Leadership is the ability to influence the activities of an
individual or group toward the achievement of a goal. The definition has
evolved from the idea of a leader being a born leader or simply "one who
leads" to a more complex view of how a person exerts influence.
For example, leaders can be influential as task-oriented leaders
or relationship-oriented leaders. The task-oriented leader excels at
establishing well-defined patterns of organization, channels of communication,
and ways of getting tasks accomplished. The relationship-oriented leader, on
the other hand, leads by maintaining personal relationships between members of
the group by opening up communication, providing emotional support and using
facilitating behaviors.
Both task-oriented and relationship-oriented leaders are necessary
for effective group functioning, but the leadership abilities of either one of
these leaders may go unnoticed if the definition of leadership used by the
schools is too one-dimensional.
Another helpful dichotomy for identifying and nurturing leadership
abilities of gifted and talented students is that of the active versus the
reflective leader. The active leader exerts influence over the group through
the force of his or her personality. Political, community, or student council
leaders are examples of active leaders.
The reflective leader, on the other hand, is influential through
the force of his or her ideas. Thus, while Einstein may never have campaigned
for office, he is a leader because of the influence of his ideas. Students
gifted in any of the talent areas have the potential to lead by contributing
influential ideas to their chosen fields.
While no single best definition of leadership exists, teachers
working with gifted and talented students may use these broadened notions of
leadership to identify the strengths and weaknesses of students as the
framework for an intervention program. As with creativity and thinking
abilities, leadership skills can be developed and honed through training
programs.
DEFINING TEACHER LEADERSHIP
Most of the researchers involved in exploring the concept of
teachers as leaders agree that it is distinctly different from administrative
or managerial concepts of leadership. Various studies indicate that effective
teacher leadership involves a move away from top-down, hierarchical modes of
functioning and a move toward shared decision-making, teamwork, and community
building (Alvaredo, 1997; Coyle, 1997).
Several models have emerged for developing teacher leaders. For example, the National Writing Project (NWP) promotes a leadership model of teachers growing professionally by sharing their best practices with peers and with diverse audiences at professional conferences, through journal publications, and through the design of teacher workshops and institutes. A similar program, IMPACT II, funded by the MetLife Foundation, awards grants for exemplary teacher projects and creates networking opportunities.
Several models have emerged for developing teacher leaders. For example, the National Writing Project (NWP) promotes a leadership model of teachers growing professionally by sharing their best practices with peers and with diverse audiences at professional conferences, through journal publications, and through the design of teacher workshops and institutes. A similar program, IMPACT II, funded by the MetLife Foundation, awards grants for exemplary teacher projects and creates networking opportunities.
The majority seem to agree that teacher leaders:
* Demonstrate expertise in their instruction and share that
knowledge with other professionals,
* Are consistently on a professional learning curve,
* Frequently reflect on their work to stay on the cutting edge of
what's best for children,
* Engage in continuous action research projects that examine their
effectiveness,
* Collaborate with their peers, parents, and communities, engaging
them in dialogues of open inquiry/action/assessment models of change,
* Become socially conscious and politically involved,
* Mentor new teachers,
* Become more involved at universities in the preparation of
pre-service teachers, and
* Are risk-takers who participate in school decisions.
In addition, several studies indicate that one of the most
significant developmental skills is for teachers to become active researchers
in their classrooms and schools. For all of these qualities to be sustained,
however, many argue that a shift in governance needs to take hold, embracing
the idea of teachers as equal partners in leadership. Researchers insist that
teachers are too often left out of the loop of leadership in their schools;
and, all too often, if given leadership roles, lack the skills that will make
them successful as leaders (Sherrill, 1999; Zimpher and Howey, 1992). Many
teachers need encouragement from administrators and colleagues to shift from
their perception of isolation into recognition of themselves as active
contributors in a larger context, outside classroom walls.
HOW TEACHERS LEAD
There
have long been formal leadership roles for teachers as department chairs, team
leaders, and a variety of other positions, but titles are less important than
actually functioning as effective change-agents. Teachers participating in a
National Teacher Forum (Paulu, 1998) characterized teachers as exhibiting
leadership by:
1. Participating in professional teacher organizations, including
holding positions of influence.
