The Affordances of Using a Teacher Leadership Network to Support Leadership Development: Creating Collaborative Thinking Spaces to Strengthen Teachers' Skills in Facilitating Productive Evidence-Informed Conversations.

Abstract

School reform policies and school administrators are increasingly positioning (TLs) with the responsibility to facilitate professional learning for their colleagues. Although ample evidence exists to suggest the need for facilitators to be highly skilled for teachers' learning to be optimized, there is a dearth of research describing how TLs act as effective instructional with their colleagues in professional learning communities (Nuermerski, 2012). Furthermore, no empirical studies have described effective models for supporting the development of the TLs who are charged with learning to take on the role of instructional leader at their school sites. Our research intends to address this gap in the literature by documenting a leader network (TLN) that is part of the Mills Scholars (MTS), a professional development program that supports teachers to develop as TLs. In this study, we describe one TLN meeting at which 21 teachers convened to learn how to develop as instructional responsible for facilitating substantive data conversations with their colleagues. We analyze the affordances this learning community provides for TLs, with a goal of making visible how the TLs were supported in strengthening the skills and dispositions required to be effective facilitators of evidence-informed conversations that would move their colleagues' thinking and learning forward. Literature Review Current conceptions of no longer associate it as belonging only to a small subset of teachers who hold formal positions of authority within schools as mentor instructional coaches, or professional development facilitators. Instead, contemporary theorizing positions as a process of influencing others to improve their educational and exemplifying a learning stance as part of a more inclusive construct where teachers in all positions within schools are believed to have the capacity to develop and strengthen their capacities (Katzenmeyer & Moller, 2009; Margolis & Doring, 2012). A commonly cited definition reflecting this current emphasis is offered by Katzenmeyer and Moller (2009), who explained, Teacher lead within and beyond the classroom; identify with and contribute to a community of learners and leaders; influence others toward improved educational practice; and accept responsibility for achieving the outcomes of their (p. 6). York-Barr and Duke (2004) theorized similarly as a process by which teachers, individually or collectively, influence their colleagues, principals, and other members of school communities to improve teaching and learning practices with the aim of increased student learning and achievement (p. 287). Such understandings decouple from association with formal authority and hierarchies that reinforce divisions between classroom teaching and administration (Darling-Hammond, Bullmaster, & Cobb, 1995). Scholars have proposed that such conceptions of hold great potential for eventuating school reform (Bradley-Levine, 2011) as teachers are supported to pose and solve problems and assume for change from within rather than looking upward or outward for (Darling-Hammond et al., 1995, p. 100). Such theorizing positions teachers as holding expertise that is valuable for entire school communities, as leaders in practice (Grant, 2006, p. 519) who are best positioned to facilitate school improvement efforts through ongoing, systematic study and strengthening of their instructional practice. Foundational to the theory of change embedded in such associations between and school improvement is a belief that leadership is in the learning, not in the perfection (Margolis & Doring, 2012, p. 878). Therefore a teacher leader is the best learner--the one who revises and improves their own teaching the most, as well as the one who provides the most appropriate feedback to others so they can learn from missteps (Margolis & Doring, 2012, p. …