Teacher Leadership That Strengthens Professional Practice

Charlotte Danielson

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781416618423
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Every school relies on teachers who informally and voluntarily lead various efforts in the school. These teachers may not be appointed leaders or paid leaders, butthey are committed leaders: they see a need and they respond to it. What do these teacher leaders do that is different from the work of excellent teachers who are not teacher leaders? If we can articulate those skills, says Charlotte Danielson, then we can take steps to enable more teachers to develop those skills and be better equipped to tackle special projects.

Teacher Leadership That Strengthens Professional Practice is designed to be a resource not only for prospective teacher leaders but also for administrators who want to better support the development of outstanding teacher leaders.

Teachers seeking to expand their leadership capacity will learn how to

* recognize an opportunity and take initiative,
* mobilize colleagues around a common purpose,
* marshal resources and take action,
* monitor and adjust the initiative,
* sustain the commitments of others, and
* contribute to the learning organization.

Administrators will find advice on how to cultivate, promote, honor, and empower teacher leaders--and how to work with them to successfully present innovations to the school community.

In short, this book gives individuals and schools a practical framework for tapping teachers' leadership potential and marshaling their efforts to better educate students and create a stronger learning community. As Danielson convincingly shows, genuine teacher leadership is a powerful force for constructive change.

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Part I

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Teacher Leadership:

Breaking New Ground

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The concept of teacher leadership is not new; indeed, every educator has encountered colleagues whom they would describe as leaders, individuals to whom they look for professional advice and guidance, and whose views matter to others in the school. The educational literature on teacher leadership is, furthermore, fairly extensive. To this point, however, the critical characteristics of teacher leaders, as distinct from teachers who are assigned to leadership positions, has not been fully described. This book fills that void and is offered in recognition that many teachers don't regard teacher leadership as a stepping stone toward administration; rather it represents its own way of working in schools and making a contribution to student learning.

The principal characteristic of teacher leadership, as described here, is that it is completely informal. Teacher leaders don't gain their authority through an assigned role or position; rather, they earn it through their work with both their students and their colleagues. Teacher leaders play a highly significant role in the work of the school and in school improvement efforts. Precisely because of its informal and voluntary nature, teacher leadership represents the highest level of professionalism. Teacher leaders are not being paid to do their work; they go the extra mile out of a commitment to the students they serve.

Part I begins with three stories of teachers who illustrate these characteristics. Subsequent chapters describe teacher leadership in some detail and enumerate what it is that teacher leaders actually do. In other words, what do teacher leaders do that is different from the work of excellent teachers who are not teacher leaders? Lastly, Part I concludes with a discussion of the critical matter of school culture and the impact it has not only on what teacher leaders do, but also on how they do it.

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Chapter 1

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Leadership Stories

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The term “teacher leadership,” which has been much in the professional news of late, has been used in a number of different senses. Its meaning, as used in this book, is best illustrated by three examples.

A New Way to Do Field Trips

In 1997, Margaret¹, a 4th grade teacher in Michigan, took her students (as she had for many years) on a field trip to the local historical museum. The outing was fairly typical of such excursions: some preparation for what the children might see, a lot of “herding” by Margaret, a few parent volunteer chaperones, and children attempting to conceal (not very successfully) their boredom with presentations by the museum staff. In fact, Margaret remembers, the children exhibited “considerably more motivation for spending their money at the museum gift shop than learning about Michigan's history.”

By the next year, things had changed. Margaret was dissatisfied with the quality of the learning in which her students were engaged. In fact, she was beginning to wonder whether the annual field trip was a wise expenditure of the district's scarce resources. So she arranged to meet with the education staff at the museum to consider alternatives. The result was the BIG History Lesson, in which Margaret's 4th graders spent an entire week at the museum!

Naturally, such an effort required a lot of planning, including meeting with the staff at the museum, locating a room the class could use for the week, and arranging for transportation and parent helpers each day, to say nothing of structuring the week's activities to take full advantage of the many resources of the museum.

