Casey Reason - Mirror Images: New Reflections on Teacher Leadership

MIRROR
IMAGES

For Janice
Inspiring teacher, counselor, and principal
Loving mother, wife, and grandmother

MIRROR IMAGES

New Reflections on Teacher Leadership

CASEY REASON / CLAIR REASON

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Copyright 2011 by Corwin

All rights reserved. When forms and sample documents are included, their use is authorized only by educators, local school sites, and/or noncommercial or nonprofit entities that have purchased the book. Except for that usage, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reason, Casey S.

Mirror images: new reflections on teacher leadership / Casey Reason, Clair Reason.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4129-9404-0 (pbk.)
1. TeachersProfessional relationships. 2. Teacher participation in administration. 3. Educational leadership. I. Reason, Clair. II. Title.

LB1775.R34 2011
371.1dc23

2011029247

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

11 12 13 14 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The purpose of this book is to support and empower teachers. By taking a comprehensive look at some new and empowering images of teacher leadership, we hope this text reveals the unique and profound opportunities teachers have today to inspire transformative change in the classroom and beyond. While we seek to inspire you with clear images of what teacher leadership can mean, we also have provided numerous Monday-morning-ready strategies and action steps in each chapter. These will help you not only understand what it means to be a teacher leader today, but will support you in your transformation. We hope this effort is a shared one and that you and teaching colleagues from down the hall and around the world can work together to redefine what teacher leadership can mean for your professional journey and the future prospects of our profession.

You most likely remember the morning before your first day on the job as a teacher. As you zipped, buttoned, and straightened your clothes, you may have looked in the mirror and tried to envision yourself as a teacher. Your brain conjured up images of teachers youd known and images of teachers from movies and literature. You reflected on the new teacher in the mirror and how he or she would look in the classroom.

It is no secret that our actions are driven by the visions we have of ourselves. A new lawyer may visualize him- or herself trying the case of the decade. A local pianist may see him- or herself playing to a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall. Our advancement in our chosen profession is driven by these images we carry with us for what we hope to become. The pursuit of this vision is driven by what we see in the mirror and what we believe will someday be staring back at us.

We use the image of the mirror throughout this book because we believe the teaching profession has been flooded with negative, disempowering images of what we do and who we are. We believe our work is heroic and transformative. Yet there are so many images of teaching that portray our journey as pedestrian and dull. Teachers themselves are often characterized as pedantic and uninspiring.

We hope new generations of teachers will look in the mirror each morning with a renewed sense of whats possible in teaching. We hope they see a dynamic teacher leader capable of leading transformation for their students, their school, their community, and the world. For teachers to see these new images, we must do a better job of creating a vision for what it means to be a teacher leader in schools. This book seeks to provide that vision.

Many people believe teacher leadership in school is demonstrated by quasi-administrative behaviors. Through the decades, we have known numerous well-intentioned, high-performing teachers who have seen their ascent in the profession limited to providing input in areas in school governance that are more about management than leadership. Rather than developing a meaningful voice in school, these teachers instead find themselves giving input on policy handbooks and building budget allocations. While it certainly takes management to lead, our profession has summarily underused the thoughtful creativity of veteran teachers.

A second misconception involves the difference between teacher leadership and delegated leadership. In many schools, the principal is an excellent delegator. He or she may carefully choose some of the most talented teachers on the staff to execute certain tasks or projects. Thus, teacher leadership has often been seen as the development of highly skilled, go-to delegates.

The advancement of teacher leadership should go beyond this model and put teachers at the center of the change process. This enables teachers to help construct a vision, establish a plan for change, and then own the implementation of the change as well as the results. We arent against delegation. We advocate an evolved notion of what is possible when teachers are given the chance to lead change.

The literature is replete with definitions of teacher leadership. In 2002, for example, Crowther, Kaagan, Ferguson, and Hann described teacher leadership as an action that transforms teaching and learning in a school, and ties school and community together on behalf of learning, and that advances social sustainability and quality of life for a community (p. xvii).

Patterson and Patterson (2004) said that teacher leaders are identified as those who collaborate with colleagues with the intent of improving teaching and learning in both a formal and informal capacity. Teacher leadership has also been defined as the building of capacity to transform schooling (Lieberman & Miller, 2005, p. 153) and the leadership role from one individual to a community of professionals committed to improved student learning (Katzenmeyer & Moller, 2001, p. 2).