Classroom teacher leadership: service-learning for teacher sense of efficacy and servant leadership development

Abstract

Improved student achievement requires the distribution of leadership beyond one individual. Given their daily connection to students, leadership opportunities distributed to classroom teachers are key to school improvement. Complicating the development of classroom teacher leaders are attrition rates and low teacher efficacy among novice educators. Service-learning and servant leadership offer complementary pedagogical and philosophical approaches to shift the role of classroom teachers and address efficacy concerns. This study utilised a pre-/post-test, quasi-experimental research design to determine to what extent changes would occur over time in pre-service educators’ teacher sense of efficacy and sense of servant leadership from participating in service-learning.