Creating a Culture of Teacher Leadership

Developing Teachers as Leaders: Shared Leadership is Not Delegation

Posted March 13, 2013 by Terry Wilhelm, founder and owner Educators 2000, and Educational Consultant.

What is the difference between shared leadership and delegation? An effective principal must be able to use both, but they are not the same.

Delegation is operational; shared leadership is developmental

As a principal, I might delegate the annual updating of the safe schools plan to a willing and interested teacher. Although I sign the final plan after she goes over the changes with me, updating the plan personally would not be a priority task for the use of my time, given the far more important work associated with being the “learning leader” of my school.

Simply put, delegation is handing off a task to an already-capable staff member. This could be an assistant principal, secretary or clerk, counselor, or a teacher. The key is that the person already possesses the skills to complete the task satisfactorily. While you may need to supply additional information, you do not need to sit side by side with the person in order for them to learn to do the task (in a delegated task, that would be micromanagement, which is both undesirable and counterproductive). Delegation lends itself well to operational tasks that are well-established and not difficult to run.

Sharing leadership is more complex. It is a dynamic process. It is developmental and ongoing. Leadership can be shared with individuals or with teams. This post will explore sharing leadership with an individual.

How to begin sharing leadership with teachers one-on-one

Consider the facets of the role that will be shared. For example, if I want to begin sharing leadership of the student study team (SST) with a teacher who will ultimately assume full-time responsibility for the role, I would think through all the role’s requirements, including chairing the meetings, maintaining therecords, and sending reminders to teachers that their student’s SST is next on the schedule. The most complex part of a role like this is not the paperwork but the facilitation of the meetings, ensuring that everyone is heard, and ensuring that the referring teacher leaves the meeting with a set of strategies to implement with the student.

Start the process by meeting with the teacher who is interested in learning this role, first making sure that s/he is indeed interested and has the time to begin learning and eventually assuming full responsibility for the role. I would also only select a teacher who has demonstrated the organizational skills and follow-through needed for this kind of role. We would discuss its various tasks and responsibilities. I would start by continuing to chair the meetings, but having the teacher sit side-by-side with me, perhaps being the recorder. We would meet briefly before and after each meeting for planning and debriefing.

Gradually, I would begin having him or her take over routine parts of the agenda, continuing to meet before and after each meeting. S/he would eventually take over the entire meeting, but I would continue to attend, initially the full meeting, then tapering off. However, I’d make sure to attend if we were going to discuss a particularly needy student or meet with a teacher who typically resisted putting classroom interventions into practice.

Principals should use both tools for effective leadership

There are certain aspects of the principalship that can be neither shared nor delegated. But the time is now to begin to share and delegate what we can if we are to be effective leaders. Delegation requires letting go of perfectionism. Someone else may not do the perfect job you would do, but they can do a very adequate job. When sharing leadership with teachers, you may find that not everyone agrees with you 100 percent of the time. But you don’t want “rubber stamp” teacher leaders; there is group wisdom that is greater than the leader’s individual wisdom, and you will greatly magnify your own effectiveness if you allow that wisdom to grow and flourish through shared leadership.

Developing Teachers as Leaders: Empowering Teachers to Share the Stage

Posted March 15, 2013 by Terry Wilhelm

As a principal, you are no doubt limited on staff meeting time. You may have no more than two 60-minute staff meetings per month. Teacher contracts vary by district, but whatever you have, it probably feels inadequate.

How do you invest your valuable meeting time?

What’s the best way to capitalize on face time with your whole staff, which can be a rare commodity? Increasingly, principals are investing it effectively for professional development (PD). After all, weekly emails may be used to disseminate information.

However, there will always be occasions when a quick, whole-staff announcement or brief business/operational discussion is necessary.

In either case, staff meetings provide an ideal opportunity for principals to begin developing teachers as leaders.

How can teachers share leadership of meetings?

At the very advanced end of the continuum, a principal might eventually — after strategic development of teacher leaders’ skills — turn over staff meetings completely to the teachers. This is akin to the concept of a faculty senate in higher education. In this model, when the principal (or university official) has an agenda item, s/he submits it to the faculty member currently responsible for coordinating the meetings, along with a requested time frame (such as 10 minutes). Once meeting usage has evolved from mostly business to mostly PD, the principal, as the lead member of the Leadership Team, may have a role in the team-developed PD plan – or not.

Key meeting ingredient: Effective agendas

Even in the beginning stages of sharing leadership of meetings, the value of assigning time frames to agenda items or professional development plan segments cannot be overstated. It keeps the facilitator and the group on track, assures the group that their time will not be wasted, and symbolically respects the professionalism of the entire staff. The agenda, whether business/operational or PD — should be distributed in advance, as well as posted on a large chart or white board, with time frames noted. Meetings must begin and end on time.

