Building Teacher Leaders through Professional Development

(Stephen Esposito, Principal, Highland Creek Elementary School, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools).

As a principal, it is important to me to build teacher leadership through professional development. This has been a practice that I have evolved in over the years. For the most part, it was not something I learned while studying to become an administrator, but as my experiences grew serving as a leader in schools I started to understand the importance of providing leadership opportunities for teachers around instructional leadership.

As an assistant principal, I worked diligently in partnership with my administrative colleagues (principal and facilitators included). We spent a lot of time determining our next steps in regards to professional development (PD), and we spent even more time developing presentation materials that would provide effective in-service opportunities for our staff. Although the professional development that we provided was very valuable, I always felt as if something was missing. Our team was very good at identifying the necessary professional development, carrying out the in-service opportunities, and we were skilled at following up to ensure that staff members were following through with the PD. For me, the missing link was not realized until my third year as an administrator; PD opportunities should be a shared responsibility between both the administrator and the teachers.

When I became a principal in 2010 I followed the same protocol that I learned as an assistant principal. Essentially it was “top-down PD.” Granted, it was effective, but it didn’t provide opportunities for our school to develop instructional leaders. My “aha moment” came at the end of the 2011 school year when I was busily preparing what our school’s PD would look like for the next school year. I had numerous end-of-year activities taking place, and was struggling to find quality time to plan PD. Realizing that I needed help, I turned to my teaching staff rather than my administrative team. Curiously, this was not a conscious decision, but rather it was a decision made out of desperation due to lack of time. Ironically, it turned out to be a professional epiphany! I pulled a group of skilled teachers together, asked for insight around what our PD should look like as a school, and then turned to them to help us develop and present PD the next school year.

This decision brought forth immediate wins for our school. I realized very quickly that what I had accidently done was create teacher leaders. In addition, I modeled what distributive leadership should look like. What I saw after the initial presentations was that teachers began to feel more empowered. They took ownership within their PLCs to implement the PD that was provided because it was their colleagues that they wanted to support. In addition, a sense of healthy competition was created because other teachers began to inquire as to how they could be a model teacher for our new initiatives. By giving teachers an opportunity to lead, our school’s leadership capacity grew exponentially. This impact didn’t occur overnight, and administrative support was still needed for some individuals and PLC teams, but for the first time, I didn’t feel as if something was missing from our professional development experience at my school.

In my current position, I make it a point to involve teaching staff on key decisions, I look for ways in which to include teachers as leaders for the work we need to do for students, and I use my specialists in the building to impact their colleagues, which in effect, impacts our most important resource, the students.

A Model of Teacher Leadership

A Teacher Leader Model that Grows from Strengths

(Kelli Varney, Principal, Newlon Elementary, Denver Public Schools).

The process of putting in place a formal model for developing teacher leaders is lengthy and engages the need for true reflection on the part of everyone involved - school leaders, teacher leaders and the entire staff. The first thing we had to do was to consider how our school might benefit from doing things differently. Some questions we’ve had to ask ourselves are:

• What might we need to stop doing in order to maximize school time, people, and money?
• What professional learning or whole school PD structures are currently in place?
• Can aspects of your schedule be flexible instead of fixed?

In developing a vision for what this might look like at our school, we took a look at where we’ve been and where we want to be in five years. Many of our teachers value their time with and impact on kids so a model that allows for them to both mentor colleagues at the same time as they are practicing and increasing effectiveness themselves is the direction we feel would be most beneficial. An overall goal would be to develop teacher Leaders who can provide a thoughtful, reflective stance toward teaching among both novice and veteran teachers by coaching both groups in effective practices—sometimes co-teaching lessons, other times observing and then debriefing. Teacher leaders should be able to support colleagues by planning lessons and evaluating the impact on learners. Teacher leaders in this model must be especially supportive of colleagues in crisis situations in the classroom, acting from a base in empathy, experience, and wisdom. They will need to work collaboratively to establish a professional learning group based on the needs of the staff. Possible topics of study could include reading about and studying classroom discourse and gathering student-generated data that gives insight into how learning works in relation to classroom discourse.

Another by-product we seek in implementing this model would be to increase the quality of reflective practice. Through a mixture of cognitive coaching, empathy, critical listening, and high-level questioning, teacher leaders can help colleagues move to more thoughtful levels of understanding of their work with learners. So we’re very excited to bring this idea to fruition. The next phase is the design phase where we will work with a team to continue to refine the vision for this work at our school. This includes writing specific job descriptions that will eventually lead to the position application/offer process.

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