Positive Teacher Leadership: Building Mind-Sets and Capacities to Grow Well-Being

• In Event: 47.050 - Re-Visioning Teacher Leadership for the 21st Century: What's Next?

Abstract

Linking theory and research on positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship, with a focus on positive leadership, this contribution provides a conceptualization of teacher leadership as an intentional reflective process of learning to grow wellbeing for self and others. Aligned with increasing international research on the importance of wellbeing in schools, the contributor suggests teacher leadership may have a role to play in cultivating school cultures that foster wellbeing for all. In this way, teacher leadership is assumed to be a mindset, a way of seeing the work of leadership as an opportunity to build collective capacity for growing wellbeing as central to school improvement work.
This contribution describes the ways that teacher leaders can exemplify practices that support wellbeing among all members of the school community. Teacher leaders who focus on developing a flourishing culture cultivate caring relationships and facilitate collaborative practices among their colleagues so that teachers model for students what it means to take risks, persist after failure, and grow both individually and collectively. The contributor surmises that teacher leadership is about positively influencing oneself, as well as colleagues and students, toward a unique sense of wellbeing. They argue for the need to language what it means to lead for wellbeing, and that this really is leadership for all. Further, they note that principal support is essential for ensuring necessary structures and supports are in place to encourage and sustain positive teacher leadership. Under such conditions, it is possible to build collective capacity for leadership for wellbeing.
The contributor’s connections between teacher flourishing and the ways that teacher leaders can support wellbeing across a school are both new and distinctive to the teacher leadership literature. Attending to wellbeing moves the research and practitioner communities closer to talking about the moral purpose of leadership by ensuring that care for self and others in and through leadership practices is addressed. The evidence on the importance of teacher flourishing demonstrates a need for further research in the area of positive teacher leadership to support teacher and student wellbeing.

Author

• Sabre Lynn Cherkowski, University of British Columbia