An Exploration of Teacher Leadership: Are Future Teachers Ready to Lead?

Abstract

The teaching profession has become increasingly complex in the last decades. The changing role of teachers has called for a new paradigm of the teaching profession that recognises the potential of teachers to lead for supporting school development and change. The influence teachers have on the school community and their commitment to school change are at the core of teacher leadership definitions. Preparing future teachers to act as leaders in their schools can support the overall efforts for school improvement. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore pre-service teacher leadership development. The study utilised a qualitative methodology to address: (i) pre-service teachers’ understanding of teacher leadership, (ii) the role of initial teacher education in shaping the understanding of teacher leadership, and (iii) the contribution of initial teacher education to pre-service teachers’ readiness for exercising leadership roles for school improvement. The study was conducted with pre-service teachers in the leading initial teacher education institution in Kosovo. A total of 42 pre-service teachers from all years of the Primary Teacher Education programme participated in four group interviews with the aim of discussing in depth the core elements of teacher leadership in order to better grasp the pre-service teachers’ understanding of this concept as well as their readiness to exercise leadership roles. A model devised by Snoek et al. (2019) was used as an analytical framework to determine the development of teacher leadership in initial teacher education. The study reveals that there is no consensus on the definition of teacher leadership. The findings show that the understanding of teacher leadership is based on a contextually drawn vision of what it means to be a teacher, resulting in a narrow view of leadership with regard to individual and classroom levels. The study concludes that initial teacher education has a critical role in contributing to shifting the conceptualisation of teacher leadership beyond the isolated views of individual and formal leadership. The findings have imperative implications for providing good models of initial teacher education that support the preparation and readiness of future teacher leaders to tackle the ever-increasing complexities of the teaching profession.