The ‘willies’ of teacher leadership

A new leader tries to overcome her worries about being a leader and create a space where all can lead.

At a Glance

As a relatively new teacher, Katie Ryan was asked to be the leader of her school’s STEM department.
She set an early goal of facilitating more collaboration within the department, but her first department meeting wasn’t as productive as she hoped.
One challenge for teacher leader collaboration is the lack of time to work together, so she decided to devote a department meeting to shared work.
As teachers created materials together, they each stepped into leadership roles and built a more collaborative community.
Teacher leadership requires a shift from authority to facilitation, from agenda-driven to community-driven meetings, and from individual to distributed leadership.

“You’re young and driven. Do you want to be the STEM department lead?” It was a question that almost knocked me to the floor.

When I finished my teacher prep program, I had a lot of confidence and youthful optimism that teams could just work together. I knew that leadership was not about going it alone, but could be a collective, supportive, and sustainable service.

Now, new to my school and one of the youngest teachers here, I was being asked to run a department. Did I have what it takes?

The team consists of four full-time teachers. Three who focus on math and me. Due to the small-scale nature of our school, one also teaches some science classes, one does our electronics classes, and another teaches a period of personal finance. While I am not the youngest of the team, two of the teachers have over 10 years of experience, then myself, and a newer teacher of three years.

When I was offered the opportunity to become department head, I had been teaching for four years and was in my first year at my current school, a high school in a suburban community in Oregon. I had not felt confident taking on leadership positions at other schools because of negative school cultures, a lack of opportunities, or the need to focus on simply keeping my head above water as a new teacher.

Finding my leadership mindset

As the 2024-25 school year approached and my leadership role became official, I was freaked out. My teaching friends named what I was feeling: “Katie has the willies about the term ‘leader.’”

Though I was relatively new to education, I had observed the leadership structures. You either move up by taking on more as an instructional coach or professional learning community (PLC) leader (sometimes without increased pay), or you move out of the classroom into curriculum development, administration, or teacher preparatory programs.

If we want teachers to become leaders, we need to find ways to recognize and support them without adding to their burden.

According to a 2022 Gallup poll, 44% of teachers feel burned out, the highest rate among the professions surveyed (Agrawal & Marken, 2022). If we want teachers to become leaders, we need to find ways to recognize and support them without adding to their burden. Research has shown that teachers recognize themselves as leaders inside their own classrooms even more than as leaders of PLCs or school projects (Von Dohlen & Karvonen, 2018). Additionally, 53% of teachers indicated that they saw themselves as leaders when they were involved in collaboration with others.

While I had experienced little collaboration in my short teaching career, I knew that collaboration around classroom activities, grading practices, school community norms, and school policies had to be the core of my leadership approach. I returned to something I’d heard as part of the Knowles Teaching Fellowship: “Teacher leadership is a collective action, not an individualized one.” This sounded beautiful, but does it actually work? How could I apply it to my setting?

My first department meeting

In the past, our department meetings had been unfocused and lacking clear expectations. Looking at my team dynamics, it was clear that we were