Teacher Leadership in Action

You don’t need to be in education long to hear a lot of domain specific jargon.  One such term is teacher leadership. We can all assume what that is or why it’s important, but I maintain that it’s often misused or misunderstood as a term. The type of action required by this practice goes beyond surface level involvement on building committees. When fostered and implemented correctly teacher leadership can be transformational for a school community.

Over the past five years our school has aligned our building committees to better reflect our focus as a professional learning community. This year our school has a number of teams carefully designed to support our school-wide initiatives such as PLCs, PBIS, RtI, bully prevention, school climate, and instructional technology.  There were multiple examples of teacher leadership at our school on Wednesday beginning with the use of planning time. Earlier in the day our instructional coach shared a picture of staff members engaged in the instructional rounds process. Members of the science and social studies departments met during their planning time to complete rounds using our school-wide observation protocol.  Instructional rounds are completed by every staff member twice a month during planning time. The leadership team will complete school-wide rounds a couple times a year to work on our problems of practice. Although it requires a sacrifice of planning time, rounds are an important expression of shared leadership and collective inquiry at our school.  Members of the 6th grade English Language Arts department shared how they are using Google Apps for Education to coordinate their efforts, track student learning, and deliver on-the-spot intervention in the classroom. It takes courage and a healthy climate for teachers to share this information in a school-wide collaboration. Teacher leadership inspires us and pushes us to take action. The final event during Wednesday’s collaboration was inspiring and teacher-led.  This year marks the first year for our instructional technology team. Members of this team share a passion for transformational learning and have made a commitment to provide professional development once a month to their colleagues. Team members broke into small groups yesterday and led peers through a tutorial session on various apps or websites that can be used in the classroom. This was a powerful demonstration of teacher leadership and capacity building. These forms of teacher leadership inspire confidence, encourage risk taking, share governance, and make us better as a learning community.