What Is ‘Teacher Leadership’?

‘Teacher Leadership’ can mean at least two (very) different things: teachers as leaders or teachers as led. The two are not, of course, mutually exclusive, as teachers can be leaders of learners in their classrooms, while at the same time reporting to their supervisors, from school principals to university presidents. ‘Teacher Leadership’ can also be visualized in different ways, for example, as a continuum, at one end of which the teacher is mostly in leadership mode. At the other end of that continuum, the teacher may be largely in ‘follower’ mode, which brings us to language and language education. From a language point-of-view, the ‘opposite’ of leader is often presented as ‘follower’, but that has connotations of loyalties and allegiances that may not apply. For example, when we hear a leader refer to ‘their followers’ we may think of some kind of cult.

It is not just language teachers who ponder the meaning, and the lack of clarity regarding the meaning of ‘teacher leadership’ has also been recognized in the published literature. For example, in 2004, Jennifer York-Barr and Karen Duke asked, as the title of their paper “What Do We Know About Teacher Leadership?” To address that question, York-Barr and Duke reviewed 20 years of published work in this area, from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Based on their extensive review, they found “numerous small-scale, qualitative studies that describe dimensions of teacher leadership practice, teacher leader characteristics, and conditions that promote and challenge teacher leadership” (p. 255). However, York-Barr and Duke also concluded that: “Less is known about how teacher leadership develops and about its effects. In addition, the construct of teacher leadership is not well defined, conceptually or operationally” (p. 255).

A dozen or so years later, in 2017, Julianne Wenner and Todd Campbell described York-Barr and Duke’s 2004 paper as “the seminal review on teacher leadership” (p. 134). Wenner and Campbell reviewed the published literature on the theoretical and empirical bases of teacher leadership, and found that still, even after all those years and all those publications in this area, “teacher leadership [is] rarely defined” (p. 134). However, they did find that such leadership is “focused on roles beyond the classroom, supporting the professional learning of peers, influencing policy/decision making, and ultimately targeting student learning” (p. 134). Based on their updated literature review, Wenner and Campbell arrived at three more conclusions: “(b) the research is not always theoretically grounded; (c) principals, school structures, and norms are important in empowering or marginalizing teacher leaders; and (d) very little teacher leadership research examines issues of social justice and equity” (p. 134). It is not clear why decades of research on teacher leadership has yet to produce a clear, concise and generally agreed upon definition or description of ‘teacher leadership’. Whatever the reasons for that, it is essential that whenever we use that phrase, we are completely clear about what we mean.

Addressing the Teacher Leadership Gap in Our Field

For around eight years by now, I have been writing about leadership in language education being a “gap in our field” (Curtis, 2013), when I noted that: “Books in our field on leadership and management are relatively rare, compared with books on methodology in TESOL, and compared with books on leadership and management in other fields, such as health care” In that 2013 article, I noted that: “given the many thousands of language program administrators (LPAs) all over the world, it is surprising that there are not more books in this area” (Curtis, 2013). Unfortunately, little has changed regarding the gap – which I would say, if anything, has become more of a hole in the intervening years. I would even go so far as to say that relatively little has changed even in the 20 years since I wrote my first published piece for TESOL International Association ‘Learning about leadership from TESOL mentors’ (Curtis, 2001), based on my year working with Association Past-President, professor Kathi Bailey, for one year as mentor, after I was awarded one of the first of the Association’s Leadership Mentoring Program (LMP) Awards

Those two decades eventually led to me developing a new, online EdD course for an online university, based in California, USA, titled ‘Leadership and Management in Language Education’ (LaMiLE). An older version of the course already existed, but the university and I agreed to ‘start from scratch’, as the material on the existing course was based on texts from 2008, so the course needed updating. To the university’s credit, they allowed me to try what was for them, and for the course participants, something new – no course books. Instead, I scoured the university’s online library for a collection of recent, relevant articles in this area, to address two of Wenner and Campbell’s (2017) findings that: “the research is not always theoretically grounded [and] very little teacher leadership research examines issues of social justice and equity” (p. 134).

After months of research, and based on an extensive needs analysis of the soon-to-be course participants, a new course description was created, which started by noting that: “There is an on-going dearth of books, articles and other publications on leadership in education, and an even greater scarcity of publications on language education leadership” (LaMiLE Course Guide, 2021, p. 1). The problem with trying to overlay texts from the for-profit world onto the largely non-profit world of foreign language education is that: “language teaching and learning is a markedly different endeavor from making and selling, for example, cars or other commercial commodities” (LaMiLE Course Guide, 2021, p. 1). The course description also makes “a significant distinction between management and leadership, rejecting the interchangeable use of those two terms” because “the literature on leadership and on management has grown exponentially in recent years” as a result of which “the two areas are now also distinctive and identifiably different” (LaMiLE Course Guide, 2021, p. 1). One of the other findings from the months of course-prep and research was that, although there can still be significant overlap between ‘leadership’ and ‘management’, the two are not the same thing at all, and the tendency to use the terms interchangeably has been one of the problems in moving the field forward.

The course objectives, based on the literature review and the needs analyses forms, were as follows:

“1. Distinguish clearly between management and leadership

2. Identify and describe unique features/aspects of their own educational context, in relation to language education leadership LEL

3. Explain the role of and the importance of equity in LEL

4. Explain the role of and the importance of social justice in LEL

5. Locate themselves within the scholar-practitioner professional frame-of-reference

6. Identify the relationships between teacher leadership and teacher professional development

7. Understand more fully the role of sex/gender in LEL, especially in relation to their own sex/gender

8. Identify the relationships between the theories and the practices of LEL

9. Appreciate the differences between ‘dominant’ and ‘minority’ understandings of LEL, in terms of diversity of cultural perspectives

10. Identify the affective challenges of LEL, including isolation and loneliness

11. Apply a set of professional standards for educational leaders to their own contexts

12. Understand more fully the critical importance of empathy in LEL

13. Discuss recent developments in the relatively new area of ‘authenticity’ in leadership

14. Employ systematic, data-based research methods to the study of LEL

15. Gather, analyze and present questionnaire and interview data from leaders in language education

16. Develop an in-depth understanding of an LEL area of particular interest to the individual course participant.”

As the saying goes, ‘hindsight is 2020’, and looking back on the course, that was probably an over-ambitious set of objectives – given that the course is only eight weeks long, and 100% online. However, to the great credit of the course participants, each of them worked extremely diligently and kept up with what turned out to be an extremely challenging volume of material to work through in a highly compacted timeline.

References

Curtis, A. (2001). Learning about leadership from TESOL mentors. TESOL Matters, 11(2), 4.

Curtis, A. (24 September, 2013). A gap in our field: Leadership in language education. TESOL Association MultiBreifs. http://exclusive.multibriefs.com/content/a-gap-in-our-field-leadership-in-language-education

Leadership and Management in Language Education Course Guide (2021). Anaheim University. http://online.anaheim.edu/enrol/index.php?id=1282

Wenner, J.A., & Campbell, T. (2017). The theoretical and empirical basis of teacher leadership: A review of the literature. Review of Educational Research, 87(1), 134-171. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/0034654316653478

York-Barr, J., & Duke, K. (2004). What do we know about teacher leadership? Findings from two decades of scholarship. Review of Educational Research, 74(3), 255-316. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/00346543074003255?journalCode=rera