This paper provides an account of an action-based study, which was conducted with the purpose to develop teacher leadership in four schools in Kazakhstan. By drawing on a non-positional approach to teacher leadership, this study sought bottom-up approaches to educational reform, school leadership and professional development in schools in Kazakhstan. The nine-month intervention programme, which was called the Teacher Leadership for Learning and Collaboration, introduced strategies and created conditions for teachers to lead educational improvement at classroom, school and system level. The outcomes of this study indicate that educational improvement requires building local capacity by empowering teachers to lead learning and innovation within and outside their schools. The authors draw on their experience of the intervention programme from the academician and practitioner perspectives.

The school system in Kazakhstan has been undergoing multiple reform initiatives since 2011. These changes were triggered by the government's initiative to join the 30 developed economies in the world by 2050 (OECD, 2014). In order to ensure sustainable economic growth, the government has initiated rapid educational reform with the purpose of improving the quality of education and increasing pupils' attainment across all schools in Kazakhstan, whereby the main target was to raise teacher quality. Due to the government's unprecedented investment in teacher training, more than 52,000 classroom teachers (as of 2015), middle and senior school leaders have undergone in-service training within the last few years (Wilson, 2017). However, the challenge that remained was to sustain and apply this change in classrooms and schools (Wilson, 2017), so that it could make a real difference and have system-wide impact. It was important to think about how to enable teachers to sustain and lead change locally, or to put it another way, how to make the top-down reform initiative sustainable by bottom-up support. In this vein, the current educational reform in Kazakhstan is believed to be greatly benefitting from the input and engagement of teachers who are critical in implementing educational policies (OECD, 2014).

Over the last 20 years, Hargreaves and Fullan (2012) have been consistently arguing that teacher quality needs to be invested in and mobilised for a system-wide educational change and sustainable improvement. The studies indicate that high-performing educational systems promote teacher leadership as a means to enhancing self-efficacy and improving teaching quality (Schleicher, 2012; Berry, Zeichner and Evans, 2016). This dimension views teachers as professionals who can develop and lead learning by generating knowledge from the bottom-up (Durrant and Holden, 2005; Frost, 2011). Therefore, central to this study was the conceptualisation of teacher leadership as an entitlement of all practitioners regardless of their roles or positions to become active participants of educational improvement (Frost and Harris, 2003; Bangs and Frost, 2016). Frost (2011) refers to such leadership as a non-positional teacher leadership (NPTL). Leadership is perceived as a moral act, whereby teachers identify their professional values by systematic reflection on their own practice, set vision in relation to their own concerns or schools' needs and act to bring about the change into their practices, schools and community (Frost, 2000; Frost and Durrant, 2003; Frost, 2008). However, the development of NPTL requires infrastructures and strategies to enable teachers to make meaning of (Fullan, 2007) and lead change. Therefore, our research concern was as follows:

How can we develop and evaluate a strategy for enhancing the teacher's role in educational reform in Kazakhstan using an approach that enables teachers to exercise leadership for the purposes of enabling the sustainable development of practice?

The ‘Teacher Leadership for Learning and Collaboration' (TLLC) programme lasted for 9 months. The intervention programme followed the main principles of the strategy called Teacher-led development work (TLDW), which was developed by the UK-based HertsCam Network with the purpose to enable teachers to exercise leadership in their schools (Mylles, 2006; Frost, 2000; 2011; Hill, 2014). The strategy has been tested through International Teacher Leadership (ITL) initiative in 150 schools in 17 countries around the world and involved more than 1000 teachers (Frost, 2011). The TLDW strategy consisted of the following steps: teachers clarify professional values; identify professional concerns; discuss concerns with colleagues to clarify the focus of their development project; develop an action plan; lead the development projects; network to build professional knowledge (Hill, 2014). Central to this study was the intention to develop and evaluate in action in schools in Kazakhstan a programme based on the NPTL idea. Through taking action with teachers within the existing power system, the first author aimed to build knowledge about the possibility of enabling teachers to develop their leadership capacity, the benefits that can arise from this and the strategies, techniques and tools required to achieve this. In the light of this, this study can be regarded as a form of critical participatory action research, whereby the first author saw herself as a practitioner. That is to say that her practice as the instigator and key facilitator of the programme referred to above was part of the phenomenon she was researching. She has also recruited allies and collaborators in a number of schools, including second and third authors, and worked with them to develop and enact the programme of support for teacher leadership within their schools. To monitor and evaluate the programme an action research spiral of steps developed by Kurt Lewin was adopted to measure and maximise the effectiveness of intervention (Lewin, 1946). The data collection methods included (i) interviews (ii) participant observations, (iii) documentary analysis and (iv) research journal. Data analysis involved thematic and open coding, which helped to construct data around themes and open code them to elicit emergent ideas (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). The programme participants’ selection was driven by the idea of voluntary participation. Therefore, random purposeful sampling was used (Miles and Huberman, 1994) in selecting the participants. Research participants included teachers and school leadership team members. The total number constituted 31 participants including the programme co-facilitators.

The implementation of NPTL in schools in Kazakhstan revealed the possibilities to enhance teachers’ role in educational reform through facilitating self-driven ongoing learning and reflection on the existing classroom practices. It also created conditions for collaboration between colleagues within and outside their schools. In general, the intervention could be described in four different stages: creating the conditions, re-orientating, enacting and reflecting (Kanayeva, 2019; Qanay et al., 2019). Our experience echoed earlier studies, whereby the role of school administration, time and facilities defined the success of teacher leadership development (Frost and Durrant, 2002; Harris and Muijs, 2005). It was important to create structural conditions, such as time and space and establish relations with participants. We also had to address the tension between the constructivist assumptions of the programme and pre-existing cultural norms. The idea that knowledge can be constructed individually and socially (Dewey, 1916) was not yet popular among teachers, so it required a great deal of effort to build sufficient trust and create safe spaces for authentic reflection. The key element of the programme was to enable teachers to transform their concerns into concrete plans and enact their initiatives. During the final stage, teachers were able to reflect on their experience and share their leadership stories. Their leadership stories were published in practitioner journals and presented at national conferences, which has implications for future enhancement of teachers’ voice. Despite the success of the intervention programme, there were number of challenges such as: lack of time, increased workload and system structure. To sum up, the study outcomes indicate positive impact of NPTL on school improvement such as facilitation of continuous professional development, collaboration, enhancement of agency and teachers’ voice. However, the sustainability of NPTL requires ongoing support from the school administration as well as conditions created at the system level.

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