September 2009
Let’s say it right off: teacher leadership is hard. Many of the reasons are obvious: Teaching is a highly labor-intensive profession to begin with, leaving little downtime for work with other adults. School schedules are notoriously stingy with space for adult collaboration. Teachers are rarely paid to exercise leadership; when they are, they are never paid enough. There is a fundamentally egalitarian ethos in the teaching profession. Those who would step forward to offer advice to their peers, or promote innovative ideas, or speak up on behalf of their colleagues are, as often as not, regarded with suspicion or resentment. Unions, ironically, with their historic concern for clear delineation between supervisors and supervised, do not on balance do as much as one would hope to promote teacher leadership.
Teacher leaders commonly report feeling trapped in the “middle space” (Lieberman & Miller, 2004, p. 84) between the teachers whom they attempt to influence and represent and the administrators who count on them to do work that the administrators are, for various reasons, unable to do themselves—while being trusted fully by neither.
Teacher leadership may be especially challenging today, when so many of the urgent “reforms” being visited upon schools come with mandates that do not emphasize or reward—or, sometimes, even tolerate—teachers’ exercise of initiative and autonomy, let alone leadership. The editors of the most recent Occasional Paper remark:
Teachers are increasingly told that the measure of professionalism is not the development of their own expertise and responsiveness to the individual children in front of them. Rather, it is bought through their fidelity to uniform, commercial and heavily scripted curricula that promise (but often fail to deliver) greater student success (Boldt, Salvio, & Taubman, 2009, p. 4).
The extraordinary dominance of externally imposed accountability and standardization in this decade, defined in huge measure by test results and buttressed by tight bureaucratic and administrative regulation, is designed to leave little, if any, room for leadership from within the ranks.
For all these reasons, teacher leadership has never been more crucial.
A glance at the emergent literature on “teacher leadership”—or at least the number of titles with that phrase included in the lists of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, for example—may give a false sense of linear progress. The strong movement for the professionalism of teaching in the 1990s and early years of this decade produced a long overdue awareness of the integral role that teacher leadership must play in any true reform of the schools. Wasley (1991), Barth (1990), Bolman and Deal (1994), Katzenmeyer and Moller (2001), Lieberman and Miller (2004), and Danielson (2006), among many others, have weighed in with books on the topic and identified the instructional leadership of teachers as being at least as important as that of strong principals. But the rapid emergence of the testing culture has overwhelmed such considerations, at least for the moment, and the best thinkers have turned to other, more immediate and urgent battles. The even more recent economic downturn has taken an evident toll as well. The number of teacher leadership positions in schools and districts, which had increased impressively in the past two decades, has now begun a noticeable decline as funding has dried up.
This volume is a modest attempt to restore the issue of teacher leadership to the prominence it deserves and requires.
What is teacher leadership, anyway? The definition problem has complicated some of the organizational thinking on the topic, and even confounded some prospective contributors to this volume. Is “teacher leadership” actually a truism? (After all, all teachers are leaders within their own classrooms.) Is it an oxymoron? (Teachers teach, leaders lead.) Is it a specific, designated role? Or is it a hard-to-get-your-hands-around abstraction, visible only in its subtle impact on school culture? Is it, in fact, even a useful construct, something that can help us make sense of the way schools either change to accommodate the needs of their students or remain stuck in old, corrosive patterns of failure?
Teacher leadership, as we use the term in this volume, has been, and in some places still is, all of these. The writers in these pages do not spend a great deal of time torturing the nuances of the definition, preferring to explore instead the vast variety of things teacher leaders do to make a difference in their schools; the daunting challenges of fulfilling roles in which you’re neither, entirely, a teacher nor a leader; and the ways that schools can take advantage of this powerful—and yet frequently untapped—source of vitality and renewal.
Teacher leadership has, to most proponents of progressive, democratic education, an appealing historical ring to it. It defies, in some measure, the notion of schools as hierarchies. It implies that everyone who works within a school organization has some responsibility for the welfare of the community as a whole. It broadens the meaning of what it is to teach. It suggests a commitment to change for the better; progress in the interest of more roundly educated students; and, ultimately, a better society. “Teachers [need] to assert themselves more directly about educational affairs... in both the internal conduct of the schools by introducing a greater amount of teacher responsibility in administration, and outside in relation to the public and the community” (Dewey, 1933, p.390). To more recent researchers and theorists, it presents a dynamic antidote to the isolation of teachers in their classrooms, unable to take advantage of the rich opportunities for better practice that collaboration offers, and to the “flatness” of the teaching profession, which so often leaves teachers with a vista only of recurring waves of their own students, year after year.
