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Research Says / Teacher Leadership: No Guarantee of Success

Bryan Goodwin

October 2013 | Volume 71 | Number 2
Leveraging Teacher Leadership Pages 78-80

In 1985, General Motors made a bombshell announcement: It was launching a subsidiary that would be a "different kind of car company." This new company—Saturn—would be based on listening to customers, rethinking design from bumper to bumper, focusing on quality and accountability, and engaging employees as full team members.

Twenty-five years later, despite buyer enthusiasm, reviewer praise, and an initially profitable operation, GM shut down Saturn. What went wrong? Industry observers say Saturn was doomed by a dysfunctional corporate culture and hostility from more traditional GM divisions. In the end, the Saturn brand was starved of reinvestment resources and the ability to make the kind of cars it wanted to make (Hanna, 2010). Saturn went from being a good idea to a brilliant failure.

In many ways, the concept of teacher leadership may not be so different from that of Saturn: an appealing, commonsense idea that, despite its seeming promise of creating a different kind of teacher, is by no means guaranteed to succeed.

Absence of Evidence

To date, few rigorous studies have measured how teacher leadership affects student achievement (York-Barr & Duke, 2004). One obstacle to researching teacher leadership is that the concept itself often remains ill-defined. Depending on the school or district, it can imply an informal or formal role. Even when defined formally, the responsibilities of teacher leaders can vary: Some teacher leaders are deeply involved in setting the direction of instructional reform; others are consumed with administrivia—facilitating meetings, ordering instructional supplies, and performing other duties that may be important but have little influence on student learning (York-Barr & Duke, 2004).

However, as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So before we dismiss teacher leadership for lack of data, we should parse out some of the typical roles and expectations for teacher leaders and connect the dots between the research on those roles and student performance.

Teacher Leadership Supported by Research

Coaching with a Framework

Perhaps the most salient role identified for teacher leaders is to serve as teacher coaches. Here, the research is fairly clear: Teacher coaching is a more powerful means of helping teachers turn knowledge into practice than more traditional "sit-and-get" teacher professional development (Joyce & Showers, 2002).

However, coaching can fall flat if coaches lack a structured approach. A study of an initiative that provided loosely structured peer coaching for mathematics teachers, for example, found no positive effects on student achievement; the researchers noted that coaching conversations tended to be superficial and nonconfrontational, providing little real guidance to teachers. Coaches had received no specific instructions about how to coach, and they were intentionally identified not as experts but as peers tasked with collaborating with their mentees to apply the lessons of a one- to two-week training program in their classrooms (Murray, Ma, & Mazur, 2009).

In contrast, a randomized control trial study of another coaching program, which was tied to a clear framework for identifying teacher behaviors that support higher levels of student engagement (the Classroom Assessment Scoring System) as well as a five-step process for coaching that involved experts reviewing classroom videos and helping teachers identify next steps for improvement, found significant effects after two years—the equivalent of moving student scores from the 50th to the 59th percentile (Allen, Pianta, Gregory, Mikami, & Lun, 2011).

Differentiating Coaching

Research also suggests that teacher coaching is most effective when it's differentiated according to teacher needs. As reported previously in this column (Goodwin, 2011), more than two dozen studies funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences found that many well-known instructional improvement programs did not produce significant results, even when they included teacher professional development and coaching. A positive outlier among these studies, however, was the K-PAVE program, which used a scaffolded coaching model to focus support on teachers who were struggling the most to implement the program (Goodson, Wolf, Bell, Turner, & Finney, 2010).

One promising approach to differentiated coaching is the gradual increase of responsibility model (Collett, 2012), in which the nature of coaching changes as teachers grow more knowledgeable of and adept with new practices. Coaches initiate the process by modeling best practices and then observing teachers and making recommendations. As teachers improve, coaching interactions shift toward asking questions, providing affirmations, and giving praise.

Sharing Leadership

Another key role often identified for teacher leaders is to share in the overall instructional leadership of the school itself—for example, assisting in analyzing performance data and developing improvement plans. Here again, we can find some important research dots to connect. Hallinger and Heck's (2010) four-year study of 198 elementary schools, for example, reported that shared leadership had a positive effect on students' math and reading achievement. Another study (Leithwood & Mascall, 2008), based on 2,570 teacher responses from 90 elementary and secondary schools, found that collective leadership explained a significant proportion of variation in student achievement across schools. Higher-achieving schools awarded leadership influence to all school members and other stakeholders to a greater degree than lower-achieving schools. (p. 1)

The School Culture Connection

Although it may be reasonable to expect that engaging teachers in leadership roles can help change school culture, research suggests the inverse also occurs: School culture often impedes teacher leadership (York-Barr & Duke, 2004). For example, one comparative case study (Hart, 1994) of a teacher career ladder program that carved out a new role for peer coaching unearthed a tale of two schools. One school embraced the new role; the other rejected it. The key difference between these two schools was the prevailing norms in the buildings. In the second school, teachers were accustomed to working alone and to infrequent communication with the principal. There, simply designating a few teachers as peer coaches did little to alter, and indeed, may have exacerbated, the school's dysfunctional climate.

Recently, a national panel that reviewed the literature on teacher leadership concluded that the role itself requires a shift in the culture of schools (Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium, 2011). That is, the presence of teacher leaders can conflict with many schools' prevailing cultures of nonconfrontation, egalitarianism, and autonomy. In such environments, teachers may resent someone being called from their ranks to offer what they may view as unsolicited feedback.

Proceed—With Careful Planning

One final caution to draw from the research is that not everyone is suited to becoming a teacher leader. Case studies have found that those who are most effective in the position have earned the respect and trust of their colleagues and are able to develop strong critical-friend relationships with other teachers, which often requires deft role shifting (York-Barr & Duke, 2004). In other words, simply tapping people who have "put in their time" to become teacher leaders is a recipe for failure.

The notion of carving out a new role for teachers to be involved with peer improvement and instructional decisions makes good sense—just as carving a new kind of car company out of an old one made sense. However, given that teacher leadership remains an unproven concept, it requires thoughtful planning and close tracking of how it actually plays out in schools to ensure that, unlike Saturn, the wheels don't come off.

Bryan Goodwin is chief operating officer at McREL, Denver, Colorado. He is the author of The 12 Touchstones of Good Teaching: A Checklist for Staying Focused Every Day (ASCD, 2013).