Background: Through its Children First initiative, New York City policymakers promoted collaborative inquiry as a process for helping administrators and teachers use student data to improve instruction and raise student achievement. Since 2007, city schools were expected to engage higher proportions of faculty in the inquiry work each year.…

Many educators agree that we already know how to foster student success, so what is keeping common sense from becoming common practice? The author provides step-by-step guidance for overcoming the barriers to adopting the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) and achieving equity and excellence for all students. As an experienced teacher and…

This article focuses on teacher leadership, an important dimension of the work of the Leadership for Learning network which is the focus of this special issue. More specifically, the article focuses on the launch of a journal--"Teacher Leadership"--as a strategy for promoting key values: shared leadership, teachers' leadership of…

Never before has the need been so great for classroom teachers to become agents of change and position themselves as problem solvers at the school building level. Teachers are uniquely positioned to assume leadership roles on a variety of tasks that could transform schools from more traditional workplaces into professional learning communities.…

The purpose of this qualitative, heuristic inquiry was two-fold: First, the study explored the lived experiences of four teacher leaders working in one comprehensive high school in a district where the researcher is superintendent. The second purpose was to learn from the experiences of the teacher leaders to inform district level actions that…

Author Douglas B. Reeves illuminates the way forward to higher student achievement through a framework for teacher leadership. Learn why the best way to expand and extend the most powerful teaching strategies is for teachers to observe the practices of other teachers and school administrators to build teacher leader networks that encourage the…

Research shows that professional learning can have a powerful effect on teacher skills and knowledge, and on how well students learn. To be effective, however, professional learning for teachers needs to be conducted in the ways that it is in many high achieving countries--continuously, collaboratively, and with a focus on teaching specific…

A decade has passed since a few union leaders formed the network known as Teacher Union Reform Network (TURN) to search for innovative ways to enhance education. Selling their message has not always been easy. Created in 1995, TURN was the brain child of Adam Urbanski, the president of the Rochester (N.Y.) Teachers Association for the past 25…

Inverness Research has served as the external evaluation group for the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession (CSTP) since its inception in 2003. As evaluators, Inverness conceptualizes projects as investments in improvement, and it examines the returns on those investments. The direct services of projects and their immediate outcomes…

"Our culture underestimates teachers--not only the complexity of their work, but also their potential to contribute substantively to the dialogue about school reform," write the authors of this article. Online teacher networks have the potential to transform traditional concepts of teacher leadership, enabling teachers to bond together into…

In these times of high-stakes accountability, all professional educators must learn how to gather, analyze, and use data to improve teaching and learning, becoming efficient generators and consumers of data. The intended audiences for this book are school and district administrators and teacher leaders who recognize the need to use data to…

Using case studies of four schools in three districts, this article explores how leadership is distributed in districts and asks about the role of teacher leaders. It proposes that teacher leaders and districts can share three leadership tasks: procuring and distributing materials, monitoring improvement, and developing people. The district and…

The authors conducted a quasi-experimental investigation of effects on achievement by grade-level teams focused on improving learning. For 2 years (Phase 1), principals-only training was provided. During the final 3 years (Phase 2), school-based training was provided for principals and teacher leaders on stabilizing team settings and using…

This unique collection of chapters takes the reader on a tour to explore innovative preservice and inservice teacher education practices from many regions of the United States, Canada and the world. Each of the chapters offers an authentic, documentary account of successful initiatives that break the traditional mold of teacher education. Section…

There is a vast body of research confirming the important influence of the classroom teacher on student achievement. A key issue, then, is how the quality of teaching and learning within individual classrooms can be influenced and improved. This paper argues that educational leadership is a key influence on the quality of teaching and learning and…