Going to scale with teacherpreneurs 

School culture and social norms conspire against teachers as leaders,  but marketing, preparation, and policy can change that and mobilize the classroom experts who want to lead schools in powerful ways. 

 

About three years ago, Kappan published one of my first essays on teacherpreneurs where I made the case that we won’t achieve 21st-century teaching and learning without a bolder brand of leadership from those who teach. The problems of public education aren’t that America’s classrooms are filled with too many bad teachers or too few smart ones. Instead, policy makers are paying too little attention to mobilizing the many experts teaching today who could lead in powerful ways.  

Enter the teacherpreneur, who teaches students for a career and has “the respect (and income potential) of an endowed chair at a research university” and “time to spread and market their pedagogical and policy ideas across organizational and geographical boundaries” (Berry, 2011).  

There is a solid base of individual teachers who crave leadership opportunities. 

Not only is there a solid base of individual teachers who crave leadership opportunities, but our education system as a whole is long overdue for large-scale reform with teacher leadership at the center. There are at least four reasons our nation’s policy makers must invest in a bold brand of teacher leadership:  

#1. Teacher leadership benefits students. 

Powerful evidence speaks specifically to how teacher leadership can make a significant difference for students. A new breed of economists, using sophisticated statistical methods that capture more of the complexity of schooling, have discovered that students score higher on achievement tests when their teachers have opportunities to work with colleagues over a longer period of time and share their expertise with one another (Jackson & Bruegmann, 2009). Other researchers have found that students achieve more in mathematics and reading in schools with higher levels of teacher collaboration (Goddard, Goddard, & Tschannen-Moran, 2007), when teachers report “frequent conversations with their peers that centered on (in this case, math), and when there was a feeling of trust or closeness” (Leana, 2011). Teachers themselves put an exclamation point on these empirical findings: Over 90% of them reported that their colleagues contribute to their own individual teaching effectiveness (MetLife, 2010). 

#2. Successful schools need dynamic collaboration. 

Scholars have found that effective school leadership that leads to improved student learning is more than a list of behaviors enacted by an administrator or two. Effective school leadership is a complex interplay among collective efforts to improve classroom teaching, engage leadership at many levels in the organization, and foster trust among educators, parents, and students in motivating high performance (Byrk & Schneider, 2002). A new study of the highly touted Los Angeles Public School Choice initiative found that gains in student achievement did not emerge because of competition from charter management organizations. Instead, successful implementation of innovative teaching and learning resulted from “cooperation and team building” among educators and parents — with Supt. John Deasy pointing to “teacher leaders (who) came to the fore” (Kerchner, 2013).  

#3. Principals can’t do it alone. 

Dramatically improving our nation’s public schools requires facing new challenges and capitalizing on new opportunities. The best individual school principals — even with assistants — don’t have the know-how and/or bandwidth to address the needs of growing numbers of highly mobile families, second-language learners, and students living in poverty. For schools to morph into 24/7 community hubs for integrated academic, social, and health services, teachers and administrators must lead — and principals alone cannot be the instructional leaders and manage all of the partnerships demanded of 21st-century teaching and learning. Indeed, the recent MetLife survey also found that 75% of today’s principals report that their job is “too complex” (MetLife, 2013).  

#4. Top-performing countries invest in teacher leaders.  

Nations whose students lead in international measures of academic achievement have built their success by advancing teacher leadership. 

Nations whose students lead in international measures of academic achievement, such as Finland and Singapore, have built their success by advancing teacher leadership. These top-performing countries have reduced the number of standardized tests and increased curriculum flexibility, relying more on classroom experts to develop and score their own assessments adapted to the students they teach. Both nations invest heavily in preservice preparation and require more teacher professionalism. They also foster stronger connections between those who teach and those who make policy. In Finland and Singapore, the annual teacher attrition rate is less than 3%, primarily because powerful policies are in place to support teaching as a career. Both countries intentionally create conditions for teachers to spread their expertise, making sure they have at least — and often more than — 15 hours a week of well-designed collaboration time to assess one anothers’ teaching practices as well as lead a variety of reforms in and out of their schools.  

Overcoming barriers; crossing borders 

“There are lots and lots of teachers who can lead like me,” teacher leader Lori Nazareno said. “I would say the ballpark figure would be about one-third.” 