All of these best practices for meetings and PD also apply to the model of the principal running the show solo. However, that model is far less powerful than empowering teachers as leaders.

If the upcoming meeting is strictly a business meeting, collaborative agenda-building ideally involves the whole staff. Tools can range from a public agenda-in-process on the whiteboard in the staff room to a Google doc that anyone on the staff can access and edit. Anyone with an item simply adds the item, his/her name, and the requested time frame. The meeting chair or coordinator finalizes the agenda so that it complies with the contractual time frame available.

Essential facilitation tools to give teacher leaders

Two essential tools to help both principals and teacher leaders facilitate meetings effectively are group norms and a “parking lot.” (Consider using as your “parking lot.” It’s a great way to model using technology).

Group norms will be addressed in detail in an upcoming post. A “parking lot” is simply a blank piece of chart paper or area on the whiteboard where a topic can be listed that either is running overtime (remember, each item has an allotted time frame) so it is tabled for a future meeting, or an item not on the agenda that arises, having the potential to derail the time frames (or the whole meeting). The meeting facilitator simply says, “Looks like we need to add this to the parking lot,” and someone assigned to that task for the meeting records a phrase or word to capture it.

It is important not to enforce time frames slavishly. The facilitator may say, “Excuse me, Linda, we’re out of time for this topic. Let me poll the group. Colleagues, would you be willing to give this topic another 2 minutes?” Use group consensus to determine whether to allot more time, or put the item on the parking lot.

Principal modeling and transparency

As a principal begins to develop teacher leaders, modeling and explicitly labeling these facilitation behaviors is important. This kind of transparency will build the confidence of teacher leaders. One-to-one conversations with shy teachers who want to put an item on the agenda, but want someone else to handle it, can often be instrumental in boosting their confidence enough to convince them to take the risk. Moving into the use of these meeting skills can also begin to ameliorate the problem of staff members who dominate others in a public setting, simply by making it structurally more difficult for them to do so in a carefully planned and executed meeting.

Developing Teachers as Leaders: Gradual Release of Control

Posted April 10, 2013 by Terry Wilhelm

In recent posts, we have explored the rationale and benefits for principals to share leadership with teachers, discussed the difference between sharing leadership and delegation, and examined staff meetings as a beginning place for teachers to step onstage.

It is now time to approach a thorny issue: a principal’s willingness to give up some degree of control. This is not to be taken lightly. In my experience, some principals are simply unwilling or unable to make even beginning steps toward sharing leadership because it means relinquishing some degree of control. Could this be true of you?

How willing are you to share leadership?

Here are some questions for principals to consider:

  • Do I worry that teachers may not be able to perform a particular leadership function as well as I can?
  • If that turns out to be true, in spite of my personal attention to developing their skills, what is the worst that could happen?
  • Do I worry that teachers – or a teacher – might perform a particular leadership function better than I do?
  • If that turns out to be the case, what will people say? Will it be a poor reflection on me (could my job be in danger), or will people applaud my decision to develop teacher leadership because it complements my own?
  • Am I uncomfortable with the possibility that my teacher leaders will challenge decisions I would make differently if they were not involved?

A tiered approach for decisions about decision-making

If the third area is troublesome, a helpful “tiered” approach will help clarify for teachers how and when their input will be used:

  • Level one decisions: I will make the decision with no teacher input. Concerns in this category include school safety/security and personnel and student issues that require confidentiality. Many of the myriad decisions a principal makes in a given day are not important enough to bother busy teachers with.
  • Level two decisions: I will solicit teacher input but I will still make the decision.
  • Level three decisions: We will make the decision together, and I do not have a strong stake in having the outcome go a particular way.
  • Level four decisions: I will put the decision on the table for discussion and the team will make it.

Using these levels and being fully transparent about them up front will help you avoid the temptation to take the disastrous action of reversing a team decision — disastrous because of the principal’s loss of credibility with the teachers on the team.

What levels of decisions should include teachers as decision makers?

Among the kinds of decisions that should fall into levels three and four are those that involve teacher collaboration, curriculum, instruction, and assessment, and many involving school-wide climate and discipline.

Shared leadership is not abdication

It is crucial to understand that sharing leadership is not abdication. Even when the principal decides to put an issue on the table for a team decision (level four), his/her influence is still important, and the team will still want to know where s/he stands on the issue. Ultimately, the principal is still responsible for everything that happens in the school, and sharing leadership does not change this.

Benefits of shared leadership

Nothing moves a school ahead — with consistently improving outcomes for all students — faster or more powerfully than teacher ownership of the improvement initiatives. “Buy-in” is never a strong enough force to gain serious momentum. Many schools have numerous staff members who minimally “bought in” to past initiatives, but often this amounted to no more than lip service. By contrast, when the teacher leaders of a school take ownership, even the most outspoken naysayers lose power.