2. Taking part in school decisions, including working on teams
with administrators to plan school improvements.
3. Defining what students need to know and be able to do,
including developing standards for curriculum and assessments.
4. Sharing ideas with colleagues, including leading professional
development programs for colleagues.
5. Being a mentor to new teachers.
6. Helping to make personnel decisions, including the hiring of
new teachers and administrators
7. Improving facilities and technology.
8. Working with parents, including the development of better links
between schools and homes.
9. Creating partnerships with the community, including working
with communities to improve the schools.
10. Creating partnerships with business and organizations, taking
the lead in forming partnerships.
11. Creating partnerships
with colleges and universities to prepare future teachers.
12. Becoming leaders in the
community.
13. Becoming politically involved,
including running for elected to offices, testifying before state legislatures,
working on political campaigns, or serving on education advisory boards that
report to the governor or the state department of education.
14. Leading efforts to make
teachers more visible and communicate positive information.
This is a rather long list
of specific ways that teachers exhibit leadership, but is there a more succinct
way of characterizing the essential nature of leadership in education? After
interviewing 43 educational leaders, Goldberg (2001) reported five
commonalities that stood out among those he interviewed:
1. A bedrock belief that
what they are doing is good and important.
2. The courage to swim
upstream, persevering in their beliefs in the face of resistance or criticism.
3. A social conscience,
particularly on issues of racism and poverty.
4. A seriousness of purpose,
holding high standards and devoting years of sustained involvement in their
causes.
5. Situational mastery, the
happy marriage of personal skills and accomplishment.
This last characteristic is one that
makes it impossible to specify a generic set of skills or understandings that
one needs to become a leader in education. Leadership in education is very
situational, and those who would lead must develop their leadership style to
match the context of their sphere of influence.
WHAT ARE THE COMPONENTS OF A
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM?
A comprehensive leadership
development program can be developed around the following components:
--Knowledge: historical
study of leaders, qualities of leaders, theories of leadership, leadership
styles
--Skills: organization and
delegation, problem solving, shared leadership, communication, futuristic
thinking, decision making, conflict resolution, goal setting, group dynamics,
divergent thinking, time management
--Attitudes: self-confidence
as a leader, flexibility, social and moral responsibility, sensitivity to
others, enthusiasm, sense of commitment
Profiles of individual
student strengths and weaknesses in these areas can help the teacher in
refining the focus of the intervention program. Leadership training typically
occurs in a group context, but gifted and talented students benefit from
setting and developing individual goals related to leadership knowledge,
skills, and attitudes
Developing Teachers' Leadership
Skills.
There have long been teacher
leaders in schools. They have traditionally accepted positions as department
chairs, team and grade leaders, curriculum committee chairs, and more. With the
advent of school and teacher education restructuring efforts, new leadership
roles are emerging (Lieberman & Miller, 1990). Whether taking on
traditional or emerging roles, a major characteristic of teacher leaders is
that they often teach full- or part-time and then assume other responsibilities
(Howey, 1988). An additional characteristic is that they have generally learned
the new role just by doing it.
A more systematic approach
to developing the requisite skills for assuming leadership roles may be
helpful. Whether or not a teacher takes on a formal leadership position, the
acquisition of these skills may serve to enhance performance in the
classroom.
EMERGING OPPORTUNITIES FOR
LEADERSHIP
Beginning Teacher Assistance
Programs
Programs such as those
developed in Ohio (Zimpher, 1988) and in California require the identification
of experienced master teachers to work with beginners. These
"mentors" must be able to provide not only good role modeling, but
also offer the kinds of help necessary to establish the beginners as competent
professionals. They must know about teaching children AND about teaching
adults; they must have a level of expertise that goes beyond being a comforter
and a source of practical information.
School-Centered Decision
Making
School-centered decision
making, also known as site-based management, has been variously interpreted
(Sirotnik & Clark, 1988), but in its most authentic form it requires strong
teacher involvement in decisions about structures and programs in their
schools. School districts that have moved to decentralize decision making have
discovered that teachers with conflict resolution and communications skills are
more effective. Also helpful is an understanding of the school district's
organization and knowledge of the state and federal education scene.
