Developing Teacher LeadershipAllison MackleySeptember 2010

Sergiovanni, T. J., & Starratt, R. J. (2006). Supervision: A Redefinition (8 ed.). New York City: McGraw-Hill

Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages.

Objectives

• Understand how school culture can lead to collective teacher leadership

• Recognize that teacher leadership begins in the classroom and can mature into leadership within the school.

• Explore how effective supervision can develop teacher leaders

A New Context for Supervision

• As first-year principals, your experiences as a teacher are not far behind. Think back to the moment that you realized you wanted to be a principal:

– What or who encouraged you to make that decision?

– What experiences did you have as a teacher that make you think that you could be an effective school leader?

Expectation to Do More

• National agendas of school renewal and increased accountability for improved learning for all students changed the context for supervision.

• These changes have placed greater emphasis on developing the human and professional resources already within the school system, which has brought to the fore a focus on teacher leadership.

Heart of Educational Enterprise

• Teaching, curriculum and student learning

• As principals, the supervisory process means facilitating both teacher and student progress in learning tasks at hand.

• As a process, supervision involves a “standing over,” a “standing above,” to achieve a larger or deeper view of the educational moment, to gain a vision of the whole as it is reflected and embodies in its parts.

• Supervision is a view of what education might mean at this moment, within this context, for these particular people. This view is meant to provide a “super-vision” of the educational moment to encourage reflection and transformation of that moment into something immensely more satisfying and productive.

Significance of Supervision II

• The process requires an open, flexible, inquiring attitude.

• It is not directed at judging behaviors according to a fixed, seemingly objective set of standards.

• The process leads to the construction of understanding and practical judgment, which leads to tentative, experimental choices that participants see as responsive to the particulars of the context in which they find themselves. The participants, in their reflective practice, decide whether those choices are appropriate and productive for them.

In the Moment

• Teaching and learning are carried forward in the reflective give-and-take concerning what works and what does not, what makes sense and what does not, what facilitates students performance and what does not. Neither the teacher, the students, nor the supervisor knows ahead of time what will result until they engage the material in a specific way. Supervision is the attempt to see the teaching-learning moment in all its multidimensionality and all its possibility.

• Share with your table group how this statement is similar to or different than your experiences with supervision? What does this mean in terms of your role as principal?

Supervisor as Professional

• Supervision is a professional responsibility of members of the educational staff—teachers, administrators, and professional support staff.

• Educational staff must have a vision of an ideal educational moment. A sense of the following:– How children learn– What is most valuable to learn– Social significance of what is learned– Ways to orchestrate learning– Importance of community– Self governance and social character in learning and for

learning.

• You must have a larger sense of the purpose of schooling – a sense of how this educational moment of these students and this teacher might embody the larger purposes of this school.

Making it Work

• Both teacher and supervisor must be willing to learn by trial and error what teaching strategies work in a particular instance.

• Supervision through reflective practice requires the following:– a highly specific involvement with the task at

hand– illuminated by an intuition of how and it is working– further intuitions flowing from the exchanges with the

students that enable the teacher to see that this is an instance of the larger purpose or value that the school is promoting.

Gaining Super-vision

• Intuitions come with time, experience and reflection.

• Requires intelligent inquiry, reflective assessment, and deep familiarity with the material being taught.

• Requires a critical assessment of the institutional barriers to teaching and learning, given all of the contextual variables

• The work of supervision is intellectual work.

Challenging Demands

• How might the following characteristics of supervision work against the development of teacher leaders?

– Work that relies on checklists of supposedly correct teacher behaviors

– Assumptions of superior knowledge granted by administrative position

– Romanticized personal experience as a teacher

Supervision II and Professional Commitment• Requires a profound grasp of child and adolescent development

• A commitment to a studied understanding of teaching and learning

• A new view of the variety of settings and stimuli that can nurture learning

• A new awareness of the complexity of student assessment

• A revised concept of professional authority as a necessary complement to hierarchical legal authority

• An understanding of adult learning

• An imaginative sense of the possibilities for flexible redesign of the process of schooling itself

Transforming the School into a Learning Community

• Supervisor becomes the following:– Facilitator– Policy innovator– Resource finder– Inventor– Collegial experimenter– Intellectual– Critic– Coach– Institutional builder– Community healer– Visionary

Emerging Perspectives on Teacher Leadership• Over past 20 years – gradual maturing sense of what teacher leadership

means but underlying supervision process tended to remain the same:

– Increased interest in improved professional status for teachers

– Importance of teachers’ participation in the democratic governance and administration

– Linked teachers’ core work with school-wide leadership, saw the importance of teams of teacher leaders involved with curriculum decisions and the school’s exploration of newer curriculum support

– Internal faculty replaced external consultant for professional development.

• More recently – teacher leadership is being linked more closely to school renewal.

– Teacher leadership connected to the ongoing, core work of teaching for improved student achievement and success.

– Linked to collaborative efforts with other teachers, to reflective practice with other teachers, to the cultural shift toward becoming a learning community of teachers.

Teacher Leadership in the Classroom

• Teachers must turn around potential hostility, apathy, and resistance into enthusiasm, collective self-confidence, interest, and pride in accomplishment.

• Teacher leaders are more than good technicians. They take the long view with students and eventually find ways to engage them.

• Teacher leaders tend to focus on the profound significance of what students are doing and the profound significance of their own work as teachers. The work in the classroom is involved with the transformation of experience (John Dewey).

• Teacher leaders go beyond the mastery of the common syllabus and good grades to the more personal and profound appropriation of the material under study.

Anatomy of a Teacher Leader

• As a group, develop an idealized visual that represents the qualities that you would like to develop in the teachers in your school.

– What are some of the leadership qualities and strategies?

– What does student engagement look like in those classrooms?

