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Building Teacher Leadership Rant

From: "Mark Rauterkus
To: K12ADMIN@LISTSERV.SYR.EDU
CC: jefwhite@IUPUI.EDU

Date: Thu, 07 Nov 2002 14:27:46 -0500

Hi All,

Jeff asked:

I am in the Educational Leadership program at IUPUI. I am interested in knowing how we as educators can improve teacher leadership in our public schools.

1. Strengthen your base.

Teacher leadership at a school needs to start with teacher leadership among teachers. The base is teachers. This base needs to be very strong.

So, a teacher union leader who does NOT listen makes a grave problem. A union leader that does NOT listen to community members give serious calls of alarms to others in the community. Hint: Make sure that the union reps are functional, working, on the ball, returning phone calles, connected to all who show interest and concern. If you have faulty deadweight in the union areas -- make the removal of the cancer as the highest priority.

Hold union elections.

Hold democratic principals to be valued among the union memebers. Do you vote on issues in your union, or only for cronies?

Teachers and faculty departments need to be strong, organized, enriched with wide understandings. Make sure your department functions well.

Are new teachers given the junk assignments because the older teachers want to coast?

Are matters equitable among the teachers? There needs to be a high sense of fairness among the ranks of the teachers if it is going to play out among the students?

Are the best teachers getting rewarded, noted, praise? And, a good teacher last semester might flunk this period or this term. Grade yourselves as you grade the students. Be honest. Be direct.

What professional developments are you attacking as a staff or as a faculty? Is the Math department better than the English at using email, justifing text books, networking with subs?

Point being, the in-house operations need to be flawless before hitting for leadership ranks.

2. Strengthen your support among your friends.

Teachers who want leadership opportunities need to have friendly administrators and tight advocates close to the action on the same wavelength.

How are the communications among buildings?

How are the communications throught the teacher strata to administrators, supervisors, superintendent's office and beyond?

Case in point: I've seen a lot of teachers get slapped down when they talk to folks in other parts of the district, share stories, and make mentions to the bosses.

If there isn't a free flow of information, leadership is dead in the water. Are there sticking points? Are turf battles too heated to make sound statements when they should be made and at all destinations? Is the teacher info being snuffed?

Are the statements clear, concise, understood? When a message goes beyond the ranks, it needs to be without local baggage. Messages need to be plain, simple, and read without a decoder ring. If a parent sees something that is jargon talk from teacher-speak, you'll lead nothing.

3. How is the respect among the student-teacher dealings?

If there are plenty of areas where the connections among the students and the teachers are broken -- the respect in the community and the family setting is going to be short lived. Leaders are proactive.

Teachers need to coach people out of the classroom too. The outreach is what wins the days for effective leadership. Ignore nothing. Teacher that fix things are going to get the green light to fix more and more.

4. Leadership is about communications.

I'd like to see pink papers, white papers, studies, rankings, and letters to the editors. I'd like to have teachers speak to civic groups, hold parent meetings, run for city council. I'd like to see teachers post web pages, take email, host community/cable TV discussion shows (beyond how to do your homework).