Adventures in Teacher Leadership

Pathways, Strategies, and Inspiration for Every Teacher

Rebecca Mieliwocki, Joseph Fatheree

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781416627197
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Leadership in Education

Have you ever imagined yourself as a teacher leader but weren't quite sure whether you really had—or could develop—the necessary skills? Have you wondered what the first steps toward becoming a teacher leader might be, what kinds of approaches work best, and how you could overcome the inevitable challenges that come with leading your colleagues on a journey toward improvement as professionals?

Authors Rebecca Mieliwocki (California and National Teacher of the Year for 2012) and Joseph Fatheree (Illinois Teacher of the Year for 2007) answer these questions and more in this engaging guide to becoming a successful teacher leader. Organized around five key tools—communication, collaboration, professional development, data, and advocacy—the book covers every aspect of what is involved in taking on leadership responsibilities. Firsthand accounts of the authors' experiences and those of more than a dozen other State Teachers of the Year describe the various pathways to leadership, strategies for success, and pitfalls to avoid. These teacher voices add powerful credibility to the research on teacher leadership and show how leaders can not only improve their schools and districts but also influence state and national policies and practices.

Both informative and inspiring, Adventures in Teacher Leadership invites others to expand their professional reach, empower the profession of teaching, and, ultimately, make a big difference in the lives of students everywhere.

This book is a copublication of ASCD and NNSTOY.

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Chapter 1

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Building Bridges: Using Communication Channels to Strengthen Ties, Create Networks, and Sustain Relationships

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The art of communication is the language of leadership.

—James Humes

At Northstar Elementary School in Salt Lake City, Utah, the 5th grade classroom of Mohsen Ghaffari, Utah's 2015 State Teacher of the Year, is filled with kids from all over the world, many of whom do not speak English as their first language. As a matter of fact, over 22 different languages are spoken by the students at Northstar. Although they may not share a common tongue, Mohsen's students all come from families in which both parents care deeply about their child's success but must work incredibly hard just to survive. It is difficult for these parents to have the time and ability to participate in school life. Because he could identify with this exact situation as a result of his own schooling in Tehran, Iran, Mohsen knew that the best pathway to success for his students would require him to build a bridge that brought parents much closer to the school.

Meanwhile, in the remote rural town of Holderness, New Hampshire, Angie Miller's 6th grade language arts students faced significant challenges owing to their isolation and lack of access to the wider world. Angie knew her students might not be able to travel throughout the world, but they could certainly study about it in her class in meaningful and relevant ways. Angie's curricular invitation to explore this wider world was a powerful motivator for kids who might be born, grow up, live, and die in the same small patch of New Hampshire. New Hampshire's 2010 State Teacher of the Year, Angie knew that her students needed a connection to something bigger that could only be achieved if she found a way to unite teachers in a common purpose.

Across the country, Paul Anderson, Montana State Teacher of the Year for 2011, struggled to figure out how to maintain relationships with the students in his fast-paced advanced placement classes. His AP science classes required him to plow through vast quantities of information in an effective way while also providing his high school students with lab experiences in which they could conduct plenty of hands-on experiments. With only a limited amount of time to do many important things, Paul became painfully aware that many of his students needed more of his time, attention, and help than he was able to give during class. He realized that if he really wanted to work individually with groups of students, he could no longer stand in front of the class and be in charge of everything. He had to create a structure that allowed students to engage in learning on their own before they came to his class.

The situations each of these teachers faced relate in some way to communication, and they are not uncommon. After all, every teacher struggles with communication on some level. Rebecca was no exception. When she began teaching, she had some pretty clear ideas about what the job would be like. She'd plan and teach fabulous lessons, work with small groups and individual kids, and assign and grade student work. She'd keep a great-looking classroom, interact positively with her colleagues, and contribute to her school's culture. Sounds easy, right?

Pretty quickly it dawned on her: what she thought it would be like was not the same as what it really was like. Rebecca learned, as we all do, that the job of teaching is much more demanding than we ever thought it would be. Every new year and each new crop of kids brought a dozen unique wrinkles that needed to be ironed out in order for Rebecca to feel as though she was making an impact. Staying on top of all of these demands took every shred of intellect, enthusiasm, and energy she had.

After teaching for a few years, Rebecca began to notice some problems in the system that were preventing her and her school from being the very best they could be. Informal conversations with teaching colleagues helped her see that these problems weren't unique. They focused primarily around communication issues and the troubles that come when schools and teachers aren't communicating very well. Here's what she discovered.

Too many schools can be islands unto themselves, castles of learning whose drawbridges are pulled up, leaving families, teachers, and administrators disconnected. Families sometimes don't receive inviting human contact from schools, leaving them unsure about what's happening inside the schoolhouse and uncertain about how to help their children succeed. Parents and community partners, a potentially powerful and wonderful resource for schools, go untapped.

