Understanding Teacher Leadership in New York City Through Complexity Theory

Since the early 2000s, parallel to the growing prominence of school accountability mechanisms, teacher leadership programs have increasingly focused on leveraging teacher leaders (TLs) to provide vital expertise and human resources to expand instructional capacity in schools. However, in the United States, school districts, which continue to prefer evaluativemodels that focus on student achievement outcomes, have struggled to evaluate the success of such teacher leadership programs, which primarily aim to improve harder-to-measure outcomes, such as collaboration, teacher instructional practice, and the distribution ofleadership at the school site. In this study, researchers partnered with practitioners at the New York City Department of Education to analyze Teacher Career Pathways, a teacher leadership program in the United States’ largest school system. We apply for the first timeMargolis’ (2020) complexity theory for teacher leadership to examine how teacher leaders (TLs) enable whole school change. Using the framework to analyze the work of TLs, we can better understand 1) how TLs function within their school to help school leaders and teachersobtain more accurate information to improve teaching and learning, 2) process this information, and 3) feed that information back into the communication network to influence decisions across the system. This study also contributes to early work on using complexitytheory to analyze and evaluate teacher leadership programs, offering a new model that emphasizes examining how teacher leadership works in practice over student achievement outcomes.Keywords: teacher leadership, evaluation, complexity theory, school change, urban schoolrefor