This paper reports on findings from funded research carried out over a three-year period aimed at examining conditions for teacher leadership in challenging circumstances. It also discusses the implications of the findings for understanding changes in teachers’ work and the role of schools in the continuing professional development of teachers.

Teacher leadership has gained increasing attention from researchers in recent years, especially internationally. This notion has been developed in the USA (Little, 1988; Lieberman, 1992; Lieberman & Miller, 2004; Lieberman & Friedrich, 2008), UK (Frost & Durrant, 2002, 2003; MacBeath et al 2006; Frost, 2004; Durrant, 2004), and Australia (Crowther, 1999), amongst others. All this work has drawn attention to the need for a vision of teacher leadership as a key element in improvement efforts in Education. Existing literature points to a number of principles that might inform the development of teacher leadership initiatives in schools: teachers are key elements in the change process; schools are learning communities in which (distributed) leadership may be enhanced; schools as learning communities are most likely to enable children to become educated, capable and active citizens; the reform of education systems is most likely to be successful when teachers’ professionalism includes the leadership of processes of innovation and improvement in practice; teachers’ exercise of leadership will become an integral part of the organization of schools; teachers interact with each other and share their knowledge (Little, 1988; Lieberman & Miller, 2004; Frost & Durrant, 2003; Durrant, 2004; Katzenmeyer, & Moller, 2001).

Within the view of schools as learning communities, members are encouraged to exercise leadership and to engage themselves in improvement and change in the settings in which they work. There is scope for further developments in this area by promoting strategies to enable teachers to develop further their capacity for leadership in their schools and across schools. However, this is dependent upon the ways in which teaching and being a teacher are understood, in other words, teacher professionalism and professional development.

Clearly the extent to which teachers are able to engage in strategic action for change depends on the way their professionalism is perceived by themselves and their colleagues and on the conditions for them to exercise leadership, to lead innovations in schools and to transform their educational practice (Frost, 2007).Research on teacher leadership would need therefore to account for the way professionalism is constructed within policy and institutional settings, and in particular in the Portuguese context which has been critical for the teaching profession over the last few years due to the economic, financial and social crisis.

The goals of the project are: i) to understand the wider social, cultural and political setting and the policy environment in which teachers’ work is framed, especially in terms of challenges and opportunities; ii) to analyze the professional and organizational culture and structures of the schools in which teachers work; iii) to understand the ways in which teachers construct their professionalism; iv) to develop strategies in order to enhance teacher leadership in schools.

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