Teacher Leadership and Peer-to-Peer Relationships

• In Event: Teacher-Leaders as Critical Researchers: Exploring Critical Teacher Leadership in Practice

Abstract

The second presenter is a teacher-leader, instructional literacy coach, and English Language Arts teacher at the middle school where the study takes place. Given the positive association between peer-to-peer relationships and school change (Baker-Doyle, 2017), this presentation aims to explore the interpersonal skills teacher-leaders possess and deploy to influence their colleagues’ practices and sustain peer relationships more effectively.

Literature on peer-to-peer relationships within teacher leadership focuses on peer collaboration in teachers’ daily interactions and, importantly, highlights that the efficacy of these interactions hinges on mutual trust, respect, and benefit as well as the school’s contextual factors (Raffanti, 2008), such as the culture and climate. However, since the clarity of roles and responsibilities of teacher-leaders is not only murky but also varies from school to school, teacher leadership can be perceived as an added layer of hierarchy or supervision that could hamper the relationship-building process.

That said, the project will use qualitative case study and participant-observer methods to focus on teacher and teacher-leader interactions at one school, where the definitions and relationship outcomes of teacher leadership can be more clearly defined. The specific methods include Green’s (2014) Double-Dutch Methodology to guide participant observation and interviews, storytelling via narrative inquiry methods, and field notes to capture participants’ perspectives of peer-to-peer relationships at the study site. Of note, the methods are designed to humanize the research process (Paris & Winn, 2013), which are informed by the kinds of critical competencies inherent to CTL.

The study is in its initial phases, so the final data collection processes are in development. The teacher-researcher, as a participant-observer, has completed personal vignettes to establish peer-to-peer relationship-building as a problem of practice. So far, findings from these vignettes highlight the complexities of the teacher-leaders’ relationships with the school, her colleagues, her students, and building-level administration.

When drawing connections between Presentation 2 and CTL, the following conclusions can be drawn. First, collaborative leadership (Woods & Roberts, 2018) has the potential to color the relationship-building experiences and practices uncovered from the study in the same ways that it did when developing CTL as a theoretical framework. This is because leadership for social justice is similarly essential to the teacher-researcher’s positionality as one of the few teachers of color at the site who feels responsible for the students of color as a result. However, while CTL notes shared cultural backgrounds and lived experiences as lynchpins for teacher advocacy, it is less clear about how shared - and, different - backgrounds between teachers complicate peer relationship-building, especially when advocating for school change that targets the school’s marginalized populations.

Second, the study also has the potential to inform CTL as a methodological approach for teacher-led research. As mentioned earlier, the project pulls on humanizing research practices like personal vignettes to more authentically and humanistically address the problem of practice. Therefore, CTL could expand beyond its theoretical framework to inform teacher-researchers’ decisions regarding study design, methods, and analysis.

Author

• Myra Bodrick, Gwinnett County Public Schools
  Presenting Author