Conceptualizing Teacher Leadership: An Interdisciplinary and Complexity-Driven Approach

• In Event: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Exploring Conceptual Frameworks of Teacher Leadership

Abstract

Teacher-leadership has become an increasingly essential component of excellence in schools, yet the concept itself remains poorly understood. Until or unless we achieve greater clarity and data on why and how teacher-leadership is so vital, districts and departments will be unable to prioritize funding or provide appropriate training and support. As noted by xxxx and xxxx:

… strong theoretical and empirical support in the form of an established knowledge base about teacher leadership will be needed to frame and substantiate decisions made about PD [professional development], especially related to the types of training that will be most beneficial, ways in which teacher leaders may enact leadership in schools, and supports that can facilitate the work of teacher leaders. (p. 137)

Perhaps the most pressing challenge related to operationalizing teacher-leadership is its broad domain. Teacher-leadership may be conducted formally or informally, with or without support, independently or in a team, and across multiple educational spaces. Attempts to formalize teacher-leadership (see, for instance, The Teacher Leadership Competencies, 2016) simply highlight how many potential entry points there are for teachers to demonstrate leadership beyond their classrooms.

With that said, we must strive towards a common conceptualization of teacher-leadership or risk being unable to advocate for the relevance of this critical work. I thus put forward the following arguments on behalf of a robust, interdisciplinary conceptualization of teacher-leadership, one which begins to account for the inherent complexity of schooling:

1) Crafting and sustaining rigorous and equitable schools is a “wicked problem” for which “there are no apparent answers, and which require[s] collaborative effort to address” (Grint, 2010, p. 137).
2) Education leaders often “try to administer or simplify”, or “manage” the complexity of wicked problems, and “solutions are lost, ignored, or simply never found” (Murray, 2017, p. 513).
3) Solving wicked problems necessitates bringing together tenets and findings from diverse research disciplines and multiple stakeholder voices.
4) Teacher-leadership, when viewed from an interdisciplinary lens, represents one powerful paradigm for entering into and addressing wicked problems in schools.

Teacher-leaders are often taught to take up an “inquiry stance” by posing a theory of action related to pressing concerns (City, Elmore, Fiarman, & Teitel, 2009). In the spirit of this approach, I posit my own theory of action vis-à-vis (re)conceptualizing teacher-leadership:

If teacher-leadership is defined and understood as a rich set of roles, skills, and dispositions situated within a complex social, psychological, historical, philosophical, and political landscape – and leveraged as a tool for addressing the “wicked problem” of inequitable and insufficiently rigorous schools – then we will be better able to promote and support authentic teacher-leadership opportunities in schools, thus leading to greater achievement for all students.

I propose a conceptual framework that articulates these elements and provides a visualization of teacher-leadership within an interdisciplinary research landscape, thus allowing for generation of meaningful hypotheses, rich (grounded) analysis, and relational synergy.

Author

• Sylvia Stralberg Bagley, University of Washington - Seattle