Building Great Teacher Leaders

Teacher leaders play a critical role in helping their peers apply new strategies, methods and programs. They can help schools move beyond “delivering professional development” to enabling continuous improvement in teaching practice. By providing day-to-day support to their peers, teacher leaders bridge the gap between learning new ideas and actually applying them in the classroom. In our last blog, we explored the role of the teacher leader. Now let’s take a closer look at how we build them.

Create a Culture of Leadership

The first step in building a successful program of teacher leadership is creating a culture that supports it. Schools with effective teacher leaders have a culture of shared responsibility for instructional leadership. It’s easy to see the difference when you look at these schools. In schools with a passive approach to professional development, teachers expect that all new knowledge and support will be passed down from above by instructional coaches or outside trainers. They do not see themselves as being responsible for critically interpreting or adapting new methods, or for providing their own insights or suggestions to their peers or to school or district leadership. In fact, they may actually feel discouraged from doing so. New initiatives in these schools tend to die out quickly after trainers and coaches have moved on. In a school with a culture of shared leadership responsibility, teachers are encouraged to take an active leadership role with their peers and provide feedback and ideas up the chain to school and district leadership. Teachers are recognized as experts in their field with valuable insights to share. Teacher leaders are seen by their peers as providers of helpful resources and support, and all teachers see value in shared planning and collaboration time. In these schools, teachers work together to ensure the success of new initiatives.

Build Time into the Day

Successful teacher leadership programs have defined times set aside for planning and collaboration. This time allows teacher leaders to work with their teams on an ongoing basis, checking in on progress, discussing challenges as they arise, and sharing ideas that have worked with each other. This model of ongoing shared learning is more effective than a “one and done” professional development session delivered by an outside expert. Teachers learn more in several 60 minute sessions spread out over time, with practice and application in between, than in a single 6-hour day of learning. A “blended model” of professional development, which combines independent technology-enabled learning with time for face-to-face collaboration and shared learning, may be the most effective model of all. In a Learning Forward survey on professional development, only 25% of teachers say that the majority of their professional development opportunities take place during school hours, and most teachers reported that they rarely had a chance to get actionable feedback in a classroom setting. A teacher leadership model, with formal time built in to the school day to support it, can flip this equation. In addition to providing shared collaboration periods, school leaders can support teacher leaders by providing occasional subs to allow teachers to observe one another in the classroom to learn from each other and provide feedback.

Pick the Right Leaders

In a teacher leadership model, there should be at least one teacher leader for each grade level or content area in the school. This leader commits to in-depth exploration of a new initiative, strategy or method, becoming an on-site expert who can help her team move from theory to classroom application. Teacher leaders are often the first to apply new ideas in their classrooms and share their insights and experiences with their peers. There may be one teacher leader on a team, or several leaders with different areas of expertise and responsibility. For example, one teacher on the team may be the expert in expository writing, another in strategies for English Language Learners, and a third in Thinking Maps implementation. Above all, teacher leaders must recognize and believe that what teachers do in the classroom makes a difference. It is the classroom teacher who has the greatest impact on student success. John Hattie, in his book Visible Learning, says “…the greatest effects on student learning occur when the teachers become learners of their own teaching and when students become their own teachers.” Teacher leaders are continually “becoming learners of their own teaching” and sharing these insights to help their peers do the same.