Andover was keenly aware that his foray into teacher leadership was tied to the acceptance of his first teaching job. Although it had only been a few years since he had graduated from the pre-service teacher-training program at Millennium University, Andover had been hired as the âlead science teacherâ of the newly renovated Einstein Science Academy, a kindergarten to fifth grade public school. Right after signing the contract, he had been called into the district office, congratulated, and told that he was to lead a ârevampingâ of the science curriculum in order to make it fit the new State standards. Andover knew from the word on the street that a few science-savvy classroom teachers, especially some more senior ones across the district, had resented that they were not appointed for this role. The Assistant Superintendent of Curricular Innovation, however, reassured Andover, when Andover asked if there were any potentially angry colleagues he ought to know about, that he neednât worry because he was exactly what the district needed to lead the changes.
âWe need new ideas. More energy. Fresh blood!â The Assistant Superintendent of Curricular Innovation had declared at that first meeting.
Andover remembered recoiling when he heard his boss mention âbloodâ because in his mind it evoked a brutish image of fresh meat being fed to a pack of ravenous hyenas.
When he offered to help his older colleagues, they responded by asking him to meet impossible deadlines, and they found fault with the littlest mistakes he made, like having the wrong number of test tubes set up for their hands-on science sessions. Complaints and emails to the superintendent had made it a rough first term and he never felt he had any leverage. Andover wished he had been given the opportunity to test-run some of his ideas with a supportive group of colleagues rather than simply being pushed into the lionâs den as a teacher leader in science.
After Andover sent an email expressing his frustration with not getting any traction, the Assistant Superintendent of Curricular Innovation signed him up for a workshop being put on by the Learning Vine. The one-day workshop for ânew leadersâ was branded with the slogan âInspiring Peak Performance.â
Andover did not put much stock into the name of the workshop. âMarketing gibberish,â he thought. He didnât imagine that he was performing anything really or playing a role of any dramatic sort. He conceded to himself that if he was playing a role, he was not too interested in summiting the peak, even temporarily, if it meant changing his leadership style. âItâs about style,â he recalled a university professor saying one day in a psychology of learning class. And Andover did not see anything wrong with his leadership style.
The facilitatorâs cell phone conversation during the next break was not audible to anyone. âYeah, we are heading in to the sit-down role-play section and I just know it is going to be a disaster, as always. By the way: got any leads for me? I am only contracted until summer with these Vine folks. Time to find a new gig.â
Who Is Directing This Play Anyway?
In exploring enactments of teacher leadership, and particularly the informal leadership positions acquired by teacher leaders, we ought to be concerned with questions such as, how is teacher leadership experienced by those performing it, those witnessing it, and those affected by it? Do teacher leaders thinking imaginatively really receive accolades for their ability to innovate beyond the four walls of their own classroom? Or, are we so accustomed to disappointing performances of people with âleadership visionâ that we doom them to failure before they ever get to the second act? Do teacher leaders really have the support to enact what we imagine teacher leadership to be? What does it mean to follow both official and unofficial leaders at the same time? Would a colleague defend the virtues of an unofficial leader like a teacher leader to an official leader who has leverage over jobs, their budgets, and school programs?
These sorts of questions reveal the myriad of assumptions we each have about leadership that deserves to be probed. Questions such as these ought to haunt those of us who profess on and on about the virtues of leadership:
- How good is the average teacher at following another teacher who has the caché of teacher leader or is at least enacting that role?
- How willing is a person in a formal position of leadership, the administrator, for example, to follow a teacher leaderâs ideas?
- What is the teacher leadership climate like at each different and unique school?
- Is anyone in the teacher leaderâs immediate audience able or willing to be thoughtfully present to what unfolds and then form their own responses?
In this book we propose that the stage of teacher leadership, the site where such acts of leadership are performed, is really more like an itinerant, traveling road show; as good or effective as that show might be, informal stages are easily dismissed, ignored, or relegated to an outsider status.
