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Paper
The Nature of Teacher Leadership: Lessons Learned from the California Subject Matter Projects
I. INTRODUCTION Teacher leadership is the raison d'être of the California Subject Matter Projects (CSMPs). Since 1988, the California Subject Matter Projects (CSMPs) have been funded by the state of California to provide discipline-specific professional development for teachers in the subject areas required for high school graduation. Each year the institutes and other in-depth professional development programs, offered by nearly one hundred CSMP sites, are able to work directly with almost five percent of the more than 200,000 teachers in the state. A major purpose of these institutes is to foster the development of teacher leaders — individuals who are skilled in teaching specific disciplines and in sharing that expertise with other teachers. Developing teacher leadership, it is argued, can result in a "multiplier effect" and a way of "leveraging" relatively scarce professional development resources. CSMP "teacher leaders" work with their colleagues in venues that range from their local classrooms to national conferences. The CSMP teacher leaders also assume a major role in designing and implementing the activities of CSMP sites, insuring that they remain responsive to the dynamic needs and challenges teachers confront in each discipline. Statistics gathered by Inverness Research Associates from CSMP sites have substantiated that through teacher leadership — i.e. a "teachers teaching teachers" model for professional development — the CSMP influence extends outward to reach 21 percent of the state's teaching force, or 46,720 teachers annually.1 Testing Some Underlying Assumptions About Teacher Leadership While much is known about the professional development work that takes place at CSMP sites, little has been known or documented about the less tangible but nevertheless intriguing work of the teacher leaders who carry the work forward into the field. Given the centrality of teacher leadership to the goals and activities of the CSMPs, we felt it was important to understand its nature thoroughly. We asked teacher leaders in interviews and surveys the following kinds of questions:
We posed these questions to over 200 teacher leaders so that we could better understand the realities of teacher leadership as it is practiced in the field. We also wanted to use these understandings to check some of the assumptions that underlie the approach of the CSMPs. The CSMP model holds certain beliefs about the nature of teacher leadership and its role in the design of effective professional development2. The most relevant of these to a study of teacher leadership are:
These tenets form the basis for the work of the CSMPs. By presenting an "insider's" view of the practice of teacher leadership as it actually takes place in the field, we are implicitly testing the validity and utility of these basic CSMP tenets. We believe that the picture of teacher leadership that we gained through our interviews and surveys, and that we present in this report, can thus greatly inform the work of the CSMPs as well as other projects that seek to develop and support teacher leaders. Sources of Data We began our study with a statewide search for recognized teacher leaders. We asked CSMP site directors, as well as county office professional development staff and other educational leaders, to nominate teachers who represented for them good examples of teacher leadership. These nominations provided us with the names of over two hundred teacher leaders (both associated with, and outside of, the CSMP community). From this pool we selected twelve teacher leaders and asked them to be "case studies" for our research. We selected teachers who represented each of the teaching disciplines of the CSMPs, who worked in rural, urban and suburban settings, and who taught diverse students from elementary through high school. We conducted several interviews with each teacher and created "profiles" of teacher leadership based on their experiences and perceptions. From the study of these twelve teachers, we were able to glean ideas about the motivation and goals teachers bring to their leadership activities, the realities of the day-to-day practice of teacher leadership, the typical problems or obstacles teacher leaders confront and the kinds of support teacher leaders are receiving through their connection with the CSMP community. To test our theories about the practice of teacher leadership that emerged from the case studies, we used the words and experiences of the case study teacher leaders to create a survey which we administered to our pool of two hundred teacher leaders. The results of the survey verified, in an even more powerful and compelling way, a conceptualization of teacher leadership put forward by the case study participants. The view of leadership put forward by over 200 teachers differs strikingly from a stereotypical and largely instrumental view of teacher leaders (e.g. people who are trained to conduct workshops for other teachers). The traditional, and largely hierarchical, notions of leadership do not adequately describe the complex and more collegial relationships we discovered in our study of actual teacher leaders. Overview of This Report Following this Introduction (Section I), we begin a presentation of our findings (Section II) in the same way that we began the study — by concentrating on the experience of individual teacher leaders. We present a profile of a single teacher leader in order to share with the reader the depth, richness and complexity that we encountered throughout this study3. In the same way that one can "see the world in a single grain of sand," we hope that the reader will then better understand the generalizations we draw in later parts of this report. In Section III, we shift perspectives dramatically, moving from a focus on one individual teacher leader to a statewide policy perspective. We briefly review recent and historical perspectives about the professionalization of teachers and the role of teacher leadership within the educational policy context of California. In Section IV we return to a mid-level perspective on teacher leadership. We briefly summarize what we learned from those educational leaders across the state who were involved in nominating teachers for the study. Their comments and criteria for selecting teacher leaders are highly illuminative about the ways in which administrators and those involved in professional development think about teacher leadership. We then continue this section with our main discussion of the findings of our study, presenting the teacher leaders' views about the nature of and rationale for their leadership activities. We discuss the origins of their teacher leadership; the leadership roles they assume; and the arenas in which they work with other teachers. We talk extensively about the relationship between the classroom practices of teacher leaders and the ideas they bring to their leadership activities. Finally, we identify key barriers and issues they face in seeking to work with their colleagues. In Section V we extrapolate from our findings to draw some implications for the design and work of CSMP sites. The themes that emerge from our interviews and survey data clearly suggest that such issues as selecting participants, connecting professional development to classroom practice, providing multiple opportunities for leadership and establishing an overall culture of inquiry and reflection are key in determining how effectively each CSMP site is in developing and supporting teacher leadership. Footnotes 3 We also present two other similar profiles in Appendix A.
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