Search

This article describes the Boston Teacher Leadership Certificate program created to expand teachers' capacity for teacher leadership roles. The professional learning was designed to strengthen teachers' leadership skills while also paying attention to whether and under what conditions they were more successful in their roles. To monitor the program's impact, the Boston Teacher Leadership Certificate program used four data routines: comparing pre-and post-course surveys, analyzing exit slips, reviewing online discussions, and looking together at student work. These routines supported collaborative inquiry, shared ownership for the quality of the work, and learning at all levels. At the end of the professional learning, 95% of course participants indicated that the course would improve their ability to have a positive impact on others' teaching practice, and 91% felt that the course would have a positive impact on their own teaching practice.

At Peters K-3 Elementary School in Garden Grove, California, teacher leadership and empowerment supported by professional learning from the district have led to increases in student outcomes and in parent and student satisfaction with the culture and climate of the school community. Peters demonstrates the impact that empowering staffs and communities can have in the service of high levels of learning for all students, no matter the odds. When schools view leadership and power as infinite, and when leadership is as much as a disposition as a position, staff and students can achieve any goal.

Teachers matter. Do our actions show that we believe this to be true? When treated as professionals and given the opportunity to participate in building and extending the profession, teachers rise to the occasion. Beyond Our Own Walls, a series of cross-school instructional rounds, was born out of a conversation that focused on what would happen if district leaders acted on the belief that teachers matter, and that building and developing the profession is everyone's responsibility. This article describes how school leaders in Colorado's Cherry Creek School District put words into actions by developing teachers' professional capital through the use of high-impact instructional rounds grounded in an appreciative inquiry approach that builds teacher capacity, develops sustainable teacher leadership, and increases student engagement.

This article describes a novel effort in New York City, the Learning Partners Program, which matches veteran principals with two or more newer ones. In 2014-15, the first full year of the effort, the city's Department of Education put 73 of the city's more than 1,800 schools into 23 groups of threes and one group of four. Every group comprised one host school and at least two partner schools. The hosts each had muscle in one or more of 16 focus areas that the city identified as crucial to improving education; the partner schools had to be seeking to improve in those areas. A key aspect of the effort is that a number of school staff members--not just principals, but assistant principals and teacher leaders, too--are involved. That means the program can enhance the skills of current principals while grooming the next generation as well. Another key facet of the program is that the 16 focus areas cover the gamut of what good principals should master, from developing teachers, to supporting struggling students, to using resources strategically, to promoting family engagement. Part of the funding for the program comes from The Wallace Foundation, a national philanthropy that supports efforts to develop effective school leadership.

This article presents a story about two school leaders in a large Southern California urban district who used skills developed in a university school leadership program to create rapport, empathy, and trust while leading through challenging situations and achieving actionable outcomes. In addition to developing relationships in support of collaboration, these leaders also changed the culture of their schools by intentionally impacting a shift in values from an existing state to a new desired state. Since values drive behaviors, shifting the values in their schools resulted in changes in behaviors that promote collaboration and student achievement. The two real-life scenarios are referred to as "The $250,000 Zinger" and "Cold Mountain Disaster."

When teachers who deeply understand the needs of their students and colleagues lead professional learning in their schools, everyone benefits. In this article, five educators and their perspectives on teacher leadership are featured. These educators have all taught low-income urban children in elementary grades for several years, but in different parts of the United States. They hold similar views on how schools can foster the development of teacher leaders, some key ways that teachers can lead professional learning for their colleagues, and the benefits and challenges of teacher leadership.

While people at all levels of education are talking about teacher leadership, few are talking about the bold type of leadership that puts teachers in charge of whole-school success. Many current forms of teacher leadership have teachers carrying out solutions that others have created. Rarely does teacher leadership involve teachers designing and implementing their own solutions to the most pressing challenges in education today. This is the type of teacher leadership that is demonstrated in teacher-powered schools. In over 75 schools across the United States, teachers are creating, implementing, and leading their own whole-school solutions, taking on the monumental task of transforming schools and the profession. Many of these schools started with teams of teachers stepping up to the challenges that arose in their local contexts. Since then, the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative--a joint effort of Education Evolving, an organization involved in school redesign, and Center for Teaching Quality--has identified many of the existing teacher-powered schools and begun to coalesce these efforts into a grassroots movement. For teacher-powered schools to succeed, teachers are going to need a variety of skills that traditionally they have not used. Collaborative management requires teachers to be able to work together to make decisions, while learning how to be a leader among leaders is likely unfamiliar to most teachers. Few teachers know how to conduct evaluations of their colleagues. Professional learning that develops and strengthens those skills will help teachers lead and create teacher-powered schools.