Things often aren't much better inside. Teachers become isolated from one another and are so fully consumed with the work of teaching that communication is hurried, infrequent, or task-driven. When they do have precious time together, it is typically reserved for administrative minutiae or so overly micromanaged that they are left uninspired, disconnected, and unheard.

Rebecca realized that opportunities for meaningful collaboration among colleagues were stymied by communication channels that weren't available, weren't open, or didn't fulfill the needs of the teachers doing the real work. Limited time and sheer exhaustion were keeping even the most committed teachers from reaching out to find others to share ideas and inspiration with.

In our own classrooms, there's often more material to teach than there are days in the calendar. Finding a balance that allows for meaningful practice, discussion, and work is a Herculean task. We don't always know how to get all the work done effectively and still have time to make deep connections with our learners.

Passionate and committed teachers—and we count ourselves among them—already know that each of these realities presents a huge hurdle to overcome. But here's what's important: rock star teachers are never content to sit back and let the status quo rule. No way! The best, most determined of us will turn ourselves inside out to knock down the walls that keep us from communicating clearly and well with one another. We will create a free and empowering exchange of ideas where once there was none. We will roam the halls of our schools to find kindred, collaborative spirits. We will reach out to our parents and our neighborhood community to make key connections. We just will. Why? Because we know that excellent communication skills can help us smooth and resolve a good chunk of the challenging situations that confront us. Such skills can even help us lay the foundation for exciting learning experiences for our students, their families, and our colleagues.

Strategies for Supercharging Your Communication Skills

We might not always be quite sure what to do, but as teacher leaders, we figure out how to make the tools we do have work to solve the problems in front of us. In the following sections, we take a look at some essential skills you can employ on your campus—or anywhere in your work life—to supercharge communication and guarantee success.

Let Down the Drawbridge

Do whatever it takes to throw open the doors of your classroom and your school for anyone and everyone to come inside. Increasing the communication flow between all the folks who make up a child's academic and home life pays enormous dividends. Matthew Kraft and Shaun Dougherty (2013), researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, illuminated the impact of communication in their 2012 study, which found that increased levels of school-to-home communication resulted in a whole host of positive benefits, such as increases in student motivation, academic engagement, homework completion rates, appropriate classroom behavior, and stronger student-teacher relationships.

These results tell us that step one in an effort to improve communication is to publicize the fact that your school and your classroom are always open to visitors; that colleagues, parents, administrators, and community members are welcome; and that you will do whatever it takes to get the good word out about what's happening in your class. Opening your doors and your work to others lets in a wonderful bit of sunlight that demystifies and strengthens the school.

Take Your Class Online

In today's world, teachers who maintain a digital presence in the form of a teacher or a class website have a leg up on those who don't. Most schools and districts have websites with live links to teacher and class websites. If your school's website software comes with free teacher pages that you can use, go for it. If not, there are dozens of free programs like Weebly or Squarespace or WordPress that offer attractive, easy-to-use templates to create a website of your own. Although some teachers create sites full of impressive features, you can start more simply. Include your name and contact information, descriptions of curricula and materials for your classes, a calendar listing important events, homework uploads or links, a wish list of things you'd like to have donated, and opportunities for parent or community involvement. If you like, you can include your gradebook, pictures of student work products, or a tweet stream if your class has a Twitter account. You can even include a class mascot who posts a word, a fact, a math problem, or a quote of the day. At its core, your website is the place where families and students can gather to get essential information about your class and to connect with you.

Translate Everything

Roughly half of the classrooms in the United States have students who speak a language other than English (Quintero & Hansen, 2017). In some schools, dozens of languages are spoken by the students and their families. It is crucial to make sure that families are not left behind because important information about your class is not available in a language they can understand. Making this accommodation may seem like a simple thing to do, but the process of getting everything translated can take time. Early on, find out who on your campus or in your district is responsible for translation services. Make sure that you get your "welcome back" letter, your syllabus, your class guidelines, all major assignments, and any paperwork related to end-of-year events translated into the languages spoken by the kids in your classroom. You can use Google Translate or other translation apps to help with on-the-spot translations for e-mails home, and you can even add Google Translate to your teacher website so that parents can view it in their first language with a simple click of a button.

Activate the Parent Network

Most schools welcome parents on campus only twice a year, at back-to-school night and open house. Arts or athletics events might bring some parents to campus more often. These occasions provide a great starting point, but the best teachers invite parents to class a lot more often.

