The Teaching As Collective Leadership (TACL) framework: Developing students as leaders of a better future

• In Event: Teaching as Collective Leadership - Research and evidence from the Teach For All network

Proposal

Teaching As Collective Leadership (TACL) is an actionable and locally customizable framework for teachers, teacher coaches and program designers to grow students as leaders of a better future for themselves, for their communities, and for all of us developed by Teach For All. Today’s children will inherit a challenging world. To make a more just, equitable and sustainable society, they will need to navigate uncertainty, collaboratively solve complex problems, and create meaningful careers in a changing economy. And yet, too many children experience education models that are designed to achieve narrowly defined academic goals, sometimes at the cost of other important student leadership outcomes; dismissive of the critical importance of community values and cultural identities to helping students realize their potential; and uninformed by a revolution in the science of learning and development. Perfecting inherited, industrial-era ways of teaching and learning will not lead to an equitable, just, and sustainable future on this planet.
In this presentation, the findings of the studying of more than 3,000 transformational classrooms serving children in marginalized communities around the world will be shared. Teaching As Collective Leadership is a framework built from co-discovered global patterns in those transformational classrooms. It is not a prescriptive checklist but is intended to provoke productive, critical reflection and to foster locally contextualized innovations in teacher recruitment, selection, training and support.

The presentation will give an overview of:
1. The purpose of the TACL framework: Transformational teachers collectively explore the purpose of education with students, families, and community members. These teachers align their daily efforts to a locally rooted and globally informed vision of student leadership emerging from those conversations.

2. The lenses of the TACL framework: Transformational teachers “see” their students, themselves, their communities, and their challenges in ways that are different from conventional perspectives. By bringing into focus the internalized assumptions we may need to “unlearn” to become great teachers, these lenses have radical implications for pre-service training, teacher coaching, and on-going support.

3. The strategies of the TACL framework: Transformational teachers design and facilitate collective, discovery-based learning in their classrooms. They foster mastery of rigorous content by connecting with students, families, and peers, listening in order to collectively develop vision, and investing in their own learning and development. To support local, contextualized innovations, we are developing prototypes of training and support tools.

4. The outcomes of the TACL framework: Students and teachers in transformational classrooms tend to value several indicators of student leadership development: well-being, connectedness, awareness, agency, and mastery. While these broader outcomes are rarely embraced by education systems, they have extensive support in education research. To foster local innovation, we are building a bank of assessments that help measure and monitor progress on these student leadership outcomes.

Author

• Alexandra Vassallo, Teach For All