What happens when teachers are given funding and time to identify and develop targeted and innovative professional learning? This article focuses on lessons learned from grants funded through the California Department of Education that were designed to do just this. As the state and the nation consider the best approaches to professional learning for educators, it is important to understand how this model worked and how it might inform state and national policy and practice. Common Core implementation is requiring the development of new models of professional growth in order to provide teachers with the support and relevant experience necessary to build their skills and expertise. The grants were part of California's Teacher-Based Reform (T-BAR) program. The program's intent was to support teacher-driven professional development by allowing teachers to select professional learning that would meet their personal learning needs and be responsive to their local school context. Individual projects varied widely in subject area, targeted grade levels, and project details. The specific anticipated outcomes of each project also varied, although actionable professional learning enabling better support for student learning was a consistent theme. The findings reported in this article are based primarily on a survey, administered in fall 2014, to all 287 participating teachers in one of the state T-BAR regions. The authors also conducted a case study examination of three teacher teams to augment survey findings. Questions probed the extent to which teachers' T-BAR project influenced their own professional growth, collaboration, and engagement, and how what they learned and did impacted their students, schools, and districts.

In early November 2013, the authors started talking about visiting the Hurley School, a dual-language school in Boston, Massachusetts. The Hurley School had spent considerable time transitioning to the Common Core State Standards on literacy, but little time addressing the shifts in math. They worried that math classes were no longer rigorous enough to meet these more demanding standards. In this aritcle, a district math content specialist and a teacher leader use classroom observations to pinpoint strengths and challenges in math instruction, followed by common planning time that focuses learning around the results.

The rapidly changing world and the increasingly complex demands placed on schools because of that change has led to an increasing awareness that the school principal alone cannot provide all of the leadership necessary for school development. More and more school districts are asking teachers to share leadership responsibilities with school administrators. At the same time, even teacher leaders who are outstanding classroom teachers and committed to assisting their colleagues and renewing their schools still need their own professional learning in order to reach their leadership potential. The authors have identified 10 areas in which teacher leaders express that they need professional learning. Most of these needs cannot be taught to teacher leaders in a single, short-term program. Rather, these needs are met through ongoing professional learning. These 10 areas are described in this article.

When teachers collaborate in schools, taking collective responsibility to improve instruction and achieve goals, student performance improves and good results happen. Wyoming is one example of a state that uses peer-to-peer professional learning with notable results. Teachers joined together to form a statewide professional community and saw the reading scores on state assessments improved over a two-year period. Teachers who teach and learn from their peers not only practice the newly acquired knowledge in their classrooms, but also share with their peers. In Wyoming, participation was voluntary, and professional learning was held on weekends to avoid pulling teachers away from their classrooms. For certification and graduate credit, teachers extended their learning beyond the weekend, to better embed the content and pedagogy into routine practice. Wyoming educators realized that federal and state scrutiny on teacher effectiveness is intensifying so in this environment, it was critical that teachers have optimal opportunity to learn and grow together. Wyoming's program produced evidence of the success that peer-to-peer work brings to schools at the grade, school building, and state levels. The teachers preferred to learn with expert colleagues from their "small town," knowing that they were best served by the opportunity to learn from those teachers who work daily in classrooms and schools, who have proven success, whose work is authentic and worthy of emulation, who have deep content knowledge, and who artfully model their pedagogy for the benefit of their professional colleagues.

This article describes an initiative designed to improve the content-area literacy skills of all students at a Massachusetts high school and to demonstrate the important role teacher leaders play in bridging the various elements of school improvement efforts. Meeting students' language and literacy needs within content-area classrooms is becoming ever more challenging, thus, in 2012, the school called on university-based consultants to help teachers and leaders focus on disciplinary literacy instruction, exploring discipline-specific ways of reading, writing, and communicating. A multiyear professional learning initiative began that included four essential components: (1) Content-area teachers would apply to participate in discipline-based professional learning communities; (2) Faculty-elected teacher leaders would convene the professional learning communities and work collaboratively with each other; (3) A site-based project leader would be designated; and (4) University-level instructional coaches would act as outside consultants. Teacher leaders were essential to the project's early success because they served as bridges between various personnel and components in the project. Project evaluation work is underway to assess teacher and student learning for the first year, and qualitative data (interviews, focus groups, surveys, and student work) demonstrate that the work of teacher leaders is paying off. Students across departments are using similar interactive reading guides to scaffold close reading. By connecting the work of outside coaches to the effective professional learning community structures they built, teacher leaders have forged new connections within and across groups and are pivotal in making instructional experimentation not only possible, but also productive.