When those who are committed to improving schools for students are reluctant to consider questions such as these, let alone seriously consider plausible answers to them, then those poor souls who are thrust into taking on teacher-leader roles face what theatre professionals call a tough houseâthat is, any seemingly unforgiving or unresponsive audience. We believe that if teacher leaders can be better rehearsed for the successful staging of teacher leadership in their schools, then their work is more likely to be received well and have lasting, positive effects.
Letâs investigate the idea of audience in relation to teacher leadership a little further. In what manner do fellow colleagues pay attention to teacher leadership? Once the person who appoints the teacher leader is confident the project will be carried out, she might just turn her focus to more pressing problems. So an ally to a project can lose touch with it. Or, if there are people waiting in the wings who had coveted the position, and any perceived power, leverage, or budget that could be associated with it, these overlooked colleagues could decide that undue scrutiny and criticism of other teacher leaders will assuage their hurt feelings. These folks might also want to make sure the spotlight on any teacher leaderâs success does not shine too brightly. There might also be many supportive, good-hearted colleagues in the audience who are too crazed and overworked to really note what is going on over on that little make-shift teacher leadership stage. In any case, plenty of dynamics are set off when someone is given, or takes on, even the most informal task of leadership, without holding a formal title.
Playing to an Empty House
Why do great plays sometimes perform to little or almost no audience? It could be that in some cases the work is not valued, or it would be valued and could be great but there is no audience that has been primed to receive it. Letâs say we could somehow objectively say it was a âgood play,â but hardly anyone was there to see it. Would it be analogous to the metaphysical possibility of an unwitnessed tree falling in the forest and making no sound? Is leadership only leadership if people are following it?
This strange phenomenon of leadership performed well but somehow without an attentive audience has to do with the state of the audience: a certain level of focus, a readiness for change, and a lack of personal ego have to be present in order to follow along with any new story. Otherwise, there is no possibility for the critical reception of an idea. Dramatic representations are not just acts of speaking that are heard by passive bystanders, but, rather, are the creation of dynamic interactions among the participants in the play and between those performers and the audience.
For a school, the critical reception received by teacher leaders is often coming from an already stressed, overworked, under-resourced group of colleagues who are too wrapped up in their own individual performances of teaching to really support anyone else in a genuine way. At best, this audience finds it difficult to critically receive new, possibly very good, ideas; at worst, they may be resentful or just simply confused by people from their own ranks taking on leadership tasks and roles, perhaps especially when they appear to be succeeding!
In the business of theatre, when there is no give and take between the audience and the show, no focus being brought to what the performers are offering, it is referred to as playing to a tough house. We believe teacher leaders these days are facing a tough, distracted house, but not a house that cannot be won over. Performers anticipate the occasional off-night, learning how to play to a tough house by adjusting their strategies. Perhaps teacher leaders who are strategically prepared for some degree of resistance and reticence can actually knock out an effective performance.
Leveraging Criticality and Creativity
This book functions as a navigation tool for emerging and practicing teacher leaders and the teacher educators and school leaders who support their ongoing professional growth. It provides a window into the worlds of some of the typical dilemmas teacher leaders might face as they enact their growing identity as teacher leaders. The particular dynamics captured in the stories that are woven throughout the book can be mapped on to many analogous situations in teacher leadership. We hope the content of this book provides not only a compass to better focus our perspectives and expectations of teacher leadership, but some ballast to steady and give balance to your career pursuits in education. These methods call upon and inevitably engage the whole person in learning and require that its users construct and understand many perspectives. It is our hope that it is an eye-opening resource for all those interested in cultivating a more savvy, sophisticated, and resilient teacher leadership workforce. We want to see the unique strengths of todayâs teacher leaders featured and supported within the admittedly complex organizational culture and climate of any given school.