The concept has been extended since 1998 to include the BIG Zoo Lesson, the BIG Nature Lesson, the BIG Science lesson, and the BIG Culture Lesson, reaching 2,500 Michigan students in grades 1–8 from 12 districts in 2004–05. While at an off-campus site, students participate in lessons particular to that site and integrate work in language arts, mathematics, science, and history. Moreover, students engage in daily reflection on their activities, partly for closure and partly to structure the next day's activities.

One of the greatest benefits reported by both teachers and students is the opportunity for in-depth work. For example, in the BIG Zoo Lesson, students observe a single animal each day for a week, exploring such concepts as group behavior, camouflage, eating and sleeping habits, and use of tools. Such sustained focus is simply impossible in a traditional trip to the zoo. Some students report returning to the zoo with their own families, and instead of the normal walking around and commenting, “There's a zebra; those are the monkeys,” they can share their own, much deeper, understandings of animal behavior.

Margaret's BIG Lesson concept has found eager converts all across the state and has attracted financial support from both public and private agencies. Margaret's own job has evolved; she coordinates the program part-time, helping to find additional sites, offering workshops for teachers, planning BIG Lesson weeks with teachers, and maintaining the Web site. In her “other” life, she has continued as a technology teacher three days a week in her original school.

Testimonials from both students and teachers attest to the value of the BIG Lesson concept. It is an idea that arose directly from the work of teaching, from the “bottom up.” It is not the sort of idea that would have emerged from policymakers at the state level or indeed from most principals' offices. To be sure, other individuals and the context helped shape what the project has become, but the energy for it arose from the work of a teacher with an idea.

Looking at Scheduling and Student Assignment

Elm Ridge, an elementary school in Florida, was recognized in the community for the many things it did well: It had a welcoming environment, a challenging curriculum, and high rates of student proficiency on the state tests. But Elena, a teacher at Elm Ridge, became interested in the practice of looping after reading an article and talking with colleagues in other districts. Looping means that an individual teacher stays with a group of students for several years (frequently the first three years), and then “loops back” (on, say, the fourth year) to begin again with a new group.

She could see the advantages: Each teacher comes to know the students deeply and to understand their backgrounds, their interests, their preferences in learning, and their family constellations. There was much less “start-up” time needed at the beginning of the school year to establish the routines and institute new procedures. Furthermore, the students themselves entered each school year knowing one another well and knowing the teacher and his individual style. The few new children who entered the school each year were easily absorbed into the established structure.

Of course, in her conversations, Elena learned of the disadvantages of looping as well: When students stay with a single teacher for three years, any conflicts that occur are magnified; when personalities clash, the effects last much longer than in a traditional arrangement. Elena was still intrigued with the idea and wondered whether it could strengthen the program at Elm Ridge.

As a result of her discussions, and with the encouragement of her principal, Elena posted a notice in the faculty lounge inviting interested teachers to join a study group to investigate the concept of looping and to determine whether it might be effective at their school. Four teachers volunteered for the work, and they arranged a regular time to meet (after school on Thursdays, every other week).

Elena located some articles for the group to read, and the others found material as well. They read and generated questions about possible benefits and challenges to be overcome. The group visited schools in neighboring districts where looping was being practiced to learn from the experience of others and to determine whether they thought it could work in their own school.

After a year of meeting, thinking, and planning, the study group proposed a version of looping for Elm Ridge. They had become convinced of the merits of the approach and were confident that they could overcome the challenges. Elena, with the backup and participation of others in the study group, described the concept to the full faculty and elicited their suggestions and concerns. As a result of that full-faculty discussion of the idea, the plan was slightly modified to the following: Kindergarten on its own, 1st and 2nd grades looped, 3rd grade on its own, and 4th and 5th grades looped. The teachers decided that this configuration would best balance the advantages and disadvantages of looping.