Most people are familiar with the practice of medical rounds, in which interns and mentoring physicians visit patients in an institutional setting, observe their various conditions, discuss what they observed, and analyze possible treatment options and outcomes. In the medical profession, making these rounds is viewed as a significant and highly important form of professional learning. While medical rounds for physicians and instructional rounds for teachers--called Teacher Rounds to distinguish it from the practice of rounds by administrators--are not precisely the same, the comparison is a shortcut way to begin thinking about what constitutes this kind of school-based professional learning. Teacher Rounds is a strategy many schools use as part of a comprehensive program for improving teaching and learning. Teacher Rounds is based on these core assumptions about what it takes to create a culture of professional growth and learning: (1) Teaching practice is best when it is public and collaborative; (2) Teaching is strongest when teachers collect data and act on it rather than rely on intuitive judgments; (3) Teachers who are self-reflective about their teaching are more effective teachers; (4) Significant improvements in teaching practice occur slowly, in small steps; and (5) Development of teacher leadership improves instruction. The practice of Teacher Rounds is professional learning that embodies all of these assumptions. This article describes the reasons why Teacher Rounds is so effective, how Teacher Rounds aligns with the Standards of Professional Learning and opens the door to the the Common Core State Standards, and provides detailed steps on how to implement the Teacher Rounds process.

Launched in 2007, the Teacher Learning and Leadership Program, out of Ontario, Canada, operates on the belief that classroom teachers know their learning needs and the needs of their students best. Additionally, the program assumes teachers have the greatest knowledge of how to build and foster multiple learning networks in order to share their expertise both within and beyond their schools. The Teacher Learning and Leadership Program allows experienced teachers to assume peer leadership roles in curriculum, instructional practice, and supporting other teachers. The three goals of the program are to: (1) Support experienced teachers in undertaking innovative, self-chosen professional learning in areas that are meaningful to them; (2) Foster teacher leadership; and (3) Facilitate the sharing of exemplary practices with others for the broader benefit of Ontario's students. The program and goals are discussed in this article.

Imagine, for a second, a school where teachers see themselves as leaders and work together to ensure that all children have access to engaging, high quality instruction every day. How might these teachers define teacher leadership and articulate its purpose? What suggestions would they offer about how teacher leadership can be grown and supported? What might these teacher leaders say about their reasons for choosing to participate in leadership work? The actions and reflections of the 4th-grade teacher team from McWhirter Elementary Professional Development Laboratory School in Webster, Texas, offer an inside look at the self-organizing system of team-based teacher leadership that stands ready to help transform schools.

There are two types of school leadership initiatives. One takes existing leaders and gives them increasing leadership responsibilities. The other engages in an organic process that grows leaders from a crop of teachers who, at first may not appear to be leaders at all. This article presents a story about the second type of initiative and how it ignited a literacy team that changed teacher practices and increased student learning.

This article provides snapshots of teacher leadership in action as one result of the Asheville (N.C.) City Schools Foundation Innovation Fellows program, an approach to providing high quality professional learning for the district's best teachers. With start-up funding from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation, this program was created to retain great teachers and lessen achievement gaps by directly connecting teacher learning and student outcomes. Fellowships are awarded on a competitive basis for teacher-directed action research. Over the last four years, the Asheville City Schools Foundation awarded more than $101,648 in fellowships to 70 teachers and three administrators. Projects spanned various disciplines, directly impacted students from kindergarten to 12th grade, and produced impressive student and teacher learning outcomes.

This article describes the role of the skillful leader and what practical solutions are needed to overcome hurdles. What distinguishes the skillful team leader from a less-effective leader is his or her approach to overcoming hurdles, and are rooted in the leader's values, mindset, intelligence, and skill. When faced with hurdles to team learning, the skillful team leader relies on their strong commitment to five foundational values: collaboration, shared leadership, goal setting and attainment, rigorous discourse, and continuous improvement. The skillful team leader will view hurdles as obstacles to overcome but also as windows into the complex world of school culture. The skillful team leader knows that addressing a problem specific to their team without a deep look at how school culture contributes will only give rise to the hurdle again. The skillful team leader not only works with their team to navigate around the hurdles that school culture gaps cause, but also works to close those gaps so all teams can succeed. Reflections from each hurdle encountered aids the skillful leader to better understand the complexity of leading, how to anticipate and avoid hurdles; and how to effectively respond.

This article describes a program instituted by the Northern Valley Schools (New Jersey, USA) Curriculum Consortium's Coaching Academy. This program was born in mid-2012 with the goal of building a cadre of instructional coaches who could provide increased classroom support for teachers to navigate 21st-century educational demands. Planning began with developing a common vision for a coaching structure that would be a growth model from the already established and embedded practice of coach-educators. New teachers are given the opportunity for embedded coaching, and veteran teachers are embarking on a new level of teacher leadership. Participants engaged in three consecutive days of learning, with the overall goal to build understanding about the why, what, and how of coaching. Teacher Leader Model Standards, were created as guides for experienced teachers to assume leadership roles. To ensure success, coaches need to participate in formal learning as well as informal peer-to peer meetings. Professional development for administrators is also key to effective implementation. Coaching has proven to be a powerful, sustained professional learning experience for everyone involved.