To be clear, teacher leadership comes in many distinct variations, and teacher leaders come in many shapes and sizes. There remain the traditional teacher leaders of yore: the department chairs, the staff developers, the head teachers, and the union officers. There is a newer wave of instructional and learning and support specialists and coaches and coordinators—and even specifically titled “teacher leaders.” But of even greater significance for our purposes here are the unofficial—and often unacknowledged—acts of teachers who support and extend each other’s practice in a million quiet ways; who press for the greater care of English language learners or dyslexic or bullied or simply invisible students; or who advocate on committees or in principals’ offices or in the hallways for fair treatment of their colleagues or overdue instructional reforms. These are the people, struggling to create cultures where these acts are the norm, about whom the authors write so poignantly in the following pages.
Although there is considerable overlap among the essays, we have organized them loosely into three categories: mentoring, to address the essential question of teacher helping teacher; transforming school culture, to reflect some of the many ways teachers make a difference in the environment immediately beyond their classrooms; and advocating for change, to spotlight the voices teacher leaders find ways to project in the interest of creating broader and more enduring change.
Any teacher knows that, no matter what the formal arrangements for supervision and evaluation, it is the guidance and modeling of colleagues that most often make the difference in what you do in your classroom. Teachers may have coaches or mentors officially assigned to them, but as often as not, they will gravitate to a fellow teacher of their own choice for the most immediate and important instructional help. Jill Stacy and Nayantara Mhatre, in the compelling piece that opens this volume, describe a spontaneous relationship that has equal measures of mentoring, peer coaching, and teaming. Their getting together is not an event that screams “leadership” in any conventional form. But in its emphasis on careful self-study and co-planning—and on the ultimately democratic mutuality of their partnership—it offers a model of the kind of internally generated support and motivation that even the most effective leaders are often unable to inspire or create.
Kami Patrizio reminds us simultaneously of two very different things: 1) Most mentoring arrangements in schools are not so casually and comfortably effectuated as that of Stacy and Mhatre. To make them more than isolated events, they require careful structuring, thorough preparation, and continual monitoring. 2) On the other hand, there is a distinct strain of human sensitivity (call it, maybe, poetry) that is at the heart of any truly effective mentoring relationship. And this requires of prospective mentors not only pedagogy, but also a deep, hard look into themselves to confront the elusive issues of identity, empathy, morality, and emotion.
That changing schools is long, hard, and usually painful work has become starkly evident at this moment in history. It is probably understandable that our society has turned with a vengeance to some of the simpler remedies: set high, specific standards; test inveterately for compliance; and punish inadequate results. Or tear the existing structures down, replace them with new, smaller schools, and insist that these tender sprouts quickly achieve the results the old schools couldn’t. But the approach with potentially the greatest long-term impact is ultimately the most difficult: it is the work of transforming schools into collaborative, collegial cultures, where the engagement and leadership of teachers is natural and persistent (Fullan & Hargreaves, 1996, pp. 44-52).
Jessica Endlich brings us into intimate contact with the faculty of a small urban high school which depends heavily on voluntary teacher leadership, and finds itself straining against the limits of capacity. Her candid interviews show vividly the tensions that exist when there is never enough time, support, appreciation, and equity to turn a wonderful idea into reality. She suggests some baseline, common-sense strategies to enable teachers to lead without sacrificing their students or their own personal lives.
While the theme of almost all the authors in this volume is that collaboration will necessarily be at the heart of any lasting changes, it is also evident that one person can motivate specific innovations or reforms and thus make a real difference. Jennifer Groves writes movingly of the need for schools to be true learning communities and to create collective ways for teachers to share and generate knowledge. She found Sarason’s (1996) call for risk taking and initiative compelling, and stepped forward to bring teachers together. It was her idea and organization of a professional development book club that brought the teachers in her school away from their regular routine, created a “rich network of learning,” and offered hope and a sense of renewal to a number of her colleagues.
Kathy Rockwood’s graduate students are pragmatic and idealistic all at once, and present a dramatically varied picture of how schools go about involving their teachers in leadership. As they tell their stories through a threaded internet conversation, it becomes evident that the trust, communication, transparency, and support that make distributed leadership workable and satisfying in some places is so visibly and painfully lacking in others. Not surprisingly, it is the former schools that, for the most part, produce the most fulfilled teachers and successful students.