Professional Development
Schools (PDS)
Professional development
schools call for an array of new teacher leader roles. These PDSs, jointly
created by schools and universities (Holmes, 1990), propose to serve as the
locus for teacher preparation, career-long professional development, and school
innovation and inquiry. Teacher leaders will be called on to demonstrate skills
required in mentoring programs and school-based management, as well as skills
related to a wide array of peer helping approaches, inquiry methods, innovation
leadership, and school-university collaboration.
LEARNING LEADERSHIP SKILLS
In the past, teacher
leaders' successes or failures were due more to context, previous experience,
and personal characteristics than to any formal effort to provide them with
appropriate leadership skills. Teachers have been expected to have the
necessary skills on entry into leadership positions, or to develop them on the
job.
Lieberman, Saxl, and Miles
(1988), in hopes of offering guidance for formal program development for
teacher leaders, described in detail the kinds of on-the-job learning of
teacher leaders they studied. The teacher leaders reported that they had had to
develop competence in several areas including: rapport building, organizational
diagnosis, dealing with the change process, finding and using resources,
managing the leadership work, and building skills and confidence in
others.
Devaney (1987) offered an
inclusive list of leadership areas that teachers might be called on to exercise
in emerging school organizations. The six roles she identified can provide an
organizer for the descriptive reports on the formal programs to develop
leadership skills:
Continuing To Teach and
Improve One's Own Teaching
This is the largest category
of staff development programs for teacher leadership. Teaching expertise,
including subject matter knowledge, seems critical because it is basic to other
leadership roles, including in-service education, advising and assisting
individual teachers, and peer support. Maeroff (1988) described several
programs for enhancing teachers' power by increasing their knowledge of their subject
matter. He claimed that the sessions were designed to get teachers accustomed
to acting and being perceived as professionals and required them to set the
agenda for their own learning.
Organizing and Leading Peer
Reviews of School Practice
Programs for the development
of teachers' ability to examine school practices must include preparation in
doing a form of practical research. Pine (1986) suggested that action research
be seen as an ongoing aspect of staff development and that teachers be prepared
accordingly. Action research methods have proven useful to teachers in the
Puget Sound Educational Consortium who are seeking to enhance their leadership
capacities within their individual schools, their districts, and the
consortium.
Providing Curriculum
Development Knowledge
Curriculum development
knowledge may also be seen as requisite to leading peer review of school
practice. Klein (1985), for example, discussed the master teacher as a
curriculum leader. Perhaps because curriculum development knowledge is seen as
a prerequisite to teacher leadership, there are no readily apparent
descriptions of programs to develop this knowledge among teacher leaders.
Perhaps, too, this is an area where undergraduate and graduate courses are
assumed to provide sufficient preparation; such an assumption may be
unwarranted.
Participating in
School-Level Decision Making
Many articles may be found
espousing the importance of teachers' involvement in decision making in their
school, but the impression is given that one learns decision making primarily
by doing it. The Pittsburgh Public School District is one exception (Johnston,
Bickel, & Wallace, 1990). In-house facilitators of organization development
are trained to lead problem solving and to conduct process observations in each
participating school.
Leading In-Service Education
and Assisting Other Teachers
As early as 1982, Joyce and
Showers offered guidance to program creation for teachers in peer coaching.
Little, Galagaran, and O'Neal (1984) later offered directions for training of
teachers for teacher assistance responsibilities, based on the California
experiences in mentor teacher programs and teacher advisor projects. Raney and
Robbins (1989) have given a good overview of the cognitive coaching program
offered in Sonoma County, California. Hilton, Kuehnle, School, and Zimpher
(1988) described an induction program for "invigorating the new and
experienced" teachers in Ohio, while Anderson, Asbury, Grossman, Howey,
Rentel, and Zimpher (1988) described a peer assistance program, also in Ohio.
These latter two efforts have led to the creation of a graduate program in
professional development through the Ohio State University.