Nazareno, who is a National Board Certified Teacher (NBCT) in science with 25 years of teaching experience, launched a highly successful teacher-led school in Denver, Colo., that has garnered national attention (Khadaroo, 2010). When Nazareno taught in Miami, she created her own nonprofit to mobilize NBCTs as mentors. She has had considerable experience in blurring the lines between teachers, administrators, and policy leaders. 

Over the last two years, my colleagues and I have documented Nazareno’s leadership development, along with that of seven other teacher leaders — Shannon C’de Baca (Iowa), Jessica Keigan (Colo.), Steve Lazar (N.Y.), Renee Moore (Miss.), Ariel Sacks (N.Y.), José Vilson (N.Y.), and Noah Zeichner (Wash.). Their stories and reflections are captured in Teacherpreneurs: Innovative Teachers Who Lead But Don’t Leave (Jossey-Bass, 2013). While still teaching, these teacher leaders have served as virtual coaches, curriculum publishers and curators, student assessment analysts, edugame developers, community organizers, policy researchers, and creators of their own schools. 

Nazareno reminded me of a number of daunting barriers facing teachers who seek to lead in bold ways. Some of these challenges include the relatively large number of educators in school systems who never teach and top-down reformers whose political agendas are out of sync with the ideas of classroom experts. In working with teacher leaders and with the Center for Teaching Quality’s (CTQ) efforts to recruit and support teacherpreneurs, my colleagues and I have identified a number of other barriers. These include principals threatened by teacher leaders and an archaic school schedule that makes it terribly difficult to teach in the morning and serve in an external leadership role during the remainder of the day (and evening) while still staying deeply committed to students.  

Over the last three years, CTQ has encountered several examples of districts’ organizational inflexibility around redefining roles for teachers that have restricted innovation. In some cases, building administrators worried that they might lose control over “their” teachers and schools if they expanded the leadership base in their buildings. In another instance that we write about in Teacherpreneurs, a supportive principal and superintendent initially approved a new teacher leadership position. But the position could not be realized because human resources forms and formulas couldn’t properly track the time and salary of a nontraditional teaching role, and administrators lacked the will to find a solution. Fortunately, CTQ has successfully developed these roles within districts nationwide for 18 part- or full-time released positions since that time. The successes of these teacherpreneurs offer proof of the value of the concept to hesitant administrators, and our memoranda of understandings with these districts offer diverse models for structuring, supporting, and funding the positions. 

Nazareno and her teacherpreneurial colleagues have learned to develop skills as boundary spanners — a concept often used in organizational development (and political science) to depict special change agents who communicate across different and often competing groups and establish links among them. According to British policy expert Paul Williams, difficult problems require boundary spanners who have interorganizational experience, transdisciplinary knowledge, and strong cognitive capabilities (Williams, 2002). Each of the eight teacher leaders profiled in the book has a wealth of all three qualities. Some developed these qualities in their preservice preparation, but most developed them through virtual networking with their teaching colleagues.  

The lessons teacher leaders have learned from their leadership experiences — and what we’ve learned through them — suggest how to create a system that supports teacherpreneurism at scale.  

A system that supports teacherpreneurs 

Many of today’s barriers to teacherpreneurs result from the structure of our education system. Top-performing nations spend far more on teachers and teaching than the U.S. Barely half of the $600 billion spent annually on public education in America is focused on instruction, and only 43% of all the nation’s education staff are classroom teachers. In high-performing nations, some 75% of education funding goes directly to instruction, and classroom teachers represent somewhere between 60% and 80% of all staff (OECD, 2005). 

No doubt that scaling up the teacherpreneur concept will require the political will to reallocate resources so that more administrators can teach, and more teachers can lead. Reflecting on what my organization has learned from working with teacher leaders and supporting teacherpreneurs in diverse school districts across America, I believe there are at least four high-leverage strategies we can use to broaden the scope of teacherpreneurism and ensure its effectiveness. 

#1. Make teacherpreneurs more public. 

The American public continues to have a great deal of trust and confidence in American teachers. In fact, over the last several years, 72% of those polled give the highest marks to teachers (Bushaw & Lopez, 2012). As teacher leader Shannon C’de Baca told me: 

To make teacherpreneurs more visible, they have to be part of the social fabric of the school and recognized as an important part. We have to be very explicit about making more visible what teacherpreneurs actually do when, for example, they serve as community connectors or policy mavens. 

