How teachers become leaders: an internationally validated theoretical model of teacher leadership development

A review of the empirical research on teacher leadership (2003–2017)

“…In contrast, a disconnected school culture with the opposite characteristics (e.g., blame and coercion cultures) and a personal stake was shown to be a major barrier to genuine teacher leadership (Cooper et al, 2016;Muijs and Harris, 2006;Poekert et al, 2016;Woodhouse and Pedder, 2017).…”

“…There was a minimal increase in the proportion of quantitative and mixed-methods design studies across three review periods. Notably, only two crossnational studies of teacher leadership were identified in the entire review period (i.e., Chew and Andrew, 2010;Poekert et al, 2016). out of the 150 reviewed articles used one single tool (i.e., interview, questionnaire, or observation) to gather data.…”

Beginning teachers’ opportunities for enacting informal teacher leadership: perceptions of teachers and school management staff members

“…Following King and Stevenson (2017) and Frost (2008), irrespective of their formal roles, teachers in this study are perceived as (informal) leaders both inside and outside their classrooms. Whereas Poekert, Alexandrou, and Shannon (2016) defined three areas of teacher leadership (individual, teams, organisation), others have distinguished four areas: 1) the classroom; 2) the subject team focusing on curricular and instructional issues; 3) the interdisciplinary team focusing on management or general issues throughout the year; and 4) the organisation (Muijs, Chapman, and Armstrong 2013;Szeto and Cheng 2018).…”

“…Until now, regular initial teacher education programmes and induction programmes have not, or only in a limited manner, addressed this topic in their curriculum (Curry et al 2008). Exceptions are some studies on teacher leadership courses in graduate programmes (Carver and Meier 2013;Henning et al 2004;Ross et al 2011;Van Zeer et al 2006) Previous studies have primarily focused on conceptualising teacher leadership (Poekert, Alexandrou, and Shannon 2016), perceptions of teacher leadership and conditions for enacting teacher leadership (Carver and Meier 2013;Rogers and Scales 2013;Scales and Rogers 2017), teacher leadership within a specific context (e.g. urban context, Henning et al 2004), or the importance of conducting research as part of developing teacher leadership (Van Zeer et al 2006).…”

Teacher leadership in Lithuania

“…According to Wenner and Campbell, "teacher leadership has of late become an increasingly popular topic among educational policymakers and influential educational organizations as an important component of school reform" (2017, p. 135). Teacher leadership receives considerable attention researchers seek to understand how teachers become leaders (Poekert, Alexandrou and Darbianne, 2016), look for connections between teacher leadership and the capacity of schools to improve (Hairon, 2017), analyse leadership for learning (Swaffield, 2014), as well as explore expressions of teacher leadership in the professional learning community (Wilson, 2016) or in professional development (Whitworth and Chiu, 2015). Finally, the importance of leadership is plainly a key element of teaching practise: "leadership, along with pedagogical and content knowledge as a professional responsibility, is an emerging requirement for effective teachers" (Rogers and Scales, 2013, p. 30).…”