Participating in the
Performance Evaluation of Teachers
The Ohio teacher leader
program described by Anderson et al. (1988) prepared teachers not only for
assistance roles, but also for performance review of peers. Descriptions have
also been given of the Schenley High School Teacher Center and the preparation
for teacher assistance and performance review of the Pittsburgh teachers who
participate in it (Johnston et al., 1990).
As we enter the 21st
century, we wonder who will provide the instructional leadership to bring
substance to our vision of literacy in science and mathematics. Though some
hold designated roles as school leaders, we have known for some time that
school principals are generally not perceived as instructional leaders, and
that instructional leadership in the most effective schools is a shared
responsibility (Pellicer, Anderson, Keefe, Kelley, & McCleary, 1990).
Lambert (1998) said, in fact, that we often make the mistake of viewing
leadership as being synonymous with assigned or formal roles. More recently, it
has been acknowledged that "teachers are the best and most abundant source
of leadership--for our schools" (Pellicer & Anderson, 2001) and that
"if schools are to be restructured successfully, teachers must assume a
variety of important instructional leadership responsibilities" (p. 14).
BRINGING FOCUS TO LEADERSHIP
DEVELOPMENT
There have been a variety of formal approaches to cultivating
leadership among science and mathematics teachers (Nesbit, Wallace, Pugalee,
Miller, & Dibiase, 2001), and no one approach has emerged as the most
effective in all situations. Indeed, in a study of 15 two-year lead teacher
professional development programs in science and mathematics, six identifiable
leadership models were noted (Wallace, Nesbit, & Miller, 1999). Examples of
teacher leaders were found to span the spectrum from classroom teachers who
demonstrate and model new techniques within their own classrooms to highly proactive
"change agents" who challenge, inspire, and motivate colleagues to
initiate school wide change. Is there a way of bringing focus to the
identification and cultivation of teacher leaders in science and mathematics?
In their study of 354
teacher leaders participating in 15 two-year professional development programs,
Nesbit, DiBiase, Miller, and Wallace (2001) analyzed evaluation reports and
conducted interviews. They found three broad categories of factors to be most
influential in supporting the development of leadership roles:
1. Factors related to
knowledge of content and pedagogy, including learning in-depth content through
hands-on activities, learning instructional strategies, and learning about
curriculum resources.
2. Factors related to the modes
of professional development, from receiving curriculum materials to observing
teaching and leadership techniques, receiving ongoing support from a
professional development staff, and analyzing a school's strengths and
weaknesses.
3. Factors related to the
development of leadership skills, both through learning about leadership skills
(i.e. presentation skills, team-building skills) and concepts (i.e. the change
process, adult development), and through planning and practicing leadership
skills. This could include working with other teacher leaders on instruction,
resolving leadership challenges, becoming familiar with school improvement
plans, or role playing.
The authors noted that the
first two broad categories are typically addressed in professional development
programs, and their importance is well supported by the literature in the
field. The unique contribution of this study is the clear identification of
explicit development of leadership skills as being a key component in
cultivating teacher leaders in science and mathematics. There is little
research identifying the essential elements of this component, however, and it
is often neglected in teacher leader development programs.
In stating some of the core
expectations of teacher leaders, Sherrill (1999, p.60) identified dimensions
for leadership skill development. Teacher leaders are expected to:
* Demonstrate exemplary
classroom instruction and knowledge of effective strategies for teaching and
learning.
* Understand theories of
adult development.
* Demonstrate knowledge of
clinical supervision models and procedures that promote effective classroom
practices.
* Cultivate desired
dispositions among teachers.
* Guide colleagues through
reflective and inquiry-oriented techniques.
* Possess research-based
knowledge about teaching and learning.
DiRanna and Loucks-Horsley
(2001) also stated that "teacher leaders must develop expertise in
organization design, change theory, adult learning, management skills, decision
making, public relations, and handholding." To these basic skills,
Pugalee, Frykholm, and Shaka (2001) would add the need for teacher leaders to
embrace issues of equity and assist in the development of technology plans for
schools and districts. Following are some resources that will help professional
development teams cultivate the growth of teacher leaders.
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