Teacher Leadership: Barriers and Supports

Abstract

initiatives to reform PK-12 education (see Sackney, this volume; Teddlie, this volume). These interventions have been generated in a wide variety of ideological seedbeds. They have emerged in response to powerful changes underway in the larger economic, political, and social environments in which the schooling enterprise is nested. And they have been engaged to solve an assortment of problems and to meet a wide variety of important objectives. One significant line of work to strengthen schools emphasizes teachers assuming greater leadership for the organization in which they work, or what has come to be known as teacher leadership (Crowther, Kaagan, Ferguson, & Hann, 2002; Little, 2003). A comprehensive review of the literature on this growing movement reveals that it rests on three foundational pillars, including (1) the struggle to rebuild the infrastructure of schooling, attempting to exorcise the dysfunctionalities of traditional hierarchical and bureaucratic structures and capture post-industrial organizational forms that privilege collaborative work; (2) the quest to redefine leadership in post-industrial organizations; and (3) the use of reform initiatives that honor professionalism. That same literature helps us to see that, although there are a variety of pathways to teacher leadership, most fall into one of two strategy “bins.” On the one hand, there are the well-established roleand function-based attempts to create more leadership-dense schools. These efforts focus on attaching teachers to, often newly created roles and functions at the school level, such as mentor teacher, master teacher, or coordinator of a program or strand of work. On the other hand, and of more recent vintage, are efforts to operationalize teacher leadership in communities of professional practice, such as instructional team leader. Finally, although the evidence on the impact of teacher leadership remains thin, we are learning a good deal about conditions that damage and support the development of teacher leaders and teacher leadership in schools. It is this latter issue that concerns us in this chapter. Specifically, we examine two key domains – organizational structure