Are teachers poor leaders?
Teacher culture struggles with leadership. Here’s how we can improve it.
Originally published May 19th, 2021 (Blogger)
In 2011, a group of education researchers from New Jersey interviewed Master’s of Education students. They wanted to know: “Now that you’ve completed this program, what are your thoughts on teachers as leaders?” I found this response particularly interesting:
“[…]usually you go to class and they tell you what you’re supposed to learn and how you’re supposed to learn it. And then you do it and you’re never quite sure if that was the right way. And here it was, they trusted us to take ownership of what we were learning and use it in ways that made sense to us, which I thought was wonderful and exciting.”
This is a Master’s-level student speaking, yet this could apply to a high school or even elementary school student. We know the best teaching involves authentic inquiry, but we keep repeating the same lessons over and over. We want students to be flexible, but we rarely change our own practice. We want students to work together, but we don’t often collaborate outside our own comfort zones. This tension between the skills we teach, and the culture in which we teach them, makes good teacher development difficult.
So what’s the problem with teacher culture? How does that affect teachers in leadership roles?
Teacher culture is about solidarity; banding together and seeing one another as equals. Another way of putting this is egalitarianism. Generally this is a good thing, but it gets in the way of developing teacher leaders. A teacher who shows interest in a leader position is stepping out of line against their colleagues, particularly when the most publicly available avenue for career advancement is to move out of classroom teaching and into administration.
So is the solution to be anti-egalitarian? Embrace individualism and go it alone? Research shows this is already a problem with teachers: we meet as a staff but don’t feel our conversations go anywhere; each classroom or department is its own island, rarely reaching out to other subject areas or grade levels for collaboration. This isolationism inhibits creativity and prevents real progress in our classrooms.
Teacher culture is about solidarity; banding together and seeing one another as equals (…) Generally this is a good thing, but it gets in the way of developing teacher leaders.
These two competing forces — egalitarianism and isolationism — are the twin terrors of education leadership. It may seem paradoxical, but teachers work both too closely together and too separately from one another, which makes taking on a leadership role a more arduous task than it needs to be. The solution lies in changing teacher’s perceptions around what it means to be a leader. What should that look like?
Below are three fictionalized case studies. Each school has it’s own culture and approach to leadership, with mixed results. Which is the best model for us moving forward?
Caste Study #1 — The Traditional Model
Consider a traditional school, centrally located, with decades of tradition. In this setting, the traditions of egalitarianism and isolationism remain unchallenged. Daily lesson plans are written up and submitted to the department head, then enacted with no variation between teachers. Students take notes from a PowerPoint, use those notes to write essays, tests, and labs, then write their final exams. Staff are held to a strict dress code, and have their entrance and exit times from the building monitored.
This culture is disseminated top-down through the hierarchical leadership structure, and enforced by older teachers amongst newer staff members. Even minor changes are met with passive-aggression rejection. Teachers work in isolation, and there is little sharing of resources. At this school, teacher leadership — such as it is — exists only to reinforce and police the status quo. In this example, we see what research has proven: that traditional forms of leadership remove authority from the classroom and do not encourage innovation.
However, what if the students are happy with this? Averages are generally high; there are relatively few behaviour issues; and staff have no real complaints about the environment. This suggests “unsanctioned work of [teacher leaders] as often covert and subversive, but not ineffective…that function outside of the administrator’s purview.” Maybe teacher leadership is happening under the radar. That might work, but is it sustainable?
Caste Study #2 — The Excellence Model
In contrast, consider a suburban high school focused on academic and athletic excellence, and a parent base that is very active in school affairs. Despite its success, the student and staff community feel overburdened with the stress of high expectations. This was counterbalanced with leadership programs within the school that helped build a sense of community amongst students. These programs tried to break down barriers between students and staff, and reduce the isolationist tendencies of both groups. These efforts reflect what education researchers call the “brokering” aspect of teacher leadership. Their goal was to link communities, share leadership amongst a wider network, and create new norms.
However — this “brokering” role changes the relationship teachers have with their peers, usually for the worse. To combat this, the different leadership groups joined together and created events for the entire student body to participate in. This helped eliminate the perception of egalitarianism and gave credit to the original individual groups, allowing school leaders’ “self-concept [to] evolve from ‘content expert’ to change maker in their wider communities.”
These efforts reflect what education researchers call the “brokering” aspect of teacher leadership. Their goal was to link communities, share leadership amongst a wider network, and create new norms.
Although effective, this process took what use to be a social relationship between teachers, and turned it into a professional relationship — going against the egalitarian model, and causing conflict with staff who couldn’t give that model up. Despite this friction, the collaboration achieved several goals of teacher leadership: community involvement; professional development of colleagues; and changing school culture. So they created a leadership climate in the end, but it was a messy journey to get there. Is there a more effective process we can use?
Caste Study #3 — The Collaborative Model
Finally, consider the non-traditional environment of a hospital-based school. The teacher participates in twice-weekly “rounds” meetings with medical staff, in an excellent model of collaborative professionalism:
- Collaboration is embedded in the organizational culture
- Meetings promoted challenging, but respectful, dialogue
- Run by staff, based on specific patient/student needs and voices
- Their purpose was to better understand how to help students
Here there is no egalitarianism; there’s only one teacher, and everyone else on staff has a specific role. There’s also no strict hierarchy; the principal is off-site, and all the staff have equal say in programming for the students. Instead each meeting with a student was unpacked in group staff meetings, then those insights were applied in the next student meeting.
The New Jersey research team calls this the cycle of praxis and cycle of impact. Better understanding of the student leads to better planning for that student, which leads back to better understanding; that’s the cycle of praxis. Since the teacher is better at working with the student, the student then feels better working with the teacher, which makes the teacher feel more confident again; this is the cycle of impact.
Let’s Get Together And Feel All Right
From these three case studies, it’s clear that the final model, with its emphasis on collaborative professionalism, is the best for staff and students. Teachers can take on authentic leadership roles, not those forced on them from above (what’s called contrived collegiality). Their leadership initiatives can be effective and distanced from personal squabbles, not held back by collegial expectations (known as informal collaboration).
It’s ironic that the least traditional schooling model actually best represents the current research around effective school leadership. It raises questions about professional inertia — how do we encourage leadership roles in a system that seems so averse to them? By updating teacher culture. We can’t limit our leadership to the walls of our classrooms. The research proves that a climate of professional collaboration has nothing but benefits for admin, staff, students, and the community. So let’s not fall prey to the “crabs in the bucket” analogy, pulling down those who climb to the top. Let’s be the professional leaders in education our students need us to be.
Mario Mabrucco is a educator with almost 20 years experience teaching literacy, arts, and social sciences to youth in Canada, Greece, France, Italy, and Monaco. He has a M.Ed in Curriculum and Education Policy from the University of Toronto, and designs curriculum for the National Film Board of Canada. Read more of Mario’s work on Medium or follow him on Twitter: @mr_mabruc
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