Abstract
Sailing Across the Divide: Challenges to the Transfer of Teacher Leadership adds a relevant voice and perspective to an important practitioner challenge: leveraging teacher leaders to expand their impact on students and reach schools. One of the central findings of the article is the functional limit that schools exert on teacher leaders. Schools routinely welcome teacher leaders to exercise their skills in classrooms, the faculty room, the parking lot, and, in some cases, committee and meeting rooms. Beyond these roles, teacher leaders have difficulty finding purchase. This observation aligns with my experience as a practitioner with experience across many levels of the public education system.
Good principals bring stability and order to schools that are routinely buffeted by forces that threaten to drag buildings into chaos. Principals confront a dozen situations per day, and for each, they run an invisible and effortless calculus: “Am I the only person who can handle this? Who can I ask for help? Who must I notify? Is this a priority? Will this have lingering effects on our school?”
The best principals also ask themselves, “How can I shelter my staff from the distraction and adverse impact that this situation might inflict?” It is the motivation and discipline of this question—its daily asking and answering—that risks mischaracterization as part of a “hierarchical and autocratic” school culture. It is on this question that I would like to contribute a complementary voice.
Sailing Across the Divide’s conceptual framework introduces sensemaking theory as a “dynamic process through which actors construct understandings of ideas, rules, and environmental pressures.” As a committed student and educator, I agree. However, we should also recognize that great principals intentionally buffer their schools from adverse effects of “environmental pressures” every day. Principals behave like drift fences: the thin, slatted fences designed to protect the landscape and residents from the worst of winter’s fury. Protecting schools from environmental pressures does not prevent school communities from experiencing all pressure, just as drift fences do not protect residents from all snow. Instead, both are designed to minimize hazards and create conditions for success.
What Drs. Woulfin and Weiner and the cited research describe as an administrative resistance to “sharing authority” should be tempered with a holistic, sympathetic view of the “too-muchness” of the role of the principal. In my experience, good principals rarely hoard decision rights on high-value issues. However, they do take personal responsibility for the high-accountability, high-risk decisions like discipline, scheduling, budgeting, and school policy development. These issues are heavily regulated, ruthlessly monitored, and grimly constrained. To invite teacher leaders into these decisions would require explaining that, in practice, there are few decision rights to share. Principals would need to explain that the thin band of decision rights that schools do retain are sometimes more a burden than a privilege. Even worse, these supposedly higher leverage issues are frequently laced with politics, paperwork, and pressures that have little to do with teaching and learning. In short, to authentically engage teacher leaders on these issues asks principals to deconstruct the protective barriers that they maintain every day.
Consider an example. School-level discipline committees are ostensibly charged with developing school practices that live within district-level disciplinary policies. However, only the principal knows the district’s true expectations related to discipline, expectations that are not represented in print but are feverishly enforced through area superintendents. Only the principal knows that some decisions that technically fit within the purview of school-level committees are hard-wired into immediate and biting pressure from central office. In this context, is understandable—perhaps even admirable—that principals conclude that delegation to teacher leaders is unfair and irresponsible.
Perhaps we can sense this tension in the voice of the principal who said, Obviously, first and foremost, we want them to be good instructors and instructional leaders, but we need to find more opportunities for them to lead in other areas of the school . . . I am not sure we have effectively found spots for them to use the skills.
Perhaps we can hear a principal who is willing to share authority but knows there is nothing “effective” about asking teacher leaders to dedicate their precious time to filling out forms that masquerade as decisions. Even worse, there is no easy way to explain this grim fact to very leaders he or she relies on to maintain optimism and momentum within the building.
My contribution to the dialogue in the article focuses less on the overall framing or findings than on deepening the representation of the principal. I urge researchers and practitioners to explore the question of whether this level of principal protection—regardless of its motivation—is necessary or harmful? Does principal protection enable teacher leaders to thrive in an instructional capacity or inhibit their long-term growth and reach? And perhaps most important, are these finely parsed judgments a luxury of the reader, while leader has no choice but to engage in daily acts of protection?
In closing, I would like to add a single, simple recommendation for intermediaries that prepare teacher leaders. Consider adding deep, first-person principal narratives to your program design. Principals’ voice and stories will help bridge the experiential gap between veteran principals and aspiring teacher leaders. They will add context and tether the training to the reality of working and leading in schools. And as an added benefit, first-person narratives would be a natural and rich complement to the case study method, deepening the vivid real-life detail and an empathetic tone that the best case studies provide.
I want to thank Drs. Weiner and Woulfin and The Journal of Research on Leadership Education for the opportunity to contribute to the academic discourse on issues vital to public education, the success and health of our schools, and the success of our teachers and students.