CHAPTER 3: Teacher Learning and Leadership: Community, Collaboration, and Challenge

As a sixth grade teacher many years ago, I knew that as teachers we were learning a variety of information about students, relevance, content, engagement, moral dilemmas in the classroom and more. But it seemed that no one was interested in what we had to say. And I wondered what it would take to create the conditions where teachers could participate with the larger educational community about knowledge created in the classroom by us. Little did I know that I would have opportunities as a professor to teach, facilitate, study, organize and make possible teachers writing about their work.

During the last decade I have studied, or been involved in some way with, four different programs that get at the kinds of organizing conditions and the types of involvement that teach us how, and under what conditions, teachers’ learning and leadership can be developed and mined. In each case, challenges of learning from the outside often conflict with learning on the inside; or learning a new role challenges the existing teacher culture; or dealing with conflict while maintaining commitment to new ideas stalls the process of change. Yet, each case shows how community and collaboration can be developed, nurtured, and instructive in teaching us how to get at teacher learning and the development of teacher leadership. A central learning is that changing the teaching culture often leads to challenging the bureaucratic ways that schools are organized, particularly when professional ideas come in conflict with the existing norms of the organization (Talbert, 2010).