By Tom

I spent last week in Washington DC. For three days I worked with an amazing group of teachers redesigning Jump Start, the WEA’s National Board Certification candidate training program. We were holed up in a conference room at NEA headquarters working with their staff along with staff from the National Board. And we ended up with a product that will definitely help National Board candidates understand the new assessment process and make their way through certification.

I also spent two days at the National Board conference. Between breakout sessions and keynote addresses, I heard a lot about teacher leadership. Two speakers in particular seemed to epitomize the opposite poles of what that concept actually means. Arne Duncan spoke about teacher leadership and the subtext seemed to be that teacher leaders are those who help administrators execute their decisions. They’re the ones who lead the workshops on the Common Core and the new evaluation systems. Tony Wagner also spoke about teacher leadership. But his definition seemed to give teachers authority over actual education policy. Teachers should be involved in continual reexamination of what we teach, how we teach it and how we should be assessed.

Personally I think they’re both right. Teacher leaders should have a voice in policy decision and have a hand in executing those decisions. Unfortunately, however, I think our voices have been stifled and our hands held back. Why?

Three reasons:

One of the ironies of teacher leadership is the fact that teaching itself gets in the way. First of all, most of us are too exhausted at the end of the day to do much more than eat dinner and plan the next day’s lessons. Being a leader takes energy. Energy and time. Teaching uses up both of those things. Besides that, teaching is generally more fun than leadership. Given the choice, I would much rather spend a day working with my fourth graders than working with colleagues. It’s not that I don’t like working with adults; I just like working with kids better. They’re more fun. When I get opportunities to take on leadership roles, I frequently turn them down if they conflict with my teaching schedule simply because I would rather be teaching.

Another barrier to teacher leadership is that many teachers have a lack of confidence in their ability to lead. Of course, sometimes a lack of confidence is justified. I have no confidence, for example, in my ability to pole vault because I’ve never done it before and it looks complicated. Teaching and leading require two fairly distinct skill sets. That’s not to say that a person couldn’t do both; but being a good teacher doesn’t necessarily make you a good leader. But a person who has learned to be a good teacher can certainly learn to be a good leader.

And finally, there’s failure. Sooner or later, a teacher leader will encounter it. It’s certainly happened to me. I’ve fought hard to get my district to adopt a particular policy only to have them turn it down. The natural impulse is always to throw in the towel, go back to my classroom where I know I can find success and forget about trying to change anything. Forget about trying to lead.

That attitude, of course, is exactly what we need to reject. We also need to get over our lack of confidence in our capacity to lead, either by learning the necessary skills or by finding a leadership niche that fits with the skills we already have. The hardest barrier, at least for me, is finding the time and energy to lead. But it can be done. It has to be done. Because if thirty years in the classroom has taught me anything, it’s that teachers need to be both in and out of the classroom in order for anyone to be successful in the classroom.