What Do We Know About Teacher Leaders' Practice and How Well Do We Know It?
A working assumption for many reform efforts in mathematics and science, including MSPs, is that teacher leaders are productive change agents in helping teachers improve their classroom instruction. By teacher leaders, we mean current or former teachers who work with their colleagues (i.e., other teachers). It is this "work with their colleagues" that distinguishes them as teacher leaders, and not just as helpful fellow teachers. Teacher leaders go under many different titles and their work is configured in quite different ways. The focus of teacher leaders can be quite varied (ranging from a direct focus on classroom instruction to actions at the school level to work at the district level) and, thus, the outcomes of their work can be quite diverse. A basic distinction among teacher leaders is that they may have no release time from classroom teaching to work with their colleagues; they may be released part-time from classroom teaching; or they may be released full-time from classroom teaching.
Given this variability of efforts that are all classified as "teacher leadership", one of the hypotheses we pursued and report on in this session is the following: Teacher leaders' efforts, particularly their work organized around teachers' classroom instruction, impacts teachers' classroom practice.
