Leading through Following: Understanding the Intersection of Followership, Leadership and Collaboration

There is a popular saying around education that, "a bad principal can convince a teacher to leave a good school; while a good principal can convince a teacher to stay at a bad school." In a blog post titled Teachers Quit Principals, Not Schools, Barnes (2017) writes about teacher and administrator interactions and how those relationships effect personal decision-making and school climate. Both the popular educational saying and Barnes's writing, while not directly, speak to the relationship between leaders and followers and how that dynamic sometimes plays out in educational settings. Broadly speaking, the dynamic between leadership and followership is important, yet historically in education, only leadership has seen emphasis and examination.