Chapter 24 --  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Educational Leadership
Assessing the Prospects of Teacher Leadership

It is increasingly implausible that we could improve the performance of schools, attract and retain talented teachers, or make sensible demands upon administrators without promoting leadership in teaching by teachers.

Teacher Leadership and the Professionalization of Teaching

Three sets of professionalization problems form the context for questions of teacher leadership.

1. Conditions of membership in the Occupation
   • Recruitment
   • Preservice admission and exit standards
   • Licensure/certification
   • Testing and Assessment tied to a knowledge base in teaching
   • Teacher evaluation
2. Structure of the Teaching Career
   • Structure of opportunity for advancement/promotion
   • Structure of opportunity for expanded responsibility of job enlargement
   • Access to meaningful (professional) reference groups in and out of school
3. Conditions of Productivity in Schools
   • Structure of leadership and decision making that includes well-qualified teachers
   • Administrators' roles in the support of teachers and teaching
   • Collective responsibility for student achievement
   • Reward structure that promotes teacher-to-teacher collaboration and accountability

Professionalizing Teaching by Professionalizing the Workplace

There are three main arguments underlying "school workplace" reforms:

1. Experiments in teacher leadership will prove to be marginal and ephemeral if they are not demonstrably linked to benefits close to the classroom.
2. The work of schoolteaching is characteristically "professional" work
3. The professionalization of the larger occupation rests in important ways on our ability to professionalize the organizations in which teachers work.

Work Worth Leading: Targets of Teacher Leadership

Advocates of teacher leadership have largely underestimated the magnitude of the change their proposals represent.

• Are schools organized to influence teaching?
  Schools that are organized to influence teaching are relatively rare.
• Teachers who lead
  Teachers who lead leave their mark on teaching.  By their presence and their performance, they change how other teachers think about, plan for, and conduct their work with students.
  Six arenas in which teachers might reasonably demonstrate leadership at the school level:
  1. Lead teachers continue to teach and to improve their own teaching.
  2. Lead teachers organize and lead well-informed peer reviews of school practice.
  3. Lead teachers participate productively in school-level decision making.
  4. Lead teachers organize and lead inservice education.
  5. Lead teachers advise and assist individual teachers.
  6. Lead teachers participate in the performance evaluation of teachers.

Teachers' Acceptance and Support of Leadership by Colleagues

The prospects for leadership can be judged in part by whether teachers have developed a close working knowledge of one another's teaching.

The prospects for teacher leadership can be judged by teachers' acceptance of initiative by specially designated leaders in their midst.

Teachers' acceptance of and participation in regular classroom observation reveals their fundamental orientation toward teaching as a private or public activity.

• Making Teaching Public
• Does Classroom Observation Change Classroom Teaching?
  Teachers expect that:
  • Observers will describe what they've seen and invite the teacher's commentary.
  • Observers who find something to admire or praise will say so directly.
  • Observers who have suggestions to make will help teachers to act on them by providing demonstrations or by joint planning.
  • Teachers who observe will request feedback on their observation practices.
• Acts of Leadership: Initiative by "Master Teachers"
  • A pattern of hesitant approval-  Teachers in five of the six schools did not flinch from the prospect that masterful teaching would be publicly recognized.
  • Building on precedent: the department head-  When principals were encouraged to find ways of sharing their leadership with teachers, one prominent suggestion was to capitalize on school-level positions.

Assessing the Prospects for Teacher Leadership

Four conclusions about the prospects for teacher leadership:

• "High Gain, High Strain"
• Through the Eyes of the Principal
• The Public Interest in Teacher Leadership
  Among the conditions that will advance or erode the prospects for teacher leadership, five are prominent:
  1. The work that leaders do
  2. The symbolic role that leaders assume
  3. Agreements for getting started
  4. Incentives and rewards
  5. Local policy support
• Organized Preparation and Support
  Districts and schools face a two-part challenge:
  • To introduce capable people to a new role with training programs for new teacher leaders
  • To introduce a new role to an institution and an occupation.  Leadership by teachers will require a more common pattern of teacher-to-teacher work in the daily operations of schools.

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Jossey-Bass Publishers.  The Jossey-Bass Reader on Education Leadership.