The Power of Teacher Leaders

Their Roles, Influence, and Impact

Nathan Bond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780367643249
• eBook ISBN: 9781000539899
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Now in its second edition, The Power of Teacher Leaders, copublished by Routledge and Kappa Delta Pi, serves as a resource for understanding the varied ways that teacher leaders foster positive change in their schools, profession, and communities. By definition, teacher leaders are teachers who stay in the classroom, maintaining their commitment to teaching students while assuming informal and formal leadership positions beyond the classroom. It is that commitment to teaching and their desire to improve student learning that motivate them to become teacher leaders.

Written by researchers and teacher leaders, each chapter describes a particular way that teachers are leading, connects to the relevant scholarly literature, and assesses the impact of the teacher leaders on students and communities. The second edition features new chapters on less common and unresearched teacher leadership roles, informal teacher leadership, and teacher leaders as social justice advocates. This edited collection shows how teacher leaders play an important role in the improvement of student learning, teacher professional development, and school and community climate.

PART 1 Roles of Teacher Leaders

1 Informal Teacher Leadership Reculturing Schools and the Profession

Melinda Mangin and Carolyn Ross

DOI: 10.4324/9781003123972-3

While formal teacher leadership roles have captured the attention of government agencies, professional groups, universities, and private organizations, the work of informal teacher leaders has been under-examined. Education scholars acknowledge that “informal activities might be among the most common and most influential forms of teacher leadership” (Berg et al., 2019, p. 19). Indeed, teachers themselves recognize that informal teacher leadership has a greater impact on teaching and learning than formal leadership (Fairman & Mackenzie, 2014). Teacher leadership that foregrounds classroom teachers as decision makers, designers, developers, mentors, and problem solvers is distinct from other conceptions of teacher leadership that take teachers out of the classroom and position them as separate from their colleagues, through title or role (Silva et al., 2000). The nature of informal teacher leadership and its impact can be difficult to identify, as informal teacher leadership develops spontaneously, outside the confines of specific programs, as teachers respond to needs within their school community and bring their particular interests, skills, and knowledge to bear. In this study we ask: How do informal teacher leaders contribute to reculturing their school communities and the teaching profession?

For this qualitative study, we define the informal teacher leader as a full-time K–12 teacher who engages in leadership activities outside their classroom without having a formal leadership title or role. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a sample of 10 self-identified and peer-nominated informal teacher leaders. The findings from this study provide new information about informal teacher leaders’ practices, beliefs, and the impact of their work. First, they engaged in three key practices: learning and sharing, collaborating with colleagues, and advocating for positive change. Second, these practices grew out of two beliefs: that all teachers can be leaders and teacher leadership is concerned primarily with collective capacity building. Third, informal teacher leadership positively affected their colleagues’ behaviors and attitudes. These findings help to operationalize a definition of informal teacher leadership and point to the potential for informal teacher leadership to reculture school communities and the teaching profession.

Framing the Study

This study is framed by two fields of scholarship. First, we define informal teacher leadership, paying particular attention to what we know about teacher leaders’ activities and the outcomes of their work. Second, we present concepts from Wenger’s (1998) theoretical work on “communities of practice,” which informs our analysis of the data and offers a helpful way to think about how informal teacher leaders are positioned to reculture their school communities.

Informal Teacher Leadership

The idea that leadership may originate from teachers seems intuitive; however, identifying and defining what constitutes teacher leadership is complicated. In their comprehensive literature review, York-Barr and Duke (2004) found that few studies provided any definition for teacher leadership. Subsequent reviews found similar results (Nguyen et al., 2020; Wenner & Campbell, 2017). For example, in their review of teacher leadership literature spanning 2003–2017, Nguyen et al. (2020) found that, of the 150 empirical articles reviewed, only 17 defined teacher leadership, and their definitions varied. Lack of definitional clarity makes it difficult to draw comparisons across the body of work and discern possible outcomes of teacher leadership. The definitional challenge may be especially acute for informal teacher leadership enacted by teachers without formal leadership roles or titles.

The definitions that have emerged in the literature differ in their attention to formal roles or informal teacher leadership enactment. Perhaps the most widely cited definition comes from York-Barr and Duke (2004):

We suggest that teacher leadership is the process by which teachers, individually or collectively, influence their colleagues, principals, and other members of school communities to improve teaching and learning practices with the aim of increased student learning and achievement. Such leadership work involves three intentional development foci: individual development, collaboration or team development, and organizational development.

(p. 288)

This conception views leadership as a process of influence, rather than a role, aimed at improving student learning, and begins to operationalize the process by identifying development foci ranging from individuals to organizations.

