7 Qualities That Promote Teacher Leadership in Schools

7 Qualities That Promote Teacher Leadership in Schools

three shifts in policy and leadership culture may help move these efforts forward:

1. New types of assessment are gaining ground. Several states are piloting performance-based assessments to replace standardized testing.
2. Exemplars in the business community are now promoting flat organizational structures, where employees work in smaller teams and have more voice and power over how they work.
3. Teachers are more networked than ever before, providing a unique opportunity to share and spread good teaching practice.

crucial decisions about curriculum, leadership roles and discipline.

While the hybrid roles that teachers play at teacher-powered schoolsmay seem like a lot of work, they give teachers the power to decide what programs, textbooks, software, etc., should or should not be used in order to make space for the community’s vision. And when teachers decide together on the vision and strategy to reach all students, they are often more invested and excited by the change they are creating from within.

Some of the best available examples of how to improve teacher quality and promote teacher leadership lie in models offered by other high-performing places, like Finland and Singapore.

Seven qualities must be in place.

1. A vision and strategy for teacher leadership, “with stated goals and clear images of tasks to be done, must be in place.”  Teachers must feel part of creating this vision in order to buy in.
2. A supportive administration. “Principals must be willing to share power with teachers and must have the skills to cultivate them as leaders,” most educational leadership programs focus on supervising teachers, not supporting them as leaders.
3. There need to be appropriate human and fiscal resources.
4. Work structures that enable authentic collaboration are crucial. While more resources help on this point, there are creative ways to stretch limited dollars.
5. Supportive social norms and working relationships are key to teacher leadership. “All too often, policymakers develop incentives to motivate teachers and administrators,” . “Instead, policies and programs should be in place to value teachers spreading their expertise to one another, allowing teaching to be exercised as a team sport.”
6. Organizational politics must allow for blurred lines between roles. Teachers can only take on leadership roles at the expense of principals and district-level administrators. This also requires teacher unions to act more as “professional guilds” and for districts to follow the example of some for-profit businesses that are flattening bureaucracies.
7. The school and system must be oriented toward risk-taking and inquiry. Just as students need hands-on applied learning rooted in inquiry, so, too, do teachers need powerful driving questions to push their work forward. “School systems must be able to interrogatethemselves about the extent to which they create opportunities for teachers to learn and lead in ways that spread teaching expertise and improve student outcomes.”