When Educators Help Call the Shots: Panel Discusses the Future of Teacher Leadership
A long history of top-down bureaucracy in public schools has created a deep-rooted system in which administrators make the decisions and teachers carry them out. But recent shifts in culture and policy are providing more opportunities for teachers to take on leadership roles and make their voices heard in decisions that impact their day-to-day work in the classroom.
Creating environments that encourage teacher leaders was the topic of the Teacher Leadership Policy Panel at “Advancing the Profession: The Outcomes of the Teacher Leadership Initiative,” an event held yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
Panelists, including Kerri Dallman, president of the Colorado Education Association (CEA), Fred Frelow, Education and Scholarship senior program officer at the Ford Foundation, and Joshua Starr, Chief Executive Officer of Phi Delta Kappa, discussed ways to allow more teachers to make an impact on teaching and learning conditions without having to leave the clssroom and pursue administrator careers.
The panel was moderated by Caroline Hendrie, executive director of the Education Writers Association, who began by asking Dallman of CEA how conditions would need to change to encourage more teacher leaders.
Dallman said the two most important factors to create those conditions are trust and collaboration – between educator colleagues, between educators and parents, and especially between educators and administrators.
“We need administrators who are comfortable with distributed leadership,” she said. “When there are strong, collaborative teams, teachers will step up to lead.”
Frelow agreed, saying that teachers are too often isolated in their classrooms and that they should use new platforms — like virtual professional learning communities — to collaborate and organize.
But Starr suggested that perhaps the question isn’t how to create more teacher leaders, but “how to bring everyone else along.”
“Teachers must feel highly engaged, they must feel they are part of the larger When Educators Help Call the Shots: Panel Discusses the Future of Teacher Leadership - NEA Today:
