Defining Teacher-Leader Roles and Responsibilities

This qualitative study examined a professional development school partnership  between a local state university and a K–5 inner-city school in the southeastern U.S. over a year to discover how the school fostered teacher leadership. The report discusses three dynamics that foster teacher leadership—professional development opportunities, co-teaching, and collective teacher efficacy—and the elements of the school culture that were found to support teacher leadership.

These tools from Public Impact are intended to help principals build leadership skills of teacher leaders. Designed for use in Opportunity Culture schools, principals in any schools can use these tools to lead instructional teams of teacher-leaders who in turn support and guide all of a school’s teachers.   

This report by the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) includes insights from effective teachers on how teacher leadership affects their practice. It explores how teacher-leaders can contribute to instructional improvements in their schools, and offers policy recommendations to support teacher leadership at the local and state levels.

Based on the premise that distributing responsibility for developing teachers across a group of talented teachers yields improvements in teaching and learning, this report identifies successful “distributed leadership” models and the five key principles that distributed leadership models share, and outlines best practices for phasing in a successful distributed leadership model. 

This report seeks to identify the components of a sustainable, effective teacher career continuum by studying eight varied school districts—high-poverty, low-poverty, urban, suburban, and rural—across the United States during a three-year period. The report describes and analyzes key elements of a viable teacher career continuum in sections on design features and enabling conditions.

This report analyzes professional learning policies and practices in four school systems where students consistently score well on the Programme for International Student Assessment: Shanghai, British Columbia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Findings illustrate how professional learning is a part of daily school life and is reinforced by school organization and policies.

Minxuan Zhang played a key role in developing Shanghai's education system; in this report, he shares his insights on teacher development, a key element of the system, which he illustrates in terms of a triangle with each side—the career ladder, inservice training and development, and performance evaluation—reinforcing the others.

The Center for American Progress investigates the role of teacher leaders in implementing the Common Core State Standards in six districts and makes recommendations for districts implementing the standards. The teacher leaders were empowered to participate in various ways in decision making at district and school levels.

This two-page brief from ASCD offers several charts about teacher leadership in the United States, including a map of states that have teacher-leader certification endorsements in place or planned.

Part of the toolkit offered by the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession (CSTP) to support the development of teacher-leaders, this tool is designed to help school and district leaders determine systems readiness for teacher-leaders, support their work, and aid their professional development.