The "Boston Teacher Leadership Certificate" program was designed in 2010 to build Boston's teachers to be stronger professional resources for one another, their schools, and district reform. The program's key strategy has been supporting experienced teacher leaders to design and facilitate graduate-level leadership development courses for their peers. To date, more than 100 teacher leaders holding roles such as team leader, content coach, data facilitator, or mentor have participated in this teacher-led professional learning to build the leadership skills needed to be effective in these roles. Program participants completed an online exit slip at the end of every course session. In addition to providing feedback on context, process, and content of each session the exit slips provided an opportunity for participants to think about what might make it easy or hard to put their skills to use in their schools. Analyzing data gathered from the spring 2011 to fall 2012 sessions, program leaders saw clear patterns emerging in the contextual conditions teacher leaders perceived as critical to their effectiveness. Four conditions were evident in their responses: a common vision of shared leadership, clarity around authority, trust, and time. The Boston Teacher Leadership Certificate program leaders used what they learned from teacher leaders to create a series of discussion guides designed to generate productive, focused conversations among school leadership teams, administrators, and teacher leaders together. These guides can support teacher leaders, their principals, and the other leaders with whom they work to discuss and take action toward creating conditions that maximize leadership capacity.

To improve the quality of instruction and the achievement of all students, effective school leaders develop capacity, advocate, and create support systems for professional learning. Creating a team of teachers to share leadership, responsibility, and accountability for achieving collective goals is essential. This was the task of a first-time principal and his staff at an Elementary in Sedalia, Colorado, south of Denver. In 2010, the school scored below the district average across the board, and at or below the state average in grades 3-6. The principal wanted to transform the culture of the school into one of high expectations and shared responsibility, aligning all professional learning to a continuous improvement process, but he had to convince the staff of the importance of sharing leadership and accepting change. The first step in developing shared leadership was to identify a process and criteria to select a school team that represented the rest of the school staff. The next step was identifying the right structures and processes to guide them. Clearly defined were two functions of the leadership team: (1) their role to lead the school forward in student achievement and (2) their responsibility for leading the development, implementation, and monitoring of the school improvement plan. The results of the shared leadership responsibilities was reflected in the next year as students in grades 4-6 showed improvement in their proficiency and advanced scores on the state writing assessment. The leadership team continues to learn how to monitor the implementation and effectiveness of improvement strategies, and the staff continues to implement writing initiatives.

New educator evaluation systems demand a focus on effective teaching and learning while promoting the professional growth of all teachers. By identifying and leveraging the contributions of high-performing teachers as instructional leaders, problem solvers, and decision-makers to lead improvement at the classroom level, the system builds capacity for quality practice at all levels and builds internal expertise. This article describes a collaborative relationship in practice since 2012, between Learning Forward's Center for Results 12 high-profile school systems, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded network, called the "Supporting Effective Teaching Knowledge Development Initiative." The 12 partnership districts have spent the past two years building, modifying, and enhancing the roles and responsibilities of teacher leaders to strengthen the quality of school culture, improve the practice of teaching, and foster a deep commitment to professional growth. The 12 sites participating in the initiative found that it is imperative that teacher leaders be provided sufficient time to engage successfully with the work they are doing, have access to continuous content-based learning, engage with peers to share learning and reflect on successes and challenges, and receive regular feedback that guides revisions to their practice. The article also includes a "Guiding Questions on Teacher Leadership" to begin a discussion on leveraging the knowledge and skills of teacher leaders.

The idea of teacher leadership holds an immense and intuitive appeal. Most educators agree that teacher leaders are essential to fostering a climate of authentic and robust leadership and learning across a school. Teacher leadership is peer leading at its most authentic, demanding, and empowering. While the value of teacher leadership may be obvious, the path to realizing successful teacher leadership is not. That path is particularly rocky for educators pressured with the demands of transforming a chronically low-performing school into a high-achieving one. Simply placing an effective teacher in a role of leadership does not automatically make him or her a leader. Teachers who have developed competence in the classroom have not necessarily developed competence in leading adults as learners or in leading systemic change in their schools. Emerging teacher leaders need sustained, intentional training and development targeted specifically to leadership development. In short, teacher leaders need support, too. This article describes the Teach Plus T3 Initiative (Turnaround Teacher Teams) that was created by teachers to address the issue of attracting and retaining high-performing teachers in chronically low-performing schools. T3 recruits, develops, and supports teams of experienced teachers--teachers with a track record of success with urban students--to teach and lead in their schools and ultimately accelerate student learning across the school.

Rural schools face challenges that are very different from their urban or suburban counterparts. Fewer resources supporting rural schools mean smaller staffs and larger responsibilities for everyone. At the same time, rural schools and districts must meet the same standards as their larger, better-funded counterparts. One key to making the most of meager resources is to develop teacher leaders who can share their expertise with student, fellow teachers, and administrators alike. The recommendations outlined in this article illustrate that teacher leaders are an invaluable resource for rural schools.

