Defining Teacher-Leader Roles and Responsibilities

This journal article from Educational Leadership provides brief descriptions of several common teacher leadership roles, including a short vignette describing each role.

This set of teacherleadership competencies developed by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, the National Education Association, and the Center for Teaching Quality is designed to be a resource for teacherleaders who want to further refine their leadership in three areas: instruction, policy, and collective action. Each of the competencies includes a description of what it means to be emerging, developing, performing and transforming in a particular area.  

This report by the Aspen Institute argues for a shift in school culture, making a case for the redistribution of leadership tasks to teachers. The strategy, aimed at teacher retention, offers teachers opportunities to participate in more leadership activities, thereby increasing their potential to move up the career ladder and ease the workload of the school principal. Profiles of innovative initiatives at school, district, and state levels are included.

The U.S. Department of Education created this initiative to spur teacher leadership. The website includes resources and examples of teacher leadership.

The Teacher Leadership Exploratory Consortium, which includes union representatives, teachers, administrators, higher education leaders, and policy organizations, created this set of model standards for teacher leadership designed to guide districts, states, and others as they develop and support teacher leadership roles as a means of improving student achievement. 

This resource  from Public Impact provides an overview of standard teacher leader roles as well as a checklist for the characteristics of a teacher leader job. Districts planning to adopt teacher leader roles can use these as a guide to designing their own leadership roles.

This report from the National Network of State Teachers of the Year (NNSTOY) and the Center for Educator Effectiveness at Pearson reviews lessons from other countries and professions and gives recommendations for developing sustainable teacher career pathways.

This paper, by Rachel Curtis of Human Capital Strategies for Urban Schools, gives examples of school systems that have created unique teacher career pathways as part of a larger vision to transform the culture of teaching and learning within schools. Through these profiles, Curtis outlines a process to help school systems develop new roles for teachers and create and implement systems and structures to support teacher leadership efforts.

This Policy-to-Practice Brief is intended to help regional centers and state policymakers as they consider expanded career paths for teachers as a vehicle for promoting teacher leadership and educator quality.