Over the last several years, CTQ, in addition to backing 18 teacherpreneurs, has supported hundreds of other teacher leaders as part of our larger virtual community — the CTQ Collaboratory — who write and publish in high-profile blogs and other print media. As a result, an Internet search for “teacherpreneurs” now yields almost 30,000 links to stories about this bold brand of leadership from the classroom. And, over the last several years, more nonprofits and think tanks are beginning to recognize and elevate teacher leadership in ways that were unimaginable a few years ago. Social media tools make sure that the public, which trusts individuals more than institutions, will get to know and appreciate the benefit that teacher leadership has for students and public education. More nonprofits are beginning to do the same — and the Internet is gradually introducing their expertise to the public.  

#2. Use teacher evaluation and pay systems to elevate teacherpreneurism. 

There is an old adage suggesting that what is assessed is what is respected. New policies can be created that use evaluation tools and pay schemes to drive teacherpreneurism. For example, Singapore’s teacher evaluation system places a premium on teachers’ ability to “address long-term fundamental issues . . .  influencing the school’s relation to the external world” as well as “highlight and resolve issues that affect teacher effectiveness” (Sclafani, 2008). Teacher evaluation in Singapore is designed for public collaboration and professional participation. Both are essential for building trust between schools and communities. Even the most advanced teacher evaluation systems in the U.S. expect far too little of classroom practitioners when it comes to the public-ness of their teaching. And pay-for-performance systems could be revolutionized to encourage teachers to spread their teaching expertise publicly in the interest of improving both pedagogical practice and parent engagement.   

#3. Prepare new teachers as teacherpreneurs.
 

Each of the teacher leaders featured in the book had classroom veterans who mentored them as bold teacher leaders. Steve Lazar, who helped design and launch a teacher-led school and is a well-known blogger and author, made it clear that in his university program he had many coteaching opportunities and “low-stakes spaces to share work” as well as externships in community-based organizations — all of which played a role in his development as a teacherpreneur. Other teacher leaders in the group — Ariel Sacks, Jessica Keigan, and Noah Zeichner — attended different colleges and had influential but very different experiences that prepared them for leadership: Sacks’ leadership focuses on publishing books on teaching literacy and developing new performance pay plans; Keigan is leading Common Core and teacher evaluation reforms; Zeichner is leading a districtwide movement to help students develop global competencies and is creating an international virtual community of teacher leaders. 

It would not take much to codify what it takes to develop as a teacherpreneur and to create a network of education schools that could offer a leadership track for new recruits to think differently about their profession.   

#4. Promote teacherpreneurs from inside unions and other associations. 

As they take a more active role in enforcing standards of pedagogical practice, teacher unions and other associations must broker the work and elevate the role of teacherpreneurs. Imagine if teacher unions and associations morphed into professional guilds to add hundreds of thousands more to the handful of teacherpreneurs that CTQ has cultivated and supported over the last several years. Imagine if they fueled and connected the growing networks of teacher leaders developed by CTQ and other nonprofits. Imagine if the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, in a prelude to their merger, expanded the concept of collective bargaining and assisted teacherpreneurs in securing individual and small-team contracts with different agencies in spreading their expertise and visibility to the public. Doing so would allow our nation to easily cultivate 600,000 teacherpreneurs by 2030 — a number representing only one in 11 practicing K-12 educators in public school systems. 

My colleague Mark Smylie said over a decade ago that “the culture and social norms of school conspire against leadership development,” especially among teachers (Smylie, Conley, & Marks, 2002). But these norms can be broken — especially if we pursue the marketing, preparation, and policy ideas proposed herein. Going to scale with teacherpreneurs is far less technical, but far more political. The question we must ask ourselves as a society: Are we ready to blur the lines of teaching and leading so that those who work with students most closely can incubate and execute their ideas in the best interests of the communities they serve? 

References 

Berry, B. (2011). Teacherpreneurs: A more powerful vision for the teaching profession. Phi Delta Kappan, 92 (6), 28-33. 

Bryk, A.S. & Schneider, B. (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation.  

Bushaw, W.J. & Lopez, S.J. (2012). The 44th annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the public’s attitudes toward the public schools. Phi Delta Kappan, 94 (1), 8-25.  

Goddard, Y.L., Goddard, R.D., & Tschannen-Moran. (2007). A theoretical and empirical investigation of teacher collaboration for school improvement and student achievement in public elementary schools. Teachers College Record, 109 (4), 877-896. 

