Teachers’ Perceptions about Leadership: Towards an Innovative Collaborative Teacher Leadership Development Framework for Schools

Abstract

The development of the literature on teacher leadership in the academic realm has been exponential, but the quest for more leadership knowledge seems to be inexhaustible. The purpose of this paper is to analyze teachers’ perceptions with respect to their leadership abilities. Email interviews were conducted with nine teachers from two primary and two secondary schools to obtain their views regarding teacher leadership, whilst affording them opportunities to make suggestions for collaborative teacher leadership development. Having employed a phenomenological approach and thematic analysis as method, this paper proposes a collaborative teacher leadership development framework (CTLDF). Significant about the CTLDF is that teacher leaders should consider ausgang as a way of opening the door for collaboration, homo economicus as a collaborative act and parrhesia as autonomy towards collaborative teacher leadership. The findings reveal that teacher leaders should cultivate a readiness to create opportunities for collaborative leadership development. The study recommends that teacher leaders should first have to be cognizant about their own individual strengths, whilst slowly starting initiatives to collaborate in order to sustain improvements in teacher leadership practices.