The real work began the next year. With Elena taking the initiative, and with a little time released from their teaching, the primary teachers explored the concept in depth, working out all the practical implications, from classroom assignments, to curriculum articulation, to collaboration on communications with families. The teachers were now truly a team; although each teacher had chief responsibility for working closely with a group of children for two years, they knew they had to work even more closely with each other to ensure consistency across all classes.

In addition, with the help of the principal, the teachers (again, under Elena's leadership) began a series of meetings with the parents of students in the school. The parents needed to be convinced of the merits of the approach, and their apprehensions had to be assuaged. Both the principal and the teachers played an essential role in this process: The teachers were the most knowledgeable about the details of the plan, but the principal was the individual to whom the parents looked for official leadership. After four years, the plan, with a few modifications, was still in place.

What Achievement Gap?

Tom, a high school math teacher in Ohio, noticed an interesting phenomenon in his school. In spite of the school's 18 percent black and Hispanic population, only 5 percent of the students in the advanced math classes were minority students and fewer than a third were female. Furthermore, because of the way the school schedule operated and the fact that the pattern in other disciplines was similar to that in mathematics (although the gender gap was noticeably worse in math), a group of white, mostly affluent students moved from advanced math to AP Biology to Honors English in what was, in effect, a segregated cluster within a supposedly integrated school.

With the encouragement of the principal and 20 minutes of a faculty meeting allocated to him, Tom presented some graphs that described the situation and compared the school's demographic breakdown with the enrollment in advanced classes. As expected, Tom's presentation was greeted with some defensiveness by his colleagues. But as a result of his invitation, five of his colleagues agreed to participate in a more detailed examination of the situation.

The group explored many aspects of the situation, but the most revealing turned out to be interviews with students and observations of one another's classrooms. They began their discussions by looking at the preparation of different groups of students when they entered from the middle schools. Not surprisingly, they found gaps in achievement in 8th grade among the different groups of students. They might have left it there and determined that the gaps they inherited from the middle schools could not be overcome in high school and that low-performing 8th grade students would be forever relegated to the lower tracks or remedial classes.

To their credit, and partially owing to Tom's polite insistence, the group first did some reading on the role of expectations, on student views of intelligence and ability, and on stereotype threat (Aronson, 2004; Grossman & Ancess, 2004; Landsman, 2004; Sanders & Cotton Nelson, 2004; Steele & Aronson, 1995). They tried to ascertain which of the research findings might offer guidance to the teachers in their efforts to expand minority participation and success in advanced classes. They also learned from their reading (Dweck & Sorich, 1999) that in interactions with students it was essential to praise them less for the products of their work than for their effort. That is, when students believe that by working hard they can do well, they are willing to put forth effort. It is not a matter, in other words, of being good at math or science, but it is a matter of making a sustained effort to master complex material.

While Tom recognized that the approach was risky, he convinced his colleagues that they needed to examine their own practices. Therefore, offering himself as the first subject for study, Tom arranged for his colleagues to interview some of his students and to observe his teaching. The results were stunning. Tom himself was shocked by the findings:

• Many students in his nonhonors math class recalled having been told by a teacher in their early years of schooling that they were not good at math. “And it's true,” they would add. “I'm in a low math class.”
• When a colleague observed one of Tom's honors math classes, keeping track of the attention he paid to boys and girls, the colleague reported (to Tom's amazement) that even controlling for the different numbers of boys and girls in the class, Tom devoted 80 percent of his time to the boys and only 20 percent to the girls. When Tom made a concerted effort to remedy this pattern and invited the same colleague to observe him again, he learned to his great surprise that his attention was only equally divided, that is, half to the boys and half to the girls. He had predicted that the 80–20 numbers would be reversed; instead, it was exactly 50–50.
• The same observations revealed that Tom's responses to male and female students were markedly different. He gave more time to respond to questions to boys than to girls, and his follow-up questions to boys were significantly deeper and more challenging.

