Learning to lead

I learned one of my first lessons about teacher leadership the hard way. It started with a call from a very angry principal one morning when I was a newspaper reporter in Detroit. He berated me about how badly my front-page story that day had damaged teacher morale in his school. Teachers, one after the other, had come into his office in tears after reading what I had written about one of their colleagues. “How could you do this?” he asked.

Teachers must be exemplary in their own practice before others will follow them, but leadership in education requires more than just professional excellence in teaching.

My crime? I had written a glowing report about a science teacher at his middle school who had become one of the first teachers in the country to earn certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards.