There are two types of school leadership initiatives. One takes existing leaders and gives them increasing leadership responsibilities. The other engages in an organic process that grows leaders from a crop of teachers who, at first may not appear to be leaders at all. This article presents a story about the second type of initiative and how it…

Richard DuFour, a leading advocate for creating professional learning communities in schools, shares his insights on why teaching has become an "embattled profession" and the steps teachers and school leaders can take to enhance teachers' practice and their working lives. DuFour explains how recent reforms aimed at educators themselves…

While most educators believe working in teams is valuable, not all team efforts lead to instructional improvement. Through richly detailed case studies, "The Power of Teacher Teams" demonstrates how schools can transform their teams into more effective learning communities that foster teacher leadership. The benefits of successful teacher teams…

Most people are familiar with the practice of medical rounds, in which interns and mentoring physicians visit patients in an institutional setting, observe their various conditions, discuss what they observed, and analyze possible treatment options and outcomes. In the medical profession, making these rounds is viewed as a significant and highly…

Exemplary practice within a northern Manitoba high school encourages student learning. Through the utilization of collaborative practice in consistent school-wide plans, teachers have provided beneficial education to learners (Sagor, 2011). The direction of educational programs can be provided through the expertise of teachers within the school.…

Purpose: Findings from a multi-year project entitled, Teachers Working Together to develop and implement culturally and linguistically responsive practices (TWT-CLRP) conducted at a large urban 6-12 school that predominantly served Latino emerging bilingual learners will be shared. All teachers shifted practices and adopted an ethos that all…

This is the story of a teacher leader who helped lead change in an urban elementary school by creating a new culture of support for beginning teachers. Specifically, she led focused, collaborative inquiry around discussion-based teaching to improve teaching effectiveness, and she created a school-wide coalition of support for beginning teachers to…

While principals and systemic leaders have a significant role to play in leading, supporting and structuring mathematics education, their influence tends to be indirect and general. However, middle leaders such as curriculum leaders, senior teachers, and faculty heads, exercise their leadership much closer to the classroom, and as such they can…

School reform policies and school administrators are increasingly positioning teacher leaders (TLs) with the responsibility to facilitate professional learning for their colleagues. Although ample evidence exists to suggest the need for facilitators to be highly skilled for teachers' learning to be optimized, there is a dearth of research…

Problem Statement: Teacher leadership has recently attracted the attention of scholars and practitioners due to its promotion of student learning and school improvement. Thus, there is a need for investigating the construct of teacher leadership and its relationship with various organizational and personal variables. Considering the fact that…

The purpose of this study is to understand special education teachers' beliefs regarding their roles and responsibilities and to determine how these beliefs differ among more and less accomplished teachers. In this study, the authors examine the interviews of special education teachers identified as either more or less accomplished based on the…

This study elaborates the many ways that teachers lead work with colleagues to improve teaching and learning, and their understanding of their work as leadership. Through qualitative case studies of seven Maine schools and a review of the literature, the authors developed a conceptual model, Spheres of Teacher Leadership Action for Learning. They…

This article reports the findings of the 2011 results of 'very rural' Kentucky high schools on the Teaching, Empowering, Leading and Learning (TELL) Survey to determine whether differences existed between high and low performing rural schools across specific survey items. Schools with ACT scores one standard deviation (or more) above their…

Teachers exhibit leadership behaviors of a service nature in their collaborative work with fellow educators. When additional school staff follow the teacher's example by engaging in servant leadership behaviors, a chain-like reaction or virtuous effect may occur. The researcher hypothesized that significant levels of agreement for servant…

This report is the second in a series from a collaboration of nine leading organizations working to advance teaching and elevate the profession. For years, education leaders have sought to pinpoint how teachers become effective in order to better leverage teachers' impact on student learning and improve student outcomes. Teacher leadership is…