When Tom reported these findings to the other members of the study group, they, too, were surprised and troubled. One by one they agreed to participate in the same sort of research into their own classes. One teacher dropped out of the study group, attributing his action to family commitments. Tom regretted that teacher's decision and hoped that the work of the group had not been too uncomfortable for his colleague. But he was unable to convince him to stay involved.

So with a slightly smaller group, the teachers began to collect information about their own teaching. Again, the results were revealing:

• Minority students who had been in an advanced math class in 9th grade, but did not continue with those classes in later years said that as one of only one or two minority students in their math classes, they felt isolated and unwelcome. They also felt themselves—or believed others regarded them as—imposters, incapable of doing the work and only token members of minority groups.
• Black students in one honors history class reported that the teacher asked the white students the tough questions but directed the easy questions, the ones that “anyone could answer,” to the few minority students in the class. When the teacher heard about this comment, she was stunned. She realized the truth of the statement, and said “I just assumed that they didn't know the answer, and I didn't want to embarrass them.”

To a greater or lesser extent, all of the teachers involved in the study recognized that they had been operating in denial to some degree; they could quite easily believe that the patterns Tom reported might be a part of other teachers' classrooms, but didn't think that they existed in their own. They acknowledged being upset by what their colleagues had discovered. Tom's role here was interesting. He pointed out to his colleagues that they might have stumbled on some of the factors responsible for the numbers he presented at the original faculty meeting, and that these were clearly under their control. That is, perhaps if teachers did some things differently, the enrollment and achievement patterns in their school could be significantly improved.

Members of the study group went to work, beginning in their own classrooms. They made conscious efforts in their advanced classes to challenge all their students and to monitor their interactions with students of different racial and gender groups. And in their nonhonors classes, they tried to take special care to offer encouragement to their minority and lower-achieving students. Some of the teachers described what they were doing to their students to alert them to the issue and to enlist their help in changing the culture of the classroom.

In weekly meetings of the study group, members reported on these experiences. At first their discussions centered on how difficult it was to confront their own practices. But the environment was safe; they had committed themselves early in the project to honoring one another's efforts and not engaging in one-upmanship or criticism. Even so, the work was difficult.

Gradually, however, they were able to report some successes. These came slowly, of course, but they were real:

• In a class where the teacher had allowed the boys to interrupt the girls, that pattern changed. Interestingly, none of the students had been aware of the problem, but a videotape of the class had made the practice obvious. Once everyone was sensitized to the situation, the boys began to apologize when they interrupted the girls and learned to wait their turn to talk. Just as important, the girls began to stand their ground in class discussions.
• Girls in a physics class had held back during lab work, letting the boys handle the equipment while they kept the data. When the teacher specifically asked the girls to set up an experiment and the boys to record the data, he was confronted with a mutiny. The girls declined to do it: “We don't know how to do it! Can't the boys set it up?” But over time, the teacher was able to shift student perceptions; by the end of the year, the girls were as possessive of the lab equipment as the boys were.
• When the course selections for the next year were announced, the number of girls enrolled in AP physics jumped from 4 of 13 to 10 of 20. That is, both the absolute number of girls increased from 5 to 10 and the proportion of the total increased from 31 percent to 50 percent in a single year. By any measure, these are very rapid results.

After several months of these activities, Tom and his colleagues realized that their work was not finished. They asked for a slot on a full-staff meeting agenda to discuss their efforts and their findings with the entire faculty. They also asked for opportunities to share their findings with the middle and elementary school staffs. Eventually, other teachers across the district became interested in the project and began to take steps in their own classrooms. Over time, the results were significant. The participation and achievement rates gradually improved among minority students and, where needed, among girls. But everyone recognized that this issue of participation and achievement gap is a long-term one that would not be fixed overnight. Many teachers also saw implications for how they communicate with families; some students are convinced, sometimes from subtle signals from home, that academic rigor is not a possibility for them. But the project Tom initiated has, over time, had a profound impact on practice.

What Can the Profession Lear...