Teacher Leadership as Willingness to Learn in the Presence of Teachers and Students

• In Event: 18.071 - Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: 18.071-11 - Structural, Conceptual, Interpersonal, and Critical Challenges to Teacher Leadership

Abstract

As part of a larger panel on the challenges of teacher leadership, this presentation will focus on the space in which teacher learning takes place. Teacher leadership can be seen as one of several ways to move teacher learning away from isolated workshops and one-time learning sessions (see Lee, 2011; Wilson & Berne, 1999), to embedding teacher learning into environments that recreate authentic and shared classroom situations (Morris & Hiebert, 2011). Under this new concept of teacher learning, the importance of engaging teachers in real-life learning situations is highlighted. Concurrently, under new models of educational leadership, teacher leaders fill a “new niche” providing the increasingly crucial function of supplying front-line support to teachers while also maintaining the integrity of school, district, and state efforts to align curriculum and instruction (CTP Report, 2009, vi).
What is less clear, however, are the ways in which the roles of teacher leaders within educational organizations are linked to the latest advances in teacher learning. In particular, the extent to which teacher leaders operate within the spaces of actual teaching, especially in the physical presence of students, has been a recent source of lament in the field (see, for example, Margolis & Doring, 2012). With this in mind, this presentation will explore the following questions in light of the larger panel framework:
• How has the authenticity of the work of teacher leadership been challenged by long-standing organizational and cultural norms?
• What are the potential benefits and drawbacks of teacher leadership in the physical presence of students?
• What are the structural, interpersonal, conceptual, and critical barriers to teacher leadership in the physical presence of students? How might they be overcome?
Drawing from the “rounding” research in both medicine and education, we argue that many of the challenges of teacher leadership can be addressed through a concept called social presence theory, which is used to understand whether quality communication can exist within online learning environments (see Gunawardena, 1995; Lowenthal, 2009; Richardson & Swan, 2003; Tu & Mclssac, 2002). This theory, which suggests that a sense of authentic social community impacts the extent to which an individual connects to concepts within a learning environment (Tu, 2000), may help better explain why student physical presence matters so much to teachers within a teacher leader-led professional development context.
Student physical presence allows for authentic student voice to be heard in relation to their own learning, which may resonate with teachers who know that education is “both a shared responsibility and a shared achievement predicated on … dialogic encounters [between students and teachers]” (Fielding, 2001, p. 137). This, in turn, may help teacher leaders lessen the often-deleterious perception that they are de-facto administrators ‘just telling other teachers what to do’. Instead, teacher leaders and teachers learn together in the presence of young people who may challenge external “research-based practices” in the teaching moment, with the potential to dismantle high-minded educational reforms with a movement, phrase, or glance. The humility embedded in this learning process, then, becomes a hallmark of effective teacher leadership designed to ultimately enhance student learning.

Author

• Jason M. Margolis, Duquesne University