“Mi zona por una recreación sana”
Actividad 13: Acampada iluminada
In response to new demands for school reform and development, there is increasing recognition from policy makers about the importance of including teachers in school leadership practices (Danielson, 2006). Teacher leadership as a notion has been introduced within the last two decades as a way of improving education output by offering teachers some power to practice their agency (Little, 2003).
Inevitably teacher leadership changes and evolves, but also inherits continuities from previous theories and practices. Since its appearance in the arena of education, teacher leadership has been undergone several developmental changes. Silva et al. (2000) describe three waves in the understanding of teacher leadership. The first wave began in the early 1990s, where leadership roles for teachers had a “managerial aspect” and were realised in positions such as department head, mentor teacher, head teacher, or master teacher (p. 780). Teacher leadership occurred within a school hierarchy and was treated merely as a position in the organisation of the teaching process. This included classical and managerial leadership responsibilities and roles such as subject leaders and
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department chairs. This can be seen as a top-down model, where teachers with leadership roles control and decide on the work of other teachers who are positioned as passively accepting the top-down imposed policies and decisions. Harris and Muijs (2004) describe teacher roles in this practice of teacher leadership as “representatives of change rather than leaders who enact or initiate change” (p.16). Supervisors and head teachers would here be the typical teacher leaders in their fields and their role divisions mainly concerned with the efficiency of the system. As discussed in Chapter 2, and as the discussion in Chapter 6 will demonstrate, headteacher and supervisor leadership is dominant in KSA, whereas teachers are viewed as passively receiving their instructions from above.
This first wave directly parallels the instructional leadership model discussed in section 3.1. It does not truly enable teachers to activate their professional agency in school development. Rather, it treats teachers in relation to assigned positions and formal roles. This wave by implication assumes that teaching is just “technical and managed work that requires close supervision” (Lieberman & Miller, 2005, p.152).
The captive roles of teachers in this wave gave rise to the second wave of teacher leadership, which capitalized on the strength of teachers as instructional leaders by using their knowledge, moving teachers away from managerial roles towards participative roles as curriculum developers and team leaders (Silva et al., 2000). This wave is connected to the distributed leadership model discussed earlier, since it values expertise and experience, but with a top-down delegation of roles. Such a shift initiates the extension of teachers’ roles beyond the classroom, into the activities of school leadership. The impact on professional engagement by teachers in this wave included a form of decentralization within schools from one-
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person leadership to a distributed style that reduced the managerial control of one person; however considerable top-down leadership through delegation was retained (Muijs & Harris, 2006).
The top-down delegation of roles to teachers in the second wave gave rise to the third wave of teacher leadership, which focused on teacher knowledge and collaborative activities, assisting colleagues with professional development activities, mentoring and problem solving (Silva et al., 2000). Teachers in this wave are encouraged to develop their professional knowledge and skills that foster collaboration among colleagues, and to develop a school culture of trust and support. Although this kind of collaborative culture is productive, it often remains top-down in its distribution and does not meet the needs of teachers, as teacher professional training and knowledge are imposed rather selected and developed by teacher for and by themselves (Martin, 2007). Teachers may, for example, be forced to meet to share best practice at the behest of authorities, but their voices are often not heard when they wish to speak on issues through their actual professional knowledge as teachers (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012). However, although frequently subjected to disempowerment through top-down leadership, teachers can in this wave lead daily while they are in their classroom, through informal teacher leadership practices; this in turn enhances their collegiality and professionalism and provides scope for further leadership development.
Galland (2008) summarizes teachers' role in the previous three waves as follows:
The first wave included traditional teacher leadership roles, such as serving as department chairs, while the second wave identified teachers as instructional leaders and took them out of the classrooms to serve as coaches and facilitators. The third wave of teacher leadership emphasizes the importance of teachers leading
from within the classroom and values collegiality and
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The third wave was not, however, the final stage of teacher leadership development. Pounder (2006) identifies a fourth wave called transformational classroom leadership. This kind of teacher leadership echoes Little (2002), who viewed teachers as “intellectual professionals through their subject expertise" (p. 922). Pounder (2006) correctly notes the intellectual and professional aspects of leadership within the classroom, which correlate with students' learning and progress. Thus, teacher leadership essentially entails the practice of leadership by teachers inside their classrooms, regardless of their formal position or delegation, as a matter of empowerment and agency. Transformational teacher leadership treats teachers as exemplary teachers with tangible benefits to themselves and their students' learning (Pounder, 2006). In this wave the concentration is on the leadership efforts that teachers accomplish for the benefits of their students' learning inside their classrooms. Pounder stated that transformational classroom leadership "enhanced learning, creativity and ethical behaviour" (p.541). Although the fourth wave explicitly adhered to the work of teachers inside classrooms for the benefits of their students' learning, it still does not develop a connection to the roles of teachers beyond their classrooms or developed the professional collegiality and collaboration. As will be shown in the discussion in Chapter 6, the views of teachers about teacher leadership make inextricable the aspects of teaching that fall inside and outside the classroom.
Given this overview of the existing literature on teacher leadership and its four waves of development, it is evident that there are limitations to the available models. To varying degrees, the four waves either overload teachers in terms of work or to varying degrees designate them only as followers. It will therefore be argued that it is necessary to firmly map social constructivist approaches onto notions of teacher leadership and focus on how teachers – within their
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communities of practice – can be further empowered to develop their professional agency. A theoretical framework which incorporates these features will be sought and analysed in the following section.