetic skills from primary schools; inadequate teaching methods- teachers without training; and teachers lacking enthusiasm for teaching profession -owing to unattractive remuneration and environment.
Therefore, I initiated extra moral lessons in the evening outside classroom activities, where all mathematics teachers including myself participated. The goal was to imbue the students with some fundamental numerical skills required for understanding the secondary school level mathematics.Besides, I voluntarily organized a mandatory workshop so as to equip the teachers with the modern methods and strategies for teaching mathematics to secondary school students. Furthermore, being an experience mathematics teacher, I taught the teachers how to effectively prepare and deliver lesson plans and lesson notes in accordance with the school syllabus before teaching.Moreover, I always tried to motivate them by enlightening them that teaching mathematics is a preparation for their future academic careers as mathematicians.I also related how this was indirectly contributing to the enhancement of teaching science and technology,leading to economic development at large.In addition, My involvement in certain extracurricular activities such as organizing mathematics quiz competition aimed at enhancing teaching and learning mathematics, actually helped the teachers develop passion as well as positive attitude to teaching professions, thereby boosting their morals and deemphasizing on the monetary benefit of the work.
Consequently, as the head of mathematics department, I made a remarkable improvement in teaching and learning mathematics as we won many intercollegiate mathematics quiz competitions and emerged as one of the best schools in senior secondary school examination for mathematics. Hence, my achievement earned me a promotion to become a vice principal where I was saddled with more challenging responsibilities.
As Vice principal academics, I had the functions of supervising and coordinating academic activities. Here, I struggled to resolve conflicts resulting from inequitable allocations of subjects among staff.To be fair and just, I allocated small loads to those taking difficult and abstract courses while I assigned more work to those teaching relatively simpler subjects.So, I was able to attain staff-load balance, getting rid of feeling biaseness.
Recalling my time in the Unity bank PLC where I worked as customers service officer, when the operations manager resigned, his responsibilities were shouldered on me ,confounding my responsibilities.The greatest challenge was that we had to withstand customers pressure and maintain customers satisfaction in a highly understaffed organization.I therefore politely sought for unity and cooperation of the staff without compromising the bank's rules and regulations. I also begged our customers to bear with our conditions of service.The cooperation I got from both the staff and the customers enabled me run the bank smoothly.
I would like to integrate the skills and knowledge obtained from Chevening scholarship progam with my existing knowledge and experience to bolster my leadership and influencing skills for the educational, economic and social development of Nigeria.
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