At least twice a year, invite parents to come to school to participate in the learning your students are doing. For example, you can host a parent science night with some sort of forensic "mystery" to be solved, a coffee-house event featuring kids performing poetry and music, or a "math madness" night with families competing against each other on math challenges. Next, you might ask parents to come in during the day to help you facilitate learning stations or to act as community experts and share their work or other expertise with students. If you want to go all in, survey your parents to find out where their passions lie and then figure out how to capitalize on that information by having them guest-teach a class, arrange a field trip, or facilitate a larger learning opportunity for your kids. Parents are an enormous, largely untapped resource, but teacher leaders know that there's gold in the parent community.

Mohsen Ghaffari, the teacher we introduced at the start of this chapter, knew this fact very well, and he decided to take relationships with families beyond back-to-school night by celebrating his culture through a home-cooked meal:

I began by deciding to cook some food in my classroom and invite all my students' parents to come enjoy it with me. While they were there, I would share with them the latest research into child development and learning that they could use to understand their children better. We sent home invitations, translated into many of the 22 different languages spoken at North Star, and I waited for the crowds to arrive.

His effort got off to a slow start, but in time, the payoff was well worth it:

My first parent night was, how shall I say, lightly attended. With the help of translators, sign language, gestures, and a lot of smiles and laughter, I told parents where their children were developmentally. I explained what an 11-year-old brain can do that a 10-year-old brain cannot. I spoke about my expectations for their [children's] work, and ways they can help their sons and daughters excel, not just at school and at home, but in life too. This was the imperfect but wonderful beginning of many times I invited families to be part of what was happening in my room.

What I realized was that even though they say a teacher is where the rubber hits the road, there are many, many parts to the machine that make this car go. I might be the wheel, but if everyone doesn't know what to do or how important they are, the car cannot move very well. Parents must be brought into the circle so they can feel they are a part of their child's success.

Provide Weekly Updates

Whether via your teacher website, a folder sent home, or a routine e-mail blast, provide parents and families with a weekly update letting them know the academic focus for the coming week, what concepts will be covered, what tests or quizzes are planned, what extra help is available, important schoolwide events for the week, and anything else you want parents to know about. You can even include a family "challenge question" that they can take part in. For example, we've seen teachers send home fun "Where in the world is this?" geography questions, quick-write topics about family traditions, or even lists of the world's most difficult-to-spell words. For some reason, kids just love giving their parents quizzes. Trust us.

Here's why the weekly update is so helpful. Teachers are often bombarded by parent e-mails, and finding the time to answer them all in a timely way can be tough. Often the e-mails contain questions about the items just mentioned. Sending out a proactive update each week answers dozens of questions that families now won't need to ask via e-mail. The regular update also gives them a feeling of confidence that they will be able to help their child navigate that week's learning and work successfully.

Talk with Parents in a Respectful, Positive Manner

In any situation where you are talking to parents, make it a priority to demonstrate a deep respect for them, their time, their child, and the situation at hand, no matter what it may be. Parents see you as an expert education professional. It's important to wear that mantle in a calm, positive, confident way. Aim for every interaction to be a win-win scenario that leaves all parties feeling that something good has been accomplished. When something great has happened in class, dash off a postcard, an e-mail, or a quick phone message. Let parents know what great thing their child did and why you are proud. Do this at least once per week, if not daily. Parents love positive news from school. This gesture puts a lot of metaphorical money in the bank for times when you need help or when the news from school might not be so great.

When a tough conversation is in order, use positive presuppositions before approaching the difficult or hard-to-hear part of the conversation. For example, if you have to make a call home about classroom misbehavior, you could begin by saying, "I know it's important to you that your daughter behaves well in class; it's important to me, too. I also value and appreciate your input because I know you are the expert in things relating to her. I am calling today to get some support for some things that are happening in class lately." Laying this groundwork indicates that you (1) respect the parent's role and knowledge, (2) are assuming good outcomes in advance, and (3) are willing to work together to solve problems. Parents have often had so many less-than-wonderful phone calls from school that they tend to prepare themselves for the other shoe to drop as soon as you introduce yourself. Beginning the conversation as just described disarms them and helps them see that you are approaching them from a mindset that isn't angry or accusatory, but instead curious and in need of assistance. Most parents want to help and are happy to be asked to provide suggestions, solutions, and feedback about how to make things better. If you can get and keep parents on your side, there's almost nothing they won't do to help you.

Keep Your Door Open and the Welcome Mat Out

Traditional school structures often find teachers siloed into their classroom spaces and scheduled in such a way that deep, meaningful, and stimulating interaction with colleagues is tough. It takes a concerted effort to fight this structure, but it's absolutely worth the expenditure of your time and energy. The first thing to do is to make sure everyone you work with knows your door is always open, and that for better or for worse, you welcome anyone to pop in to visit anytime. You might even press them into service or ask them to participate in what the class is learning.

Take care with this step and how you deliver your welcome, as it's a fine line between being genuinely interested in having visitors and coming off as the know-it-all teacher who wants everyone to come see your amazing instruction. You want to approach this ...