Clara Lin tells the inspiring tale of a new teacher who refused to accept the dreary status quo to which beginning professionals are so often consigned. Almost in anger at the assumption that she was supposed to be miserable for her whole first year, she struggled mightily to find innovative ways to solve her most intractable classroom problems, and then turned her energies to whole-school reform. The morass of school and community politics in which she quickly found herself turned out to be a vehicle of powerful learning for Lin, as well as the basis for a major school change. Her discovery that “’novice teaching’ and ’teacher leadership’ are not mutually exclusive terms” is a happy one.
Children are at the heart of most teacher leaders’ struggles. But none, it would seem from Lillian Hernandez and Cristian Solorza’s essay, can surpass the passion and intensity inspired by English Language Learners and other bilingual and immigrant students in their teachers, who so often and so completely identify with the daily struggles and obstacles these students face in school. For these teachers, leadership feels less like an option than an imperative. They sense the societal forces so starkly arrayed against non-English speaking children and feel they have no choice but to step forward and speak up. Bank Street’s BETLA program has prepared teacher leaders with the voice and resources to advocate for the voiceless.
Finally, Robin Hummel makes an emphatic, persuasive plea for teachers to seize the reins of instructional leadership and to take responsibility—even in the face of recalcitrant administrators and increasingly prescriptive curricula—for their own professional learning and growth. She makes the case for action research as a particularly potent professional development tool, and shows how it serves in addition to liberate teachers from inertia and dependency. Her own research indicates that teacher leadership not only benefits the field in important ways but, in fact, satisfies an urgent personal/professional need in many teachers.
These voices, many of them publishing for the first time, make an eloquent case for more attention—scholarly, public, human—to be paid to these critically important, too-often neglected people in the middle.
I don’t know what to do about Heather and Diane. Based on their written answers to literature assignments and their lack of participation in class discussions, it seems that they’re not really understanding the plot of the novel we’re reading as a class. I know my students are all on different reading levels, but they need help. I want them to be and feel successful, but where do I start?
(E-mail from Nayantara to Jill, December 2007)
I first approached Jill halfway through my second year of teaching sixth grade at a progressive independent school in New York City because I was at a loss about what to do with two of my students who had been in her class the year before. It was assumed by most, including me, that because I had made it through my first year, I “knew what I was doing.” However, I was facing new challenges that neither my first year’s experience nor my graduate school work had prepared me for.
The literature program I had inherited from previous sixth-grade teachers was based on at-home reading assignments, usually two or three chapters per week, and written responses to questions. It’s almost embarrassing to share now, but beyond the initial introduction to the novels that all the students were assigned, we rarely read together in class, and my students were not reaping the benefits of sharing ideas with their peers. The assumption was that everyone in the class could independently read literature critically.
I had taken a literacy class designed for teachers of kindergarten through third grade during my first semester of graduate school. It was the first time I had been introduced to any formal pedagogical methods; because I had never taught in a classroom, it all felt rather out of context and irrelevant. Additionally, because I was enrolled in a museum education program, I was certain I’d be developing curriculum in a museum one day, not teaching young children how to read.
However, my path had taken me out of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, where I had been designing and implementing curriculum in an after-school program for teenagers, and into the classroom. And while I am not teaching young children how to turn letters and sounds into words and sentences, in my second year I realized that I was still teaching slightly older children how to read. The problem was that I didn’t know how.
“I never learned how to really teach reading.” Nayantara’s words sat with me for a number of days. I recalled how lonely many periods of my years as a beginning teacher had been. I had started out down the same path five years ago as a fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, asking many of the same questions Nayantara had had for me the day she approached me. I was even pursuing another degree in literacy in order to refine my classroom practice. My survival during these beginning years depended on the support of two mentors along the way, two individuals who took the time to reach out to me so I might swim rather than sink. I decided to ask Nayantara if she would consider working together with me and engage in a mentoring relationship. She readily accepted my invitation and our journey began.
My interactions with Nayantara prior to mentoring her consisted primarily of conversations during division and department meetings. I had not known who she was as an educator within the classroom before we began this relationship.
Our first meeting gave me insight into Nayantara’s current literacy practices and instructional strategies. As we talked, she was able to articulate the areas of literacy she wanted to focus on and she asked me to help her change the way she taught books to the whole class.
In our division at our school, students read novels that are meant to add to their knowledge and enhance their understanding of the concepts rooted in our social studies curriculum. Nayantara was about to begin a new book, but was frustrated with the “read–answer questions–whole class discussions” format she had been using. She recognized that her struggling readers had difficulty reading the books independently at home. The students’ answers were “dry,” and not everyone participated in the discussions. She knew there was something else she could have been doing, but was unsure of how to break away from her current practice.
