Teacher Leadership vs. Teacher Professionalism
I am currently facilitating an online course in teacher leadership--called Teacher as Change Agent--for the Center for Teacher Leadership (CTL) at Virginia Commonwealth University. Last Tuesday, Mary Tedrow, a bona fide teacher leader from Virginia, was the guest at our webinar. Tedrow has a distinguished and varied resume' and said lots of smart, lively and provocative things in her remarks, including this, in response to a class member's question about opportunities to lead in her school:
Remember-teacher leadership is a threat to an established system.
That comment resonated in my thinking for several days. Who is truly afraid of genuine leadership emerging from practitioners?
Given the surfeit of classes, graduate degrees, non-profits and blue-ribbon reports on the shiny possibilities of teacher leadership, it's a difficult concept to reconcile. My social media stream gives me daily pre-packaged opportunities to read about teachers who are leading: changing lives by staffing a brand new charter, embracing new learning management systems, talking to policy makers about ESSA, reviewing textbooks to ascertain their alignment to the Common Core, and serving on committees to develop yet another model of teacher evaluation.
And that's just in the last 10 days.
Teacher leaders are everywhere. Often, they're doing precisely what the established system wants Teacher Leadership vs. Teacher Professionalism - Teacher in a Strange Land - Education Week Teacher: