Ten Years After: Is Genuine Teacher Leadership Dead in the Water?
OK. The headline was designed to lure readers. But the question remains: Has practice-based teacher leadership come a long way in the last decade--or has the concept become co-opted and marginalized by all the organizations and funders that want to own it? Teacher leadership has been a hot issue for more than two decades, but the dialogue around its definition and mission has clearly shifted.
I asked Mary Tedrow for her take, because we have a long history of wading around in the theory and practice of teacher leadership together. Ten years ago, we co-created the Center for Teacher Leadership's Teacher as Change Agent course, based on the belief that teachers were experts and in charge, when it came to their classrooms, but very much on the receiving end of policy--for better or worse. We built case studies of garden-variety teachers who succeeded in changing policy--at local and state levels--into the course, because we thought that's where the real leverage occurred.
We made the assumption that teachers who had good ideas, informed and honed by experience, were best positioned to influence policy. We thought teachers could and should gain control over their own core work: curriculum, instruction, assessment and managing a classroom. We thought teacher leadership, as a movement, was just out of the gate--at the cutting edge of a push to fully professionalize teaching.
If you had asked me, in 2004, what teacher leadership would look like in 2014, I might have imagined a rising national wave of unique place-based, teacher-created schools, teachers serving as ad hoc policy advisors to senators and governors, teachers sharing innovative curriculum and performance-based assessments of student work using newly available technologies. I certainly would have predicted greater delineation, recognition and utilization of the skills of top-tier, long-term veteran teachers, and a vastly more professional approach to selecting, preparing, mentoring and advancing teacher practice.
Have we sincerely pursued any of those goals, wide-scale? We certainly have more books, more websites, more opinions, more formalized, grant-funded teacher leadership programs. Everybody's involved with a different flavor of "teacher leadership:" Teach Plus. StudentsFirst. Teach for Ten Years After: Is Genuine Teacher Leadership Dead in the Water? - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher: