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Cultivating Teacher Leaders is Crucial
(Hartford, CT) Exemplary teacher leaders are skilled at matching instructional practices to students’ learning, utilizing cutting-edge curriculum and thought-provoking content and resources and collaborating with and leading their colleagues. They also engage in continuous improvement to engender student learning and work closely with principals to enrich student learning and increase achievement.
Charlotte Danielson, an internationally-recognized expert in the area of teacher effectiveness, says teacher leaders and principals can engage in several actions to help students. These include taking initiative when an opportunity arises, enlisting colleagues to focus on common goals, finding and obtaining resources to support goals, and monitoring, adapting, and adjusting actions as needed. They can also make evidence-based and data-based decisions, support colleagues as they focus on goals, and face and deal with pessimism.
There are formal and informal teacher leaders in every school. Some teacher leaders emerge, while others are identified by school principals to be teacher leaders. Either way, how do principals create and sustain a culture for teacher leaders?
Principals can cultivate teacher leaders by creating and sustaining a culture of risk taking. They can institute democratic norms, respect the professionalism of teachers, provide opportunities for teachers to become involved in decision making, elicit and act on teacher ideas, support collaboration by changing schedules, and ensure professional learning opportunities to all teachers. As Marilyn Katzenmeyer and Gayle Moller succinctly state in “Awakening the Sleeping Giant,” “Within every school there is a sleeping giant of teacher leadership, which can be a strong catalyst for making change.”
To support teacher leadership, CREC offers various workshops. During these workshops, teacher leaders develop essential competencies that are based on Teacher Leader Exploratory Consortium’s Teacher Leader Model Standards. Candidates will also be provided with content that will increase their understanding of facilitation skills and protocols, adult learning theory, working with diverse faculty members, instructional coaching, data analysis, and presentation skills. For more information, contact Ellen Retelle, director of CREC’s Institute of Teaching and Learning, at eretelle@crec.org.
