Approaches to Teacher Leadership
Hilty talks about three different approaches to teacher leadership; teacher research, models of distributed leadership, and self managed teams. Currently my school is using elements of each of these. We have not settled on a specific style for our building. There are times where teachers are sent to research specific things within the teaching profession. Like Hilty mentions, there is little follow through on implementation when this is the style. There are many times we are in Professional Development around some aspect of teacher research and then we all go back to our classrooms and do exactly what we were doing before. The teachers doing the research have great intentions, grand ideas of implementation, and high goals for what their research is going to look like in the classrooms across the school. Yet, the implementation does not happen. There is a disconnect in my school between doing the research and actually getting the results put to use in classrooms.
The second approach Hilty talks about is models of distributed leadership. This is the model my current principal favors. There are very few decisions she makes on her own. She has put together numerous committees that departments are expected to supply members for. This model can be successful when you have large enough departments. My principal has put together more than nine committees but we only have nine members in our department. This means there are people who are multiple committees. As one of the department heads, if a committee spot is not filled, the responsibility gets put on my co-department chair and I. While I think there are many models that fall into this category, there are specific environments where they can be successful.
Thirdly, Hilty talks about self managed teams. My school calls these Professional Learning Communities (PLC's). This is the work we are currently doing best. My department has been working together to create realistic and attainable goals. We have been focusing on students ability to reason mathematically and they have shown tremendous improvement in that area of mathematics. We work each year to refine our ability to work together and we make sure we are meeting the needs of our students. This feels like our most successful area because we get to choose how the department is growing. I am also aware that since I am part of the leadership of the PLC I am biased about the success of it. While I still believe we have been very successful as a PLC, I am too invested to make a true judgement outside of the our data.
After processing the different approaches to teacher leadership presented by Hilty, I had the correct mindset to look at Building Hope, Giving Affirmation. This article focuses on social justice in the classroom. This has been a key topic in our math department over the past couple of years. The questions that were presented made me think about my school and whether or not we have a social justice lens. While I think we are working on gaining a social justice lens, we are not there yet. We have teachers at different places on the continuum of cultural responsiveness. One of the biggest flaws in our professional development around social justice and culturally responsive teaching is students are not involved. Teachers are spear heading this movement. If we truly want to bring social justice into our classrooms and become culturally responsive teachers we need to bring students into the conversations. The students are the ones who know what they need. If we want the students to respond to us, we need to respond to them. As a school we have a long way to come before we are able to say that our teacher leadership style is truly supporting all of our students and their needs.
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