Thus began the first cycle of our relationship. We set aside one forty-five minute period a week (ordinarily a preparation period) to meet, debrief, and plan our next steps. Reflecting on our experiences was an integral part of the process; we often used concerns or questions that surfaced in our individual journals to guide our discussions. There were times, of course, that something unexpected arose and we were unable to meet, but when this happened, we kept in contact via e-mail.
Throughout this first cycle, Nayantara and I focused our work on the reason she had approached me: thinking about and learning how to change reading instruction so she could meet the needs of her students. We looked at the overall concept of differentiated instruction. Using the ideas we discussed, Nayantara put a literature circles structure in place in her room.
I played several roles during this process. During our meetings, I shared with Nayantara the practices I had enacted in my room using literature circles and I asked questions about her goals for her students in using this format. When I was in her classroom, I worked primarily with the small groups she had created and occasionally one-on-one with a student. Our work was content-specific; the beginning of our relationship was, as Nayantara described it, noninvasive.
At first, I was cautious about working so closely with Jill. My classroom was my space, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to make myself vulnerable to someone else’s ideas. However, I eventually felt safe working with Jill for a couple of reasons. To be frank, the most important reason was that she was my colleague and not my supervisor. That Jill was going back to her own classroom of students made me feel that she wouldn’t be judging me. It wasn’t threatening to have her in my classroom. She was neither evaluating me nor giving directives; rather, she was trying to help me have more success with my students.
When we began, we focused on specific lessons and assignments. This was a productive way for us to start. We examined the types of questions I was asking, both in class and for homework. I never felt that Jill was critiquing me as a person—which can be difficult to separate from me as a teacher—but rather that she was evaluating the techniques that I was using.
When we moved on to Jill observing me, I could feel myself getting nervous. There she was, sitting in the back of the classroom furiously taking notes. However, despite my tendency to focus on what went wrong during our observation, or to focus on something entirely different that had materialized in the interim, Jill always started our debriefing meetings with positive feedback. We had built a sense of trust, and I could be honest about my concerns and bring up new issues. Because of this trust, I was confident and eager to take Jill’s suggestions and tailor them to my teaching style and the learning styles of my students.
While working with Jill has been a generally positive, productive experience, there were some roadblocks with regard to our personal goals and philosophies, as well as to our relationships to other people at school.
Jill was really enthusiastic about working with me. I was excited about the possibilities, but nervous about what I had gotten myself into. She had so many ideas, both in terms of theory and practice, and it sometimes felt overwhelming. I was still a second year-teacher and I wasn’t sure how much I could, or wanted to, change at one time. As our work picked up, I became more aware of all the things I could be doing better. (Thankfully, Jill was good about reminding me about the things I was already doing well.) I brought up so many things with Jill in our pre- and postlesson meetings, that as I look back, it seems that while we made progress, much of it was superficial. Perhaps, however, the surface changes were a good way to test the waters in working with Jill. Perhaps they were indicative of my anxiety about looking so closely at my own practice. In retrospect, I wish we could have picked one specific goal to examine in greater depth; I should have slowed down along with my students.
Trying to keep our work focused was definitely a recurring theme throughout my later journal entries.
I also noticed that I tried to focus our conversation, but felt that it was all over the place at some points while we are talking. I suppose this is part of discourse, but I don’t want her to feel overwhelmed with too much information. (Journal entry, March 2008)
It was at this point that I knew we were no longer in the honeymoon phase. Nayantara and I had established a trusting, caring partnership, and were facing new obstacles. I realized that each time we met to debrief, the goals of our work changed. While I tried to keep our work centered on a specific literacy strategy, Nayantara posed important questions as she analyzed her practice, leading us in new directions. For example, after observing a lesson I had taught to my class on the strategy of asking questions when you are reading, Nayantara identified organization as an area she wanted to concentrate on. “Organization—of time, materials, logistics—I never think to use chart paper. How can I use chart paper?” she exclaimed. Honestly, at first I was concerned that not only did her comments point us in a new direction, but also that they were taking us away from our literacy-content focus. I wondered if I had done something wrong or had not observed something I should have noticed earlier. How was I going to ensure I included subject matter in our work together as we explored this new issue? As Feiman-Nemser and Parker (1990), writing about coaching relationships, had pointed out, “Beginning teachers need help learning to organize students for purposes of teaching and learning,” but can still focus on structure, logistics, management, and organization, as it is “rooted in the specifics of content” (p. 41). I had forgotten that Nayantara was a beginning teacher. She’s smart, confident, and a reflective educator. That doesn’t mean, though, that she had mastered everything, just as I certainly didn’t have all the answers.
