Teacher Leaders: Transforming Schools from the inside

Teacher leadership is hard. Many of the reasons are obvious: Teaching is a highly labor-intensive profession to begin with, leaving little downtime for work with other adults. School schedules are notoriously stingy with space for adult collaboration. Teachers are rarely paid to exercise leadership; when they are, they are never paid enough. This volume is a modest attempt to restore the issue of teacher leadership to the prominence it deserves and requires. Although there is considerable overlap among the essays, they have been organized loosely into three categories: mentoring, to address the essential question of teacher helping teacher; transforming school culture, to reflect some of the many ways teachers make a difference in the environment immediately beyond their classrooms; and advocating for change, to spotlight the voices teacher leaders find ways to project in the interest of creating broader and more enduring change