Blurred Lines: Special Education Teachers as Critical Teacher-Leaders

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

Abstract

The fourth presenter is a teacher-leader with a background in special education, who is currently serving as the district’s special education coach. The research aims to investigate the current reality of special education classrooms, including the qualities of a teacher-leader within the field of special education. What is it like to be a special educator in today’s hybrid teaching and learning contexts? What are special education teachers’ perceptions about their school culture, the level of daily support they receive, their role in their professional learning communities, and how their role compares to that of their general education colleagues? And, where do special education teachers’ practices parallel, intersect, and cut away from agreed-upon understandings of teacher leadership?

While all teachers faced challenges when the pandemic began, these difficulties seemed to impact the world of special education more than any other field in education as schools were expected by law to maintain adherence to all federal and state mandates, navigate ways to provide compensatory services through a pandemic and juggle virtual meetings with an increased number of advocates and lawyers. Due to the demands related to compliance and instruction, as well as time constraints, special education teachers are in a unique position to demonstrate teacher leadership competencies (York-Barr et al., 2005), especially given their collaborative roles and responsibilities across various teaching and learning dimensions.

Through qualitative research methods such as teacher interviews, surveys, and classroom observations, the study underscores how special educator practice already meets many of the competencies and indicators of teacher leadership, particularly critical teacher leadership. Preliminary data from this inquiry find that the special education teachers in the study exhibit essential components of teacher leadership, such as interdisciplinary collaboration, student advocacy, and data-driven decision-making (Bagley & Tang, 2018). Despite collaboration between special education teachers and general education teachers, the participants express the desire to collaborate more with one another and across schools in this district. In this way, the participants unknowingly point to the potential of a Communities of Practice (Wenger, 2011) model to strengthen their teacher leadership practices.

Otherwise, the data have not cut away from previous teacher leadership research that emphasizes collaboration and collegial support. For example, in the same ways that special educators’ roles and responsibilities mirror teacher leadership competencies, so do they reflect several key components of CTL. And, like Presentations 1, 2, and 3, the study holds significance in terms of how teacher leadership is defined (i.e. critical and/or culturally responsive), enacted (i.e. through advocacy, collaboration, and ethical leadership), and by whom (i.e. formal versus informal roles and/or general education versus specialized education teachers).

Author

• Jessie Leyden, Fulton County Schools
  Presenting Author