Teacher Leadership

I’m getting started on studying for my doctoral comprehensive exams. I just finished reading Burns’ Transformational Leadership in which he discusses the notion of creating new leaders. I read John Gardner’s introductory essay to the Jossey-Bass Educational Leadership anthology, and he is very interested in distributed leadership. Then, I pick up the latest issue of Education Week with its article about several states that have developed teacher leader certificates, and there is distributed leadership in action.

“There’s also a very clear need for building-level principals to recognize that leadership is more than just one person,” she said, “so there’s a need to codify, as well as create, incentives to help distribute leadership.” (She is Ann L. Duffy, the director of policy for the Atlanta-based Georgia’s Leadership Institute for School Improvement, a public-private partnership.)

And, this would help solve the remuneration issue, too. Add another step to the salary ladder that currently isn’t available. An institutionalized merit pay, as it were.