Busting out of the teacher cage

Abstract

The author lays out guidelines and suggestions for how teachers can actually become policy leaders, taken from his book, The Cage-Busting Teacher (Harvard Education Press, 2015). Teachers serious about leadership can get the ear of policy makers by leveraging their positional and moral authority — though they may need to be persistent to get an audience. Once they get a meeting, Hess offers up guidelines for creating the schools and systems they seek. They should emphasize shared concerns, offer workable solutions, and take care to not just demand more resources. Teachers who seek to affect policy, should keep in mind that policy makers usually want to do the right thing but that they often don’t know how their policies are playing out in real world, and are eager to hear from practitioners who show up with practical ideas and workable solutions.