Education researchers frequently seek out districts, schools, and teachers as partners for professional learning projects. They share their ambitious vision--a new model of professional learning that will support an empowered community, instructional improvement, and student achievement. The authors, along with other members of their research team, designed and piloted a model of mathematics professional development called the problem-solving cycle. At its core, the problem-solving cycle provides a focus and structure to school-based professional development, such as professional learning communities. Beginning in fall 2008, researchers partnered with administrators in the Cherry Creek School District in Centennial, Colo., to implement the problem-solving cycle in the district's middle schools. Results of the implementation of the problem-solving cycle are discussed.

Establishing school-based professional learning appears so simple and straightforward during inspiring presentations at summer workshops, but keeping collaborative work focused on teaching and learning in such a way that it produces consistent results is a highly underestimated task. Investigations and experience from a group of researchers at the University of California Los Angeles and Stanford University suggest that the likelihood of maintaining such focus and coherence might be significantly increased when there is a clear system of dedicated settings and assistance for each level of leadership and learning--teacher teams, teacher leaders, and administrators. A firmly established system of cascading settings and assistance links is perhaps the most important distinction of successful schools and districts the research team has studied over the last two decades. These schools have solidified nonnegotiable times and places for learning and continuous improvement. Ongoing support for these settings is intentionally provided over a period of years so that teachers and administrators can jointly persist with identified learning goals until they begin to see results.

A clear vision is the essential foundation for making decisions about precious resources for implementing professional learning: (1) people; (2) time; and (3) money. The Auburn School District in Washington state learned firsthand how a clear vision drives resource allocation to support strategic actions and how effective partnerships can be the best solution when internal resources are not available. In collaboration with the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession, Auburn aims to impact student learning by developing teachers' instructional leadership skills. After just one year of a new initiative, 50 teacher leaders are transforming teacher and student learning through professional learning communities as well as transforming district culture.

Four years ago, a group of teachers lingered after a district meeting, sharing a conversation about encouraging social responsibility in the school district of Tenafly, New Jersey. That conversation led to the eventual formation of a teacher study group, a grassroots professional learning community that has impacted its members and the school district. Teachers find they are energized when they participate in the teacher study group focused on social responsibility. The group members' experiences offer some lessons about organic professional development and the role of teacher leaders within and beyond traditional district roles.

Instructional teacher leaders strive to help teachers build knowledge and skills to improve teaching practice. With titles such as coach or coordinator, they may receive a stipend or released time from teaching. Instructional teacher leaders rely on an array of strategies to improve instruction and enhance student learning. They conduct professional development workshops, co-plan and model lessons, observe teaching and provide feedback, collect and analyze data, facilitate dialogue and reflective critique, and promote shared practices among teachers. Despite the designation as leader, the instructional teacher leader's role is nonsupervisory. Teacher leaders do not evaluate teachers to determine performance-based promotions or sanctions. By maintaining their status as peers rather than supervisors, teacher leaders gain teachers' trust. The logic follows that teachers who trust the teacher leader will seek advice and assistance. The nonsupervisory nature of the teacher leader role creates a paradoxical challenge for the teacher leader. In an effort to gain teachers' trust, teacher leaders deemphasize their status as experts and avoid delivering hard feedback about teaching practice. Yet these actions ultimately undermine the work of improving instruction. How can the teacher leader be both a trusted colleague and a resource for instructional improvement? Making teacher leadership an effective tool for improving instructional practice depends on resolving this paradox. It requires a reconceptualization of the role, placing the teacher leader's expert knowledge at the center of the work. It also requires a school culture that embraces evaluation, collaboration, dialogue, and deprivatization as vital to the instructional improvement process.

Leadership by teachers is essential to serving the needs of students, schools, and the teaching profession. To that end, the Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium has developed Teacher Leader Model Standards to codify, promote, and support teacher leadership as a vehicle to transform schools for the needs of the 21st century. The Teacher Leader Model Standards can be used to guide the preparation of experienced teachers to assume leadership roles such as resource providers, instructional specialists, curriculum specialists, classroom supporters, learning facilitators, mentors, school team leaders, and data coaches. They can also serve to reinforce the role of higher education in preparing preservice teachers to become members of professional learning communities and develop critical skills of inquiry, communication, and facilitation. This article describes the knowledge base needed by the teacher leader in order to meet the performance expectations related to each domain. The functions then describe in more detail key actions and practices related to each domain. It is not expected that an individual teacher leader should or could embody the many dimensions of teacher leadership outlined in the teacher leader model standards. There are many contexts in which teachers can assume leadership roles, and hopefully the Teacher Leader Model Standards will help expand opportunities for leadership within the teaching profession.

