Footnotes to Teacher Leadership

Abstract

scape for some time now. Since the mid-1980s, teachers have been looked to with increasing regularity as agents of school and classroom change. Their leadership has been promoted in a number of different ways, from involving them in school-level and district-level decision making; to creating specific leadership roles related to teacher professional development and instructional improvement; to encouraging informal and collaborative leadership work on teams, as part of school professional community, and through initiatives to develop distributed leadership. The proliferation of opportunities for teacher leadership development in recent years reveals a great deal of faith and confidence in its efficacy for promoting teacher professionalization and school improvement. With the proliferation of opportunities for teacher leadership has come increasing attention to the subject in the scholarly and professional literature. This literature now spans almost 30 years. A substantial amount of research has examined the development, exercise, and outcomes of different forms of teacher leadership. Other research has examined conditions that shape its function and effectiveness. This literature has been reviewed with increasing regularity. Several major reviews have been published in the past 10 years (Murphy, 2005; Smylie, Conley, & Marks, 2002; York-Barr & Duke, 2004; see also Lieberman & Miller, 2004), including one in the first edition of this handbook (Smylie, 1997). These reviews are extensive treatments of theory and empirical findings concerning teacher leadership and together they provide a clear and comprehensive picture of the history and state of the art of the research. Even though the study of teacher leadership continues unabated, we chose not to write another review of research findings and duplicate much of what has been done so recently. Instead we appropriated the idea for this chapter from a paper published some time ago by James March titled “Footnotes to Organizational Change” (1981). March stated in the introduction to that paper that his intention was not to review the findings of a rapidly growing empirical literature on organizational change. That task was left others. Instead, his purpose was to introduce several “footnotes” to the research, to “comment” on the corpus of knowledge at the time, and to “identify a few speculations stimulated by previous work” (p. 563). March’s footnotes were intended to draw attention to overlooked but potentially important FOOTNOTES TO TEACHER LEADERSHIP