– How does their leadership extend to other teachers?

– How might the school employ their leadership in other ways?

– How does the school community benefit from their leadership?

Where to Begin?

• Teacher leadership begins in the teacher’s leadership of his or her students.

• This demands an autonomy and discretion unique to the profession.

– Help teachers build a repertoire of instructional adaptations and applications.

– Encourage teachers to trust in the ability of students to do high-quality work once they are motivated and to trust in the mutual exploration with the teacher of how to do the work.

– Provide opportunities for teacher leaders to grow in exchange with their colleagues as they explore together alternate ways to address a learning unit.

Teacher Leadership in Comprehensive School Reform

• Teacher leadership is the key to ongoing school reform.

• National models of school reform place teams of teachers in strategically important positions of influence during the change process:– Accelerated School Project– America’s Choice– Success for All

One Example: National Writing Project• Teachers become better teachers of writing and place themselves in a

position to lead other teachers toward increased competency in teaching writing.

• Structured around learning communities

• Teachers graduate with title of teacher consultant

• Return to classroom but also participate in local, regional and national leadership work

• Dynamics that foster leadership (Lieberman and Wood)– Every teacher, no matter what his or her background or philosophy, is

viewed as having something of value to contribute.– Teachers commit themselves to learning from others.– Teachers dialogue about and critique one another’s writing.– Teachers take ownership for their own learning.– Teachers grow in their reflection on teaching through reflecting on their

learning.– Teachers rethink their professional identity, linking it to participating in a

professional community.

Teacher Leaders in Your School

• How can you take the dynamics that foster leadership of the National Writing Project and translate them into the culture of your school building?

• How can you help to develop confidence in teachers so they carry on conversations with other teachers about the results of their work with students?

Brainstorm two or three actions that you could take to develop this type of learning community among teachers in your school.

Distributed Leadership

• Teacher leadership does not displace administrative leadership.

• School improvement requires distributed leadership throughout the school, with individuals and teams all on the same page regarding clear goals of improved and high-quality student learning.

• Leadership of a community that engages with various teams reinforcing the ideas and initiatives of others through their specific contributors.

• School learning communities are the natural ground for the expression and development of teacher leadership.

Learning Communities

• Learning communities and teacher leadership are means for enhancing student learning, not ends in themselves.

• Shaping the focus of learning communities - Supports ongoing work of teachers:– Better understand each student’s learning needs and

capabilities– Better understand the subject matter of the curriculum

and its relationship to many facets of the real world– Development of a great repertoire of student learning

activities that will connect the students’ needs and interests with the curriculum material and its relationships with the real world.

Maintaining a Broad Vision

• View schools as sites for social justice, democratic community, and authentic learning

• Teachers must resist the imposition of a free market interpretation of the schooling process and the exclusive equation of learning with standardized test scores.

• Recognize learning as the gradual transformation of an unformed identity and an immature person into someone who knows where he or she came from, what communities he or she belongs to and has responsibilities for, how to find various types of human fulfillment, and what is worth striving for.

Teachers as Leaders Framework

• Empirical findings about teachers who have accomplished significant results for their schools not only by mobilizing their fellow teachers, but also by involving segments of the community in support of projects that transform students learning, while also having a significant impact on the local community (Frank Crowther and associates).

• Teachers as leaders– convey convictions about a better world.– strive for authenticity in their teaching, learning and assessment practices.– facilitate communities of learning through organization-wide processes.– confront barriers in the school culture and structures.– translate ideas into sustainable systems of action.– nurture a culture of success.

• Teacher leaders generate “new meaning and in so doing enhance the community’s quality of life.”

• Research always found a principal and other administrators who were supportive and encouraging.

• Teacher leaders collaborate with administrators in work that in theory and in practice had been reserved to administrators alone.

Evolution of Teaching Profession

• Teacher leadership is no longer appointed of anointed by the principal; it is considered a necessary part of being a teacher (Lieberman and Miller). Evolution from:– Individualism to professional community– Technical work to inquiry– From control to accountability– From managed work to leadership

• School will not improve unless teachers exercise a collective leadership in performing their core work—the enhancing of student learning (DuFour and Eaker).

• For schools to become places where all students learn, then all teachers must become leaders (Roland Barth).

Teacher Leadership as Relational

• The forging of close working relationships with other individual teachers through which mutual learning takes place is the most important dimension of teacher leadership (Day and Harris).

• Personality traits of teacher leaders (Leithwood, Jantzi and Steinbach)– Fairness– Commitment to the school community– Concern for the morality of decisions– Being a humane person– Being open, honest and genuine

• Relationships with students are crucial to the advancement of student learning.

Implications for Supervisors

• Supervision should be linked to a broader, school-wide strategy for improving teaching and learning (Kim Marshall).

– Have teachers work in teams to evaluate student work and to develop common curriculum unit plans and common interim assessments.

– The formal observations of classes would be almost entirely replaced by brief, though frequent, walk-through class visits linked now to the work of teacher teams to improve student learning.

• Carefully target clinical supervision as a perfect instrument to build a working relationship with a teacher, especially a less experienced teacher, that will lead to the building of those leadership qualities necessary for the success of all the students in his or her classes.

• With a trusting relationship established through the intense work on clinical supervision, the teacher may be encouraged to network with a group of other teachers who could be a continuing resource for generating good questions and good ideas of relating to student learning.

Your Leadership Challenge

• How are you going to stimulate the latent leadership in teachers? Develop an action plan with at least three goals for developing teacher leadership that you will implement this school year.

• Find a two or three other administrators at your table group who can serve as your learning community this year. Discuss what kind of support you can give one another to help you find success.

Teachers do not become leaders on their own. It is in the working together, collaborating in leadership action, rather than in assigning leadership titles, that the leadership work gets done.