Throughout the past two decades, Boston Public Schools has seen strong, steady improvement, recently demonstrated through student gains on NAEP's Trial Urban District Assessment in math and recognized through the award of the 2006 Broad Prize for Urban Education. Teacher leaders have played an important role in Boston's improvement. As team leaders, mentors, and members of instructional leadership teams, for example, teacher leaders have helped to strengthen teaching by leading collaborative teams, supporting colleagues' professional learning, and facilitating data-driven decision making. The Boston Teacher Leadership Certificate capitalizes on the expertise of Boston's experienced teacher leaders to bolster the system's capacity to accelerate learning for all students. Since effective teaching is essential for students' academic growth, it only makes sense that effective teachers would be important assets to improving student learning in a school or district. Yet effective teachers are not necessarily effective in formal teacher leadership roles. Teacher leadership roles, which teachers and administrators design to contribute in a deliberate way to improved teaching and learning, require a range of knowledge and skills beyond those required for effective teaching. The Boston Teacher Leadership Certificate program is unique from other programs that support teachers to build teacher leadership skills in three important ways. First, the courses it comprises are designed to strengthen the specific knowledge and skills needed in Boston, ensuring teachers' capacity-building efforts connect directly with district needs. Second, the certificate benefits from a partnership among the district, the local education fund, and local institutions of higher education. This collaboration enables teachers to earn graduate credits for participating in high-quality, role-relevant professional learning. Lastly, experienced teacher leaders are the designers and instructors for the certificate's core courses to ensure that the certificate meets the demands of participants' work.

The "culture of nice" is the underlying culture that inhibits a team of teachers from reaching a level of rigorous collaborative discourse where teachers are challenging each other's and their own thinking, beliefs, assumptions, and practice. This article discusses how honest discourse can be the key to shifting school culture. The act of analyzing student work, like discussing other sensitive topics such as race or student equity, requires teacher leaders to foster a vulnerability-based trust. Teachers must be willing to expose their struggles and failures with their colleagues, and colleagues must be willing to tell the truth, or teams will go through the motions of collaborative inquiry but never see results. Through skillful facilitation, the teacher leader can unearth cultural issues that lie beneath the surface and stand in the way of change. If a team collaborates without addressing and working to shift the culture of nice, the teacher leader puts the team at risk of gaining no insight into its own practice, obtaining no results (or unsustainable results) for students, going through the motions of collaboration, and ultimately dismissing the process as a waste of time. While no one has the power to make a person or group change thinking and behaviors, teacher leaders who recognize the signs of a dysfunctional culture, respond proactively and in the moment, and follow up after a team collaborates can initiate moments that move the team beyond the culture of nice.

Teachers are leaders when they function in professional learning communities to affect student learning, contribute to school improvement, inspire excellence in practice, and empower stakeholders to participate in educational improvement. From an equity perspective, teachers also lead when they serve as change agents who collaborate to use equity-based approaches to meet the needs of diverse learners and to build on the strengths of their colleagues. In both definitions, teacher leadership is inseparable from empowerment as teachers need to be empowered to lead and supported to sustain their efforts. The five-stage empowerment trajectory is a framework for sustaining teacher leadership development programs. Researchers developed the framework as a result of a study focused on the ways in which teacher leaders in the Urban Teacher Leadership Academy collaborated to recognize and challenge deficit thinking, and the influence they had on their colleagues' thinking. This article discusses the five stages: (1) enabling; (2) exploring; (3) evolving; (4) engaging others; and (5) energizing others.

Teacher leaders are vital to establishing a collaborative school culture that fosters continuous improvement of teaching and student achievement. Over the last seven years, Learning Forward's support of teacher leaders has focused more on teachers who support their colleagues by serving in one or more of many roles with one of many diverse job titles. A fundamental belief underlying Learning Forward's work is the importance of collective responsibility. This belief acknowledges that no school or system will succeed based on the leadership of a single hero leader. Deep change requires that all parties within a school or school system work collaboratively and productively to realize results for every student. In "The Learning Educator: A New Era for Professional Learning," Stephanie Hirsh and the author (2007) describe eight principles that guide effective professional development. This article discusses three of these principles which serve as the foundation for teacher leadership: (1) leadership; (2) expertise; and (3) collaboration.

The Partnership for Reform in Secondary Science and Mathematics (PRiSSM) is a three-year project that targeted mathematics and science teachers in middle and high schools from six districts in southwest Washington. Consistent with NSDC (2009) recommendations for professional development, PRiSSM involved collaborative teacher teams in reflecting on and discussing content goals and student learning data to improve practice. Based on the authors' ongoing work with PRiSSM teachers and administrators, they have identified five important considerations essential to maximizing the potential of teacher collaborations around content-specific learning objectives. In this article, the authors discuss these five considerations: (1) Teacher-defined inquiry focus; (2) Principal involvement; (3) Benefits of single-disciplined learning communities; (4) Supporting research skills and content-specific discussions about student learning data; and (5) Teacher leaders as facilitators.

