Journal of Education & Social Policy

Leadership in Child and Youth Educational Settings
Mehrdad Shahidi

Abstract
Comparing diverse types of power within leadership theories, this paper revolved around the referent power, which generates vivacious and indisputable trust, acquiescence, and faithfulness, and is more effective than disciplinary power in child and youth educational settings. It was also demonstrated that referent power is naturally embedded in an interactional approach in which developmental characteristics and contextual factors have main influences in leading child and youth educational settings. Creating a pathway to make interactional leadership approach applicable, a model of cultural proficiency was developed and adopted in this paper for child and youth practitioners and educators. Finally, it was demonstrated that this model can help educational leaders and practitioners to rethink about their biases, exclusiveness, and ethnocentric approach that make their societies culturally destructive, blinded, incompetent, and unprofessional. Some sample strategies to make the model feasible were also suggested in the current paper.

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