Jackson, C.K. & Bruegmann, E. (2009). Teaching students and teaching each other: The importance of peer learning for teachers. NBER Working Paper #15202. Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. www.nber.org/papers/w1502 

Kerchner, C. (2013, November, 25). L.A. public school choice program swaps competition for collaboration. Huffington Post. www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-kerchner/la-public-school-choice-program_b_4288225.html  

Khadaroo, S.T. (2010). School teachers in charge? Why some schools are forgoing principals. Christian Science Monitor. www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/r14/USA/Education/2010/0901/School-teachers-in-charge-Why-some-schools-are-forgoing-principals 

Leana. C. (2011). The missing link in school reform. Stanford Social Innovation Review, 94 (4), 30-35. 

MetLife, Inc. (2010). The MetLife survey of the American teacher: Collaborating for student success. New York, NY: Author. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED509650.pdf  

MetLife, Inc. (2013). The MetLife survey of the American teacher: Challenges for school leadership. New York, NY: Author. www.metlife.com/assets/cao/foundation/MetLife-Teacher-Survey-2012.pdf 

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). (2005). Education at a glance: OECD indicators, 2005. Paris, France: Author. 

Sclafani, S. (2008). Rethinking human capital in education: Singapore as a model for teacher development. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute.  

Smylie, M., Conley, S., & Marks, H. (2002). Exploring new approaches to teacher leadership for school improvement. In J. Murphy (Ed.), The educational leadership challenge: Redefining leadership for the 21st century (pp. 162-188). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 

Williams, P. (2002). The competent boundary spanner. Public Administration, 80 (1), 103-124. 

---

Matthew Dennis    

7 years in teaching 

7th-grade English teacher / English & literacy department chair 

Skinner Middle School, Denver, Colo. 

National Academy for Advanced Teacher Education Fellow* 

I used to think that being a leader meant having all the answers. Now I know that it means you have more questions. I used to think it meant you had to get in there and get things done. But I’ve learned that leadership means taking the time to develop an understanding, having the finesse to facilitate the process so that many people can answer the questions. 

The role of the leader is not to be at the forefront but to have the capacity to bring in all sides and to bring out what you need from others. It means being able to bring about a change that will last so something will go on long after you leave. 

You don’t have to have the title of school leader to be a leader. The longer I’m in education, the more I see a variety of ways to influence the classroom. I went through a principal preparation program because I really felt a sense of urgency, and I wanted to have the most impact that I could. I felt like I had to widen my scope so I could influence more than just 120 students a day. But I want to be a demonstrated instructional leader first. There are plenty of things to keep me in the classroom, but I am always interested in the policy piece, the systemic piece, and how I can have some impact on that. 

* Note: Several of the teachers highlighted in these vignettes graduated from the National Academy of Advanced Teacher Education, which challenges teacher leaders to deepen their instructional practice and improve their capacity to lead colleagues in their schools. 

---

Randy Kurstin    

9 years in teaching 

8th-grade English language arts lead teacher 

Albemarle Road Middle School, Charlotte, N.C. 

National Academy for Advanced Teacher Education Fellow 

Leadership starts with passion and making a commitment to having an impact. When I began teaching at my school, I noticed that students didn’t have a lot of opportunities to do anything outside the classroom to make their learning meaningful and relevant. So I put together a Shakespearean recitation group. Most of the students didn’t know who Shakespeare was, and they had no experience doing anything like this. This group has become a staple at our school and led to many successes at local and regional recitation competitions. Students are eager to be involved and up for the challenge. I didn’t ask anyone else to do this; I just did it. There was no baseball team at my school. I’m an avid baseball fan. When I asked why there was no team, people told me that nobody wanted to coach. I said, when do I show up?  

Now, my classroom is a learning lab where teachers, usually young teachers and new teachers, visit to observe lessons. I really enjoy those experiences because I know I’m directly influencing other teachers. I really don’t want to be on the other side of the desk. I like being in the trench. I like being able to directly affect my students. I know I could raise my income by leaving the classroom, but that’s just not why I became a teacher. It’s not about the money. 

Effective teacher leaders are quality teachers first. I think my colleagues trust me because they know I have as much skin in the game as they do. If you want good relationships with other teachers, you have to be humble, you have to admit that you don’t know everything, you have to be part of the conversation not dictating the conversation, and you have to listen. As a professional, you pay attention to the little things, making sure you’re punctual, paying attention to how you conduct yourself in meetings. You have to make sure you are part of the team, not apart from the team. 

 

Citation: Berry, B. (2014). Going to scale with teacherpreneurs. Phi Delta Kappan, 95 (7), 8-14.