Why Teacher Leadership is Important
The more time I spend in the classroom, the more I am convinced that teaching is the single most challenging intellectual and emotional pursuit in existence. While I would hold firmly that good teaching is a craft that can be learned by anyone, great teacher, which is unfortunately necessary for my students in the Bronx to be successful, is the work of artistic genius. It should then be left to the artist and the craftsmen to determine the future of their medium; no reasonable person would argue otherwise if they agree to my teacher as craftsman/artist premise.
The problem with the current dialogue around education is that it assumes an industrial aspect to teaching: students are seen as raw material, onto which some act is preformed or some knowledge is inserted. Teachers are merely viewed as the instrument through which this insertion occurs. The bourgeois elites who currently
