One popular approach to teacher leadership is to identify certain teachers as particularly successful, then have others learn from them. Collaborative leadership, in contrast, looks at leadership as a quality that anyone can have. In this model, the goal is not to figure out who is best. Instead, teachers share their unique talents and interests…

This piece explores questions of power, conflict, and community in education through a story of Chicago educators engaging in experiential inquiry processes. One of these processes is a "Theatre of the Oppressed" exercise for dealing with conflict in education settings. The other process described here focuses on a text that emerged from…

Urban education and its contexts have changed in powerful ways. Old paradigms are being eclipsed by global forces of privatization and markets and new articulations of race, class, and urban space. These factors and more set the stage for Pauline Lipman's insightful analysis of the relationship between education policy and the neoliberal economic,…

This study focus on the question: "How do high school principals, regarded as having skills in developing the instructional capacity of teachers, exercise their leadership to promote the development of teacher's instructional capacity in three primary contexts; whole school, content department or grade level teams and individually?"…

A poorly performing school is like a complex puzzle with its pieces haphazardly scattered. To achieve coherence and improve performance, a principal must have a vision of how the completed puzzle should look. Schools that have effectively implemented instructional models have principals that are puzzle solvers. To fit diverse needs into place and…

This study investigated professional development as provided through the Teacher Leadership Academy (TLA) model used in rural Illinois area school districts and district consortia. Surveys were distributed to TLA participants that sought their perceptions of the desirability, involvement, and feasibility of school reform in general and the…

Educators often ignore the political requirements of urban reform in their focus on the research and models that guide it. Conversely, political scientists frequently miss the differences among reforms in their focus on coalitions and resources. Integrating Clarence N. Stone's concept of "civic capacity" with an educator's view of reform…