Much has been written about the value, need, and complexity of differentiating learning within every classroom based on student readiness, motivation and interest, apparent skills, learning preferences or styles, and identified cognitive needs. Teachers are encouraged to look at differentiation for students not as a formula for teaching, but rather as a way of thinking about and shaping the learning experiences of all. Differentiation does not dilute content, add to content, or change content. Rather, it presents content in differing ways with necessary adjustments to pave each learner's way to successful learning. Differentiation guarantees all learners the opportunity to succeed. If districts intend to add value to professional development, they must consider the power of differentiation for teacher learning. This article describes a differentiated model of professional development which consists of three steps: "I do," "we do," and "you do." The "I do" step of demonstration and expectation provides the modeling that offers teachers a common springboard from which to launch a learning process. The "we do" step of approximation and response personalizes the learning through joint practice and coaching support that ultimately results in the "you do" step of responsibility and independent practice. To be successful with this model, teacher leaders/coaches must experience the learning necessary to develop the coaching skills that they will need to support their colleagues.

A few years ago, the authors began to consider how to foster more intentional teacher leadership development among all clinical teachers who mentor teacher candidates in their Professional Development Schools. A Professional Development School (PDS) is an in-depth school-university partnership designed to bring about the simultaneous renewal of schools and teacher education programs as an educational reform approach to increasing teacher quality. In this article, the authors narrate how they were challenged to develop innovative ways that online learning communities could foster collaboration, support, and learning, especially for novice teachers, in order to break the isolationist nature of the profession. For years, they have faced challenges of time, money, capacity, and contractual issues in providing high-quality systemic professional learning for clinical teachers. Carrying the PDS approach into the 21st century, clinical teachers formed an innovative online community intended to not only increase clinical teachers' mentoring skills, but to also provide them with a pathway to seeing themselves as teacher leaders. A framework for clinical teachers as teacher leaders is presented.

In the North Middlesex Regional School District, located in north central Massachusetts near the New Hampshire border, teachers knew that the district had urgent challenges. Isolated programs provided rigor to only some students, student achievement scores showed room for improvement, and a recent accreditation review had raised questions about the high school's scheduling, teaching techniques, and time on learning. The large high school was not seen as a welcoming place by parents and students. With such pressing needs in the district, the leadership team was confident that the solution lay in instructional improvement. In addition to the instructional improvement possibilities, the team knew that creating teacher leaders could help improve teacher empowerment, morale, and motivation. However, the district recognized that it had neither the capacity nor the experience with developing teacher leaders to provide training to teachers for these roles, as well as to prepare school leaders and the rest of the faculty for the changes these new roles would create in their work. The leadership team recognized that it would be worthwhile to invest some of its limited resources in outside help for this initiative to distribute instructional leadership and build capacity. After consultation with teachers and leaders throughout the district and with support from Teachers21, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization promoting educational research, policy, and practice for a comprehensive approach to professional learning, the leadership team set about creating a system that could sustain teachers' ongoing, job-embedded professional learning to lead to instructional improvement, professional renewal, and success for all students. This article describes how external partners facilitated the growth of the district's instructional leaders through sustained learning opportunities and collaborative communities.

Never before has the need been so great for classroom teachers to become agents of change and position themselves as problem solvers at the school building level. Teachers are uniquely positioned to assume leadership roles on a variety of tasks that could transform schools from more traditional workplaces into professional learning communities. Schools' most complex problems are best solved by those working in them daily and grappling with the challenging issues first-hand. Teachers' daily experiences foster an inside view of what can be done. This inside advantage allows school-based teacher leaders to more creatively and often more quickly design solutions that get to the core of a school's problem long before an outsider has had time to review and assess what the school may need. In this article, the author discusses how teachers can assume leadership roles that will effect positive change in how other teachers teach, how all students learn, and how a professional learning community operates.

Whether by design or by chance, superintendents communicate their beliefs about what is important educationally and the roles they expect their principals to fulfill. Superintendents who champion the development of their principals as instructional leaders begin by establishing common understandings with them about why principals' instructional leadership is necessary for school success. They reinforce this by actively providing support for their principals to develop and refine their effectiveness as instructional leaders. This article describes how one district superintendent in Phelps-Clifton Springs (New York) leads the way in providing professional learning opportunities for school principals.