The major focus of our work together was exploring how differentiated literacy instruction would impact the range of learners in my classroom. While I understood that this could potentially be a positive experience for all my students, and particularly the two I had initially struggled to reach, I was not sure I bought into the concept of differentiation. At first it seemed rather unprogressive, and reminded me of the negativity I felt when I was in tracked groups in middle school. I was therefore nervous about changing things.
How is this different than tracking? Is this approach actually going to work? How would my students feel about it? Will I be making more work for myself? Will parents get upset that their child is not getting the same homework assignment as another child? (E-mail from Nayantara to Jill, December 2007)
I also wondered if our jumping from idea to idea—from organization, to asking questions, to materials—was because I pushed the topic of differentiation too quickly. I knew that Nayantara was still questioning this approach and wasn’t necessarily ready to move forward with differentiation in her literacy practice. I had encountered the same instructional difficulties and questions as Nayantara. I thought I had conveyed to her my empathy, my understanding of how I knew what she was going through. I realize now that, while I was on this journey, she would take the path she wished to take at the speed she needed, at her level of readiness.
Another challenge I encountered in my role was balancing how much information I shared directly with Nayantara, and how much I left her to discover through my guidance. I felt it was essential that she be given the opportunity to construct meaning from her own experiences, to make meaning of her own learning to teach. But I also didn’t want her to feel frustrated and walk away without any ideas that she could pick and choose from to help shape her practice. Often, as we debriefed, I felt as if I dominated the beginning of our meeting by asking many guiding questions to prompt Nayantara’s thinking, and that at the end I shared examples of how we could address some of the issues we had been discussing. I left feeling unsure and wondering if I had talked too much and asked either too many guiding questions or not enough questions that led in the correct direction. As I was new at this, I didn’t have a definitive idea about what this conversation was supposed to feel and look like, but I knew that the dialogue would vary from person to person, and from conversation to conversation. With time and practice, a smooth rhythm fell into place.
While I was slightly concerned about what my students and their parents would think about my work with Jill, I was more concerned about the reaction of our supervisors. Our school generally encourages and supports collaboration, but I wondered if the work I was doing with Jill was supposed to be done instead with our learning specialist or our curriculum coordinator. I was meeting with them as well, but given the nature of that particular year, much of my time with them was spent confronting other, equally important, issues. Was working with Jill challenging the well-established hierarchy of roles at our school? Did it matter?
I struggled over how to define the nature of our relationship as it developed. In the beginning, my relationship with Nayantara exhibited many of the qualities of mentoring. I am a more experienced teacher and Nayantara was the novice or beginning teacher. However, as our relationship evolved, we moved beyond the narrow definition of mentoring. Traditionally, mentoring at our school was designed to support new teachers, but ended once the teachers were settled into their new surroundings and position. Our relationship, unlike this model, did not stop simply because we had explored our initial goals. Instead, as Nayantara began to identify her problems and address various literacy practices, we developed a professional partnership, one in which we learn from each other by asking questions, offering opinions, and providing suggestions.
While it was perhaps clear to others that Nayantara has learned from me, what was not as apparent was that I have learned from her. She asks me questions about my practice that push me to think about the instructional strategies I choose to put in place in my classroom. I am then able to explain more clearly what I am doing and why. Ours is a professional partnership, two colleagues working together to gain knowledge that will further our literacy practices within our respective classrooms.
There’s no end to this type of relationship, as you continuously question and refine your practice. Recently, Nayantara was telling me about how she would like to structure her work with student teachers and her new grade-level partner next year. As I left this informal meeting and stepped onto the subway, I wondered whether she would be taking on these leadership roles with such confidence if we hadn’t worked together.
During my first two years of teaching I noticed a disconnect between what I had learned in graduate school and what I learned in the classroom. I found that even the most specific, practical suggestions from a professor (“If you can hear my voice, clap once…”) might not be effective in every situation.
While working with Jill wasn’t always perfect, it was ultimately successful. It wasn’t successful because it made me think, “Great, I fixed that problem. Now we’re done,” but rather the opposite. It was and will continue to be successful because I feel supported and confident in rethinking and improving my practice. I’m more interested now in exploring new theories and techniques in my classroom, and I understand that not everything is going to work for my students or for me.
Although we’ve completed graduate school, it doesn’t mean we can or should stop learning. While we can learn from our professors and our administrators, often the people in neighboring classrooms can help us the most. Jill shared her experience and knowledge through our partnership. I saw her evolve as a teacher leader, and was able to tap into my emerging leadership qualities and apply them to my own professional relationships.