Chapter 4: Teacher Leadership: National Organizational Patterns and Cultures

“Leadership” as a construct has played a central role in globally diffusing educational reforms of the last few decades, which focus on teacher professionalization and professional development. Both accountability and decentralization movements assume that more active and informed teacher leadership in schools will result in better student academic performance. Within the current global cultural dynamic, teacher effectiveness and teacher quality have become the focus of intense international attention by both the OECD and UNESCO, and both organizations have promoted policies to “improve” teacher quality, which require teacher leadership (OECD, 2005; UNESCO, 2014). A clear example of this is UNESCO’s Teacher Policy Development Guide.¹ This guide was specifically developed to influence the ways in which nations formulate policies about their national teaching forces, and it demonstrates how central the concept of “leadership” has become within discourses on global educational reform.