Other scholars have defined teacher leadership in relationship to teachers’ dual connections to classroom teaching and leadership. Wenner and Campbell’s (2017) definition includes “teachers who maintain K–12 classroom-based teaching responsibilities, while also taking on leadership responsibilities outside of the classroom” (p. 140). Wenner and Campbell explain that a classroom teacher distinction is important because classroom teachers are uniquely positioned in their peer status to understand the complexities of teaching and influence their colleagues, a stance held by other scholars as well (Curtis, 2013; Donaldson, 2007; Mangin & Stoelinga, 2008; Muijs & Harris, 2006). Margolis (2012) makes a similar argument for classroom connections in his definition of a hybrid teacher leader as “a teacher whose official schedule includes both teaching K–12 students and leading teachers in some capacity” (p. 292). Efforts to limit the definition of teacher leader to teachers who retain K–12 teaching responsibilities help to draw more precise lines across the literature without precluding the possible formalization of teacher leadership roles.

A different approach to defining teacher leadership focuses on the kinds of activities that typify teacher leadership. In a seminal exploratory study of three teacher leaders, Silva et al. (2000) describe a “third wave” of teacher leadership characterized by teachers’ meaningful participation in school decision making. They explain third wave teacher leaders’ key activities as (1) navigating school structures, (2) nurturing relationships, (3) encouraging professional growth, (4) helping others with change, and (5) challenging the status quo by raising children’s voices. Distinct from the first two waves, which formalized leadership roles for teachers and diverted their instructional knowledge to educational settings outside the classroom, this third wave empowers teachers who work from within classrooms to create change. As such, Silva et al. (2000) present “a definition of teacher leadership that makes leadership a part of the work a classroom teacher does on behalf of children” (p. 781).

A larger study by Fairman and Mackenzie (2014) explored the teacher leadership activities of 40 teachers in seven schools. The findings showed that teacher leaders worked to increase student learning through a variety of leadership activities, including modeling professional attitudes, coaching colleagues in their use of new materials, collaborating in planning and co-creating instructional materials, and advocating for change in practices. They worked diligently to cultivate collegial environments and deepen relationships, understanding that these relationships served as the foundation for modeling and coaching activities.

A conceptualization of teacher leadership as a process of influence (York-Barr & Duke, 2004) points to the need for research on the ways in which teacher leaders are influential. Previous literature reviews have identified four main impact areas: on teacher leaders themselves and their colleagues (Nguyen et al., 2020; Wenner & Campbell, 2017; York-Barr & Duke, 2004) and on students and the school (Nguyen et al., 2020). Furthermore, the teacher leadership activities described by Fairman and Mackenzie (2014) and Silva et al. (2000) seem to reflect the kind of participatory leadership that Fullan (1995) identified as a key component of reculturing of schools. Schools are commonly characterized by social norms that perpetuate isolation, individualism, and hierarchical decision making that limit teachers’ and teacher leaders’ opportunities for agency and collaboration (Mangin, 2005). How then, might teacher leadership activities influence school culture? This study examines informal teacher leadership enacted by classroom teachers to determine how teacher leadership practices might influence school culture and the profession.

Communities of Practice

In Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (1998), Wenger presents a social learning theory of how people negotiate meaning within communities of practice. Wenger proposes that competent membership in a community of practice includes mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared repertoire of practice. The members’ participation, through direct engagement in social activities and the creation of artifacts such as tools and documents, facilitates the negotiation of meaning and the reification of shared understandings. Boundary encounters, instances when members of different communities interact, allow for new connections and meaning making.

Through this “Communities of Practice” framework, the informal teacher leaders can be understood as working within and across communities of practice to negotiate meaning and, potentially, shift the status quo. Their membership might include professional organizations, learning communities, accreditation programs, or leadership teams. Wenger explains that if members have an experience that falls outside the current regime of competence of a community to which they belong, introducing the new experience to their community might shift its regime of competence. Wenger writes, “If they have enough legitimacy as members to be successful, they will have changed the regime of competence—and created new knowledge in the process” (p. 139). Thus understood, the informal teacher leaders’ multimembership in different communities of practice may facilitate boundary spanning and shift regimes of competence in ways that reculture their school and even the profession.

Research Methods

This qualitative study included a sample of 10 informal teacher leaders. Due to their lack of formal titles, sampling informal teacher leaders can prove challenging. The sampling strategies employed in other studies of informal teacher leadership guided our approach (Fairman & Mackenzie, 2014; Silva et al., 2000; Stoelinga, 2008). The criteria included three main components: (1) peer- nomination, (2) self-identification as a teacher leader, and (3) participation in at least three spheres of leadership action as defined by Fairman and Mackenzie (2012). Further criteria included sampling for demographic variation, with consideration of potential participants’ gender, race, age, years of teacher experience, subject, and grade-level taught.

Recruitment took place via Twitter. The first author utilized hashtags to reach a large audience an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Editor and Contributor Biographies
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 Roles of Teacher Leaders
• Part 2 Becoming a Teacher Leader
• Part 3 Teacher Leaders and Social Justice
• Index