Teacher as leader the professional role.
Explain the need for good leadership for a professional teacher.
What is teacher leadership?
The term teacher leadership refers to that set of skills demonstrated by teachers who continue to teach students but also have an influence that extends beyond their classroom to others within their school and elsewhere. It entails mobilizing and energizing others to improve the school's performance. It is a critical responsibility related to teaching and learning. Mobilizing and mobilizing and energizing does not occur because of the role of the leader as boss (as might be the case with a principal) but rather because the individual is informed and persuasive.
Therefore, an important characteristic of a teacher leader is expertise and skill in engaging others in complex work. It also entails unweaving work. It also entails unweaving passion for the school's core mission and the courage to confront obstacles to achieving that mission.
To be sure, teaching is unique among the professions in the degree of government regulation involved. The state has a vital interest in an educated citizenry, education is a critical factor in casting a vote and serving on a jury, and an educated workforce is essential to sustain economic development. Furthermore, in most places, students have little choice in the schools they attend or in the teachers in that school to whom they are assigned. These factors ensure that educators in general, and teachers in particular, are subject to greater state regulation than, Say, accountants or architects.
The concept of teacher leadership rests within a web of concepts regarding leadership in educational and organizational settings and it is the best understood of these other ideas.
Leadership as Administration
In educational circles, the term school leader means the site administrator; university programs for school leaders prepare principals and superintendents for their roles. Professional literature in education, with an excursion into the leadership exercise by central office administrators such as superintendents, assistants' superintendents, staff developers, and curriculum directors.
The interstate school headers licensing consortium, an outgrowth of the council of chief state school officers, has defined school leadership as consisting of sit standards, all intended to support the principal's essential responsibility as instructional leaders. These standards, which have been adopted by many states as criteria for the licensing of administrators, may be summarized as establishing and maintaining a vision, providing instructional leadership, managing the building interacting with the broader community, maintaining high ethical standards, the document standers-describers knowledge dispositions and performance that taken together, serve to further define each standard. According to this approach, it is not sufficient for school communities in the service of high-school student learning. Hence, the interstate school leaders licensing consortium definition of leadership, while focusing on the role of administrators as managers, must also be instructional leaders. Nonetheless, they are undeniably administrators.
Sustainability goes even further, as described by Andy Hargreaves as the institutionalization not of changed practice but the habit of critically examining practice. Embedding this habit of mind into the daily work of schools cannot happen without leadership, and it is part of the leadership exercise by administrators. Therefore, the concept of teacher leadership is nether neither in conflict nor in completion with the idea of administrative leadership. They are complementary concepts that ideally work together on behalf of students and their learning. Header ship as management of change: -
Some writers, notably. Michael Fullen (2001) has conceptualized leadership as the management of change, often large-scale change. Such effort requires leadership skills, to be sure, the history of education is littered with the corpses of innovation that did not serve the departure of a heroic leader. Managing change, therefore requires not only initiating but also institutionalizing and sustaining changed practice. Furthermore, large-scale changes affecting a school district or indeed an entire state or country is frequently accompanied by a revision in policy and is typically supported by a large invention of resources.
But teacher leadership rarely involves large–scale, systemic change. Changed practice that results from teacher leadership is significant and can reach into the very crevices of a school's programs that are typically involved in systemic Change Although the literature on leadership as management of Change is important to our understanding of leadership in general, it does not fully explain the concept of teacher leadership as described here.
Formal Teacher Leadership Roles.
Many Schools have instituted structures in which teachers assume formal leadership roles in the school, such as master teacher, department chair, team leader, helping teacher, or monitor, these arrangements recognize the essential role of teachers as key players in the broader effort toward enhanced student achievement. Such roles are not created to engage teachers primarily in establishing schools as democratic societies rather, they are created to distribute the work of running schools to others besides the principal and to enlist teachers as partners in school improvement.
Teacher leadership, by contrast, is spontaneously exercised by teachers in response to a need or an opportunity through work with colleagues. It emerges organically, no one appoints teacher leaders to their roles. And while administrators may play an important supporting role, the initiative comes from the teacher.
Why Teacher Leadership?
As stated earlier, interest in teacher leadership has increased substantially in recent years. Why is this? Why are educators and policymakers suddenly interested in this phenomenon?
Educational leadership, as described in the professional literature and typically referred to as administrative leadership at the school site, has become a gigantic task, beyond the capacity of any but the most capable and energetic principal. Richard Elmore describes it well.
The vast literature on school leadership has defined the principal variously as requiring some or all of the following forms of leadership technical, professional, transactional, and transformational. Other models of leadership focus on its political, managerial, or cultural dimensions. When distilled, these concepts all seek to establish the principal as the inspirational head of the complex organization called the school. The principal is to shepherd the school toward the achievement of demanding imperatives mandated by national, state, and district policy. The sheer range of the descriptions of what the principal's work encompasses attests to the size and complexity of the role.
Not surprisingly, School administrators one straggling under the load, and human resources personnel report that principalship is increasingly difficult to fill. As instructional leaders and as managers, site administrators are burdened with huge responsibilities under increasing pressure from their own district and government agencies and with student populations that are increasingly diverse in academic and social preparation and in English language skills. A Principal in New York City has reported that the legal mandates he received from the superintendent's office in a single year weighed in at 45 pounds. The job has become virtually impossible to do well small wonder, then, that thoughtful educators increasingly recognize that administrators, to discharge their responsibilities, must cultivate a culture of inquiry and responsibility for student learning among their faculties They must, in other words, cultivate teacher leaders. As Elmore (2000) describes it.
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