Insider Voices: Teacher Leaders Talk Back to the Literature on Teacher Leadership

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

Abstract

Objective
In this study, a group of early career teachers who were engaged in inquiry into teacher leadership was asked to respond to several findings drawn from two seminal literature reviews on teacher leadership (York-Barr & Duke, 2004; xxxx & xxxx). By putting teachers’ perspectives about teacher leadership in conversation with ways it is conceived in academic research, we aim to “work the dialectic” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) between academic research and teacher inquiry.

We believe “empowered scholar teachers” (Kincheloe, 2012, p. 18) have agency to “challenge common assumptions about knowers, knowing, and knowledge for the improvement of teaching and learning” (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009, p. 39). Therefore, in this paper we take up Berg and Zoellick’s (2017) conception of teacher leadership, which includes dimensions of “legitimacy”, “support”, “objective”, and “method” as “empirically useful” (p. 1) for bridging what teachers know about teacher leadership and what researchers claim in the literature on the topic.

Methods and Data Sources
We presented 29 early career teachers with eight findings drawn from reviews of empirical research by York-Barr and Duke (2004) and xxxx and xxxx. During three phases of discussion, the teachers were invited to “talk back” to one or more of these findings based on their local knowledge of teacher leadership generated through their inquiry. We drew on grounded theory methodology as a framework for coding teachers’ responses and developing conceptual categories that “arose through our interpretations of data” (Charmaz, 2005, p. 509) generated by teachers.


Data sources include: 1) notes of nine small group discussions, 2) nine posters created by those groups to represent collective responses to one or two research findings; and 3) comments written by individual teachers on the posters during a “gallery walk”.

Findings
Our analysis of teachers’ responses shows that when teachers were invited to bring their local and contextual knowledge into conversation with research, they resisted designations between formal and informal teacher leader roles, instead focusing on “legitimacy” as a more meaningful way of representing the dynamic between teacher leaders, their colleagues, and principals. Specifically, teachers in this study:

1. Challenged explicit or implicit ideas about power, expertise, and hierarchy that they found embedded in excerpts from research literature on teacher leadership;
2. Complicated findings about the support provided by principals for promoting teacher leadership;
3. Extended findings that teacher leaders depend on strong relationships with colleagues as a source of influence, suggesting that by knowing their colleagues well, teacher leaders empower communities of teachers to lead educational improvement together.

Our findings confirm the usefulness of Berg and Zoellick’s (2017) framework for defining teacher leadership. We foreground a vital, and often sidelined, perspective - that of teachers themselves - into ongoing efforts to conceptualize teacher leadership for future research and show that by including insiders’ voices, researchers can capitalize on and learn from teachers who have engaged in inquiry themselves.

Authors

• Linda Whalen Abrams, Knowles Teacher Initiative

• Roseanne Rostock, Knowles Teacher Initiative

• Kimberly D. Masloski, Knowles Teacher Initiative