We do not think the requisite empathy required to support teacher leaders or the socio-emotional commitment needed to be one can be learned entirely through abstract means, that is, we do not think the best approach to teacher-leadership development is through language alone. Nor do we see lecture, conversation, homework, traditional case studies, or random role-playing exercises as methods capable of sufficiently illustrating the cognitive, affective, and embodied experience of teacher leadership. Because whole school improvement has so many moving parts, we do not think it can be learned in isolation. Teacher leadership, though sometimes initiated by an individual, is by no means a solo act. Everyone invested in building healthier schools should be concerned with learning more about the dynamics of teacher leadership in order for students to succeed. This book is meant to inspire an active learning process and to be read in working groups consisting of professional colleagues from diverse positions and ranks. It is meant to appeal to the sensibilities of emerging and practicing teacher leaders as well as those in positions of training and employing them.
Who Then Is This Book for?
This book should appeal to:
- Early career teachers who want to better understand the dynamics of teacher leadership;
- Mid-career teachers considering more formal or informal leadership roles;
- Teacher mentors who wish to serve an even greater role in the lives of mentees;
- Vice-Principals, principals, and district-level personnel who wish to better support teacher leadership; and
- Teacher educators looking for more powerful pedagogical tools for transformative, experiential, and active learning tasks.
Essentially, the Drama in Teacher Leadership (what we refer to in this book and in our approach to ethnotheatre as DiTL) will be of interest to anyone who is committed to better understanding how teacher leadership, which goes beyond the confines of any individualâs classroom, is best leveraged to serve the multiple and complex needs of students who should be at the center of all decisions that we make. Students cannot remain at the center of our efforts if professional relationships between adults in schools become strained.
We genuinely hope that the ideas and educational schemes contained in this book might help the complex adult working relationships at schools function better. As obvious as it is to state that the ultimate beneficiaries of strong adult working relationships in schools are the students, the adults themselves also benefit from better professional relationships. Students expect a school staff to be working collegially. They neither expect nor deserve a bunch of isolated individuals running around, vying for the gold medal award for leadership and not knowing how to support each other.
The ultimate beneficiaries of this book are students and their families who deserve teachers who are professional, prepared, and ready to function at exemplary levels. They do not deserve to see or feel that good teacher leaders are getting fatigued, demoralized, and frustrated with the way schools are. We believe that teacher leaders are critically important to the foundation of our next generations of schools. Our transdisciplinary perspective that merges theatre, embodied learning, creativity, active reflection, and analysis, with leadership education, is designed to help readers envision and ultimately reshape the reality of teacher leadership today.
The Goal of Great Performances in Schools: All Studentsâ Success
We know that student learning is influenced by a great many factors: studentsâ skills, expectations, motivations, and behaviors; family resources, and attitude and encouragement toward school; peer-group attitudes and behaviors; school organization, resources, and climate/culture; curriculum design, structure, and content; and teacher skills, knowledge, dispositions, and practices. The list of factors contributing to student learning actually goes on and on.
However, teachers and their teaching are the most impactful in-school factors related to student learning. In particular, the broad consensus is that âteacher qualityâ is the single most important school variable influencing student achievement. While there are some things about teaching and learning that are hard to qualify and even more troublesome to try to quantify, one thing seems clear: in order to affect improved learning opportunities school-wide, we need to develop a resilient teaching force capable of enacting their careers in ways that are generative and fulfilling. We need teachers of the highest quality and caliber.
No single principle of school improvement is more valid or durable than the maxim that states: student learning depends first, last, and always on the quality of the teachers in their classrooms. Experts may disagree about what size the ideal class should be, or how the system can function best to support individual student learning, or whether there is adequate funding to meet the learning needs of all children. But, no oneâs list of educational priorities fails to place teacher commitment, effectiveness, and resiliency atâor very nearâthe top. However, we have also learned that if we want all children within a single school to find success we cannot have teachers simply doing what they need to do to get through the day. What we need are teachers who are leaders for each and every child in the school.
The concept of teacher leadership has dominated the discourse of educational preparation for years. It is hard to find detractors; after all, who would be against such an idea? Teacher leadership is called for at every level of effective school functioning. School improvement is often tied to the concept of a strong teacher leadership presence. Building better school cultures means cultivating teacher leadership. It means distributed and/or shared forms of leadership that are focused on improving student outcomes school-wide. Teachers who clearly e...