Introduction
When leadership is thought of as a process of leading, directing, and guiding people, it entails an element of transformation.
In plain language, this is due to the fact that leadership is expected to trigger a “movement from point A to point B”, which involves a certain degree of adoption of change, in order to complete that movement.
Thus, in the process, those who are led will be transformed into persons with new and different skills, traits, and abilities, as a result of a leader’s attempt to effectively manage change within an organization.
Transforming learners through transactional leadership
A dual reason and motive for people to embark education is to learn new skills and acquire new capabilities.
When learners attend a training course within a formal or informational education context, they come to realize, to a greater or lesser extent, that they need to implicitly enter some sort of an informal agreement, thus accepting the fact that they will be turned into literally different persons in the end.
Educational leaders and teachers are the other party entering this informal learning agreement, and in order for them to be able to implement the teaching/learning agreement in practice, they need to utilize various teaching technique, methods, and models, with transactional teaching being a prominent one among them.
Advantages of transactional teaching
Transactional teaching, which is an approach to transactional leadership in the context of education, is a powerful method that has the potential to produce great results among learners.
It is actually a situation that involves a transaction between teachers and learners, in which, the latter offer some kind of reward to encourage the latter to increase their learning performance.
This method takes advantage of human nature, according to which, rewarding a certain behavior results in an increase and repetition of that behavior.
On the other hand, punishing a specific behavior has the opposite result, that is reducing and even eliminating the behavior in question.
Therefore, this is another side of transactional leadership, since it may not only be used for praising and encouraging a desirable behavior, but also for fighting and eradicating a behavior that is not desirable.
In the context of education, transactional teaching can help in establishing a specific direction at an early stage, on which, learners should focus their learning efforts and goals.
For example, by offering a number of rewards for high performance, such as good marks and grades, certificates of achievement, etc., as well as ringing the bell for poor performance, a teacher can get corresponding results from their learners, whereas other teaching methods may not prove to be so successful.
Disadvantages of transactional teaching
A disadvantage of transactional teaching is that, in its purest form, it is not much different than the so-called “carrot and stick” approach.
In spite of the possible benefits of such an approach, a major consideration refers to the fact that, once there is no more “carrot and stick” in place to provide highly specific and ongoing guidance to a person, the person may not be able to move to any direction, because he or she has got used to simply executing without thinking on their own.
Similarly, in transactional teaching, unless learners receive their usual reward or punishment, they won’t be able and/or willing to successfully carry out their learning tasks, because they have got accustomed to receiving their reward or punishment on a regular basis.
Final thought
A critical question to address is whether transactional leadership can be fruitful or fail, when it is implemented in an educational environment.
The level of success of transactional teaching methods depends on whether it can help learners in improving their learning performance, as well as maintaining a strong learning performance, or even further enhancing it, without the need for supervised learning.
This means that transactional leadership has certain limitations.
In the case of transactional teaching, in specific, the “transaction” that takes place between a teacher and a learner should end at some point, after it has met its original goal, which is to initiate further and ongoing learning, rather than become a fixed, long-term solution that learners will always find handy, when they face learning difficulties, thus becoming reliant on external motivation all the time.
Therefore, the ultimate goal of implementing transactional leadership within an educational context is to encourage learners to learn independently, and make learning independence a lifelong skill that goes on after the learning “transaction” has ended.
Sources and further reading:
Transactional teaching impact: Shaping future leaders
Carrot and stick