Session Information
26 SES 01 A, School Leadership, Middle Management and School Context
Paper Session
Contribution
Teachers play an integral role in school leadership activity. The question is not if teacher leadership is active, but the extent to which it exists, how it is manifested, and how it is enabled or constrained by the organizational structure and culture that surround it. Over the past 30 years, researchers and reformers have conceptualized teacher leadership in different ways in order to engage with this challenge. Based upon the literature on teacher leadership, I summarize four archetypes of teacher leadership focused on instructional improvement that differentially emphasize the development of teacher leadership capacity and the creation of specific roles for teacher leaders. First, and perhaps the most prevalent form of teacher leadership is organic teacher leadership, which occurs naturally in schools with strong collective responsibility (Abelmann et al, 1999). The second approach, informal teacher leadership, encourages teachers to take on leadership roles in support of their schools and provides them with training, but does not change the structure of the school organization within which they are operating (Smylie & Denny, 1990; Lord, Cross & Miller, 2008). The third paradigm of promoting instructional improvement through teacher leadership, or quasi-formal teacher leadership, are those efforts that incorporate teacher leaders into the organizational structure of schools, by providing them with titles and/or positional status, but stop short of providing them with formal authority to influence the behavior and practices of their peers (Muijs & Harris, 2007; Camburn, Kimball & Lowenhaupt, 2008). These different formulations of teacher leadership serve as the backdrop for an analysis of the role of teacher leaders under a formal model.
Using data from case studies of eight schools in England, this paper describes the roles and responsibilities of teacher leaders, called middle leaders in England, in a formal model where teachers are given the responsibility for supporting and leading the improvement of sub-groups of teachers in their schools – and held accountable for their improvement. The paper focuses on both the roles of individual teacher leaders as well as the organizational supports and school cultures that enable or constrain their efforts. The paper concludes with an emerging theory of teacher leadership which combines relational, knowledge, and authority aspects of teacher leadership for instructional improvement. The relational aspects speak to the ways in which teacher leaders build levels of collaboration and trust with their colleagues to balance peer and advisor relationships. The knowledge aspects address the foundation capacity that legitimizes teachers to influence the work of their colleagues. The authority aspect provides the organizational legitimacy to break through the typically flat structure of schooling.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Abelmann, C., Elmore, R., Even, J., Kenyon, S., & Marshall, J. (1999). When Accountability Knocks, Will Anyone Answer? CPRE Research Report RR-42. Philadelphia, PA: Consortium for Policy Research in Education. Camburn, E. M., Kimball, S. M., & Lowenhaupt, R. (2008). Going to scale with teacher leadership: Lessons learned from a districtwide literacy coach initiative. Effective teacher leadership: Using research to inform and reform, 120-143. Lord, B., Cress, K., & Miller, B. (2008). Teacher leadership in support of large-scale mathematics and science education reform. Effective teacher leadership, 55-76. Muijs, D., & Harris, A. (2006). Teacher led school improvement: Teacher leadership in the UK. Teaching and teacher education, 22(8), 961-972. Smylie, M. A., & Denny, J. W. (1990). Teacher leadership: Tensions and ambiguities in organizational perspective. Educational Administration Quarterly, 26(3), 235-259.
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