To increase student achievement, schools and districts are hiring teachers as leaders to support peers in improving teaching and learning. Their roles are variously called coach, school-based staff developer, instructional specialists, or program facilitator. Yet though many have exceptional teaching skills, they seldom have a deep understanding of working with adult learners, facilitating professional learning, and taking a broad view of the educational system. For coaches to be successful in their work and to contribute to improving teaching and student academic success, they depend on key stakeholders--associations, state agencies, districts, schools, and principals. This paper presents a discussion of the support these stakeholders provide to school-based coaches. Providing appropriate support helps school-based coaches transition from teachers of students to leaders of teacher learning. As leaders responsible for providing intensive support to their colleagues, school-based coaches are better equipped for success in this new role if they, too, have ample support. (Contains 2 resources.)

If principals expect to reap the full benefits of having teacher leaders in coaching positions, they should create working conditions that encourage positive relationships, reduce risks, and provide leadership development. To take full advantage of school-based coaches, principals must provide them with appropriate support. This paper discusses the eight strategies principals can employ to encourage and support school-based coaches: (1) Collaboratively build and monitor an action plan; (2) Negotiate the relationship; (3) Be available; (4) Provide access to human and fiscal resources; (5) Maintain the focus on instructional leadership; (6) Help maintain balance to avoid overload; (7) Protect the coach's relationships with peers; and (8) Provide leadership development opportunities. These eight strategies help create a context in which a school-based coach can thrive and help build leadership capacity among all professional staff.

The National Staff Development Council (NSDC) has won recognition for the field of professional development. Researchers and education change agents acknowledge the importance of professional learning among strategies essential for reforming schools and raising teacher and student performance. The federal government, states, and school districts are spending more money for professional development than at any time in history. Professional learning communities are all the rage. Within the past five years, a completely new category of educators has emerged: professional developers at the school site who partner with and coach classroom teachers in improving their practice. While these are major achievements, thousands of educators still either have not heard or have not understood the message that if schools are to increase the performance levels of all students, all educators must experience high-quality professional learning as part of their daily work. These educators are easy to identify by their ideas and words. In this article, the author discusses how proponents of high-quality professional learning should think about the future of the field: (1) Develop a definition; (2) Examine values; (3) Own the field; (4) Determine "how" professional development occurs; and (5) Spell it out.

In this article the author, discusses how the National Writing Project (NWP) prepares participating teachers for leadership roles by demonstrating their most effective classroom practices, studying research, and improving their knowledge of writing by becoming writers themselves. NWP prepares teachers to articulate and interrogate their practice in a way that benefits a room full of colleagues. Its three main structures--teaching demonstration, writing and response groups, and reading groups--are intended to generate and build knowledge and community among participants.

Teachers and administrators of Ogden Elementary School (Ogden, Kansas) had a problem--the school had had a pattern of poor student performance at least since 1991, when the Kansas State Assessment was implemented. Ogden had failed to reach the state standard of excellence (25% of tested students scoring in the "exemplary" category; 5% or fewer scoring "unsatisfactory"; scores meeting or exceeding an established distribution) in all areas for a decade, and the school consistently had scored lower than all other elementary schools in its district. Teacher leaders in the school contacted mathematics educators at Kansas State University, seeking assistance through professional development opportunities for their teachers. In 2001, staff developed and began implementing an action plan, collaborating with university faculty and other professional developers. In 2003, 4th graders at Ogden Elementary School significantly increased their performance on the state assessment test. The rise in student achievement was a result of the changing culture within the school and teachers applying teaching philosophies they focused on in their professional learning. This article describes the three types of professional development that teachers took part in to lift student achievement: (1) book studies; (2) demonstration lessons; and (3) model lessons.

This article presents the seven-faceted design for districts to engage and develop aspiring school leaders. These are: (1) Growing teacher leaders: Whose job is it anyway?; (2) A resource rich in leadership opportunities: Where is there more work to be done than in a school?; (3) Beware of silos; (4) We're all in this together; (5) Staff developers offer valuable assistance; (6) NSLP supports; and (7) Useful paperwork: The Leadership Resume.

How do principals get teachers past isolation to create a top school? Principals must create a web of leadership, a nonhierarchical structure of authority and control. While they remain at the center, they are supported only when they learn to delegate. Teachers learn to take on leadership roles, creating a more vested interest and lessening the stress for all.

Teacher leadership is an idea whose time has come. True teacher leadership is exercised spontaneously and may be demonstrated by any teacher in the school. Allowing teachers leadership responsibility can transform a school. School leaders, including staff developers, can help support the development of teacher leaders by practicing the ideas presented here.

Profound change in school begins with profound change in leaders that radiates to others and into the system. Profound change requires more than structural change--it requires changing the brains of teachers and administrators. Creating such change requires that leaders think, speak, and act differently on a daily basis, clarifying their ideas and values in important areas and communicating them clearly.

Describes how a change to teacher leadership made a big difference for one diverse urban high school. Guiding principles included: the principal is the formal leader, but leadership is everyone's responsibility, and every professional is included in monitoring the renewal process. Staff learned that: change must address real needs, teacher-principal relationships are critical, and lots of encouragement is helpful. (SM)