Prelims

Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools

Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools

Edited by

Jana Hunzicker

Bradley University, Peoria, IL, USA

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

Emerald Publishing Limited

Howard House, Wagon Lane, Bingley BD16 1WA, UK

First edition 2018

Copyright © 2018 Emerald Publishing Limited

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ISBN: 978-1-78743-404-2 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-403-5 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-923-8 (Epub)

Professional development schools (PDSs) excel in preparing new teachers, supporting practicing teachers in their professional growth, and engaging stakeholders in carefully crafted examinations of issues that directly shape schools. At their very best, PDSs bridge the gap between the two very different cultures of the P-12 and university worlds and, in doing so, positively boost student learning.

That said, the road to a successful PDS partnership is rarely, if ever, smooth, and those who embark on this path typically have to overcome roadblocks that remind them every day just how difficult a task it is to produce a meaningful and productive school–university partnership. These roadblocks often appear in the form of questions. For example, PDS collaborations that rely on grants have often asked, “What happens when the money runs out?” while those that have limited to no funding at all ask, “How can we sustain this partnership over time?”; other frequently asked questions include, “Can not-yet-tenured university faculty really afford to spend their time in schools in the face of tenure and promotion requirements?”; “How much buy in (and from whom) do we need to make this a successful venture?”; “Can we do this without the full support of administrators at the university, district, and/or school levels?”; and, assuming the partnership does indeed have such administrative support, “What happens when the administrators change?” These last few questions about leadership have been pervasive in the PDS world for quite some time, with it now very well understood that crafting and sustaining a successful PDS partnership is next to impossible if you do not have committed support from your dean, superintendent, or principal. And, since individuals in these particular roles seem to change rather quickly and consistently over time, it truly is critical to ask, “What happens when the administrators change?”

The contributors to Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools understand this last point – that successful PDSs require support from above. However, they also believe that top-down leadership, while critical, is not the only form of leadership necessary to build and sustain PDSs. In fact, they argue without fail that PDSs are the perfect venue for a different kind of leadership to emerge – the leadership of teachers. As Jana Hunzicker relates in her two opening chapters, the concept of teacher leadership has gained traction in American schools in the last 10–15 years, a time when, perhaps not coincidentally, PDSs have also taken flight. What those two simultaneous events have produced are a new set of questions that Hunzicker and her PDS colleagues pose in this volume. In three carefully crafted sections – each featuring three or four chapters contributed by teacher leaders and scholars from across the United States, three to four personal reflections written by practicing and/or former P-12 teacher leaders, and a synthesis chapter written by a leading expert in the field – PDS practitioners ask, “How can teacher leadership positively shape student learning?”; “What kinds of PDS-embedded structures can be put in place to promote teacher leadership?”; and “How do we prepare and develop teachers to be teacher leaders in the first place?”

What emerges in the pages that follow, as teacher leaders from ten universities and their P-12 school partners address these questions through the sharing of their work, is a powerful image of teachers taking on roles that heretofore were considered off-limits. Or, as one set of contributors put it, involvement in their particular teacher leader project “provided an opportunity for teachers to be treated as the professionals that they are.” This long-overdue recognition is one of many lessons to be learned from Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools, lessons that will serve all educators well, not just those involved in PDSs. Foremost among these lessons is that students must be our collective and primary focus and that teacher leaders have an obligation (one writer said “the courage”) to do what’s right for students – even if what we do for them flies in the face of conventional practice.

Another lesson from these pages is that teacher leaders can be powerful advocates for turning around what has been a significant weakness of the teaching profession – a collective failure to consistently share the results of our work with others within the profession and with the broader communities we serve. Teachers, and particularly teachers in PDSs, are engaged in remarkable initiatives that significantly benefit their students; yet they typically keep the results of their work, intentionally or unintentionally, to themselves. The end result is that the broader public is kept in the dark about the positive programs taking place in schools, which leads all too often to those involved in the crafting of education policy doing so with limited – and in some cases inaccurate – information. As seen time and again in these pages, teacher leaders can have a major impact on public policy through the simple act of sharing what’s going on in their schools with their school colleagues; teacher candidates; school boards; teachers and administrators in other area schools; and state, regional, and national organizations focused on educational practice.

Teacher leaders can also help schools craft – and stick to – specific goals that meet the unique needs of their individual schools. When the National Association for Professional Development Schools released its Nine Required Essentials of a PDS in 2008, it intentionally began the list with the expectation that PDSs must have “a comprehensive mission that is broader in its outreach and scope than the mission of any [one] partner.” In other words, PDSs are created not for spurious reasons or simply for the sake of coming together, but instead for specific goals and missions. Examples to be found in these pages include helping English Language Learners grow while simultaneously helping their teachers understand the needs of this specific group of students, enhancing the knowledge base and teaching skills of science teachers, providing students not typically given the opportunity to engage in higher level math classes the chance to do just that, and requiring teacher candidates to develop Professional Growth Plans from day one so that they are prepared not only to teach but also to lead. Each of these projects succeeded because a teacher leader, or a group of teacher leaders, took the initiative to introduce and promote an agenda that they believed was important to student success.

In addition to offering these types of lessons, Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools makes it clear that, while there are multiple paths to becoming a teacher leader, some intentional and others accidental, most of those paths involve individuals stepping out of their comfort zones and accepting challenges not traditionally ascribed to teachers. This can create some awkward situations, as when an instructional coach is told by a school principal that, “You will not come into my school and bother my teachers,” or when another instructional coach learned that her writing observations in a notebook made teachers nervous, or when a new teacher leader realized that she was now privy to information about colleagues that normally would not be available to her. But, as is clear in many of the stories shared in this volume, the role of teacher leader is a long-overdue and positive addition to the world of education. Who, other than teachers, are better positioned to know their students’ and their community’s needs? Who has a more direct impact on those students – and their families? Who has the proverbial boots on the ground? And who is better positioned to help the other teachers in their schools grow “as the professionals that they are”?

The value of Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools is enhanced by the fact that all of the contributors are affiliated with PDSs that have, over a very long span of time, dedicated themselves to promoting school–university partnerships for the benefit of teaching and learning. It was refreshing – and reassuring – to see the names of these institutions and to know that the work they have been engaged in over time has continued and has produced such positive results. It was also refreshing to read the reflections offered by the P-12 teacher leaders who engaged in this work, and, finally, to know that the synthesis chapters come from three exceptionally well-qualified and enthusiastically engaged PDS scholars. Jana Hunzicker is to be commended for bringing together this impressive collection of PDS advocates and for challenging them to examine – and to share – their work.

Bruce E. Field

Georgia Southern University

This book would not have been possible without the support and assistance of many. I especially wish to thank Zoe Morris and Kimberley Chadwick for adeptly ushering me through the proposal and editorial management processes, Rebecca West Burns for critiquing my original proposal and offering suggestions that significantly improved the project, and Bruce Field for reading the book’s introductory chapters–and later the entire book–and providing invaluable feedback.

I also wish to thank the book’s 49 contributors. Thank you to Bruce Field for writing the book’s foreword, to Bernard Badiali, Michael Cosenza, and Rebecca West Burns for writing the synthesis chapters for each section, to the 33 authors who wrote scholarly chapters related to their teacher leadership and PDS work. And most of all, thank you to the 11 teacher leaders who wrote personal reflections about their leadership successes, insights, and challenges. Just as teacher leadership is almost always collaborative, the creation of this book was truly a team effort!

Jana Hunzicker

Bradley University

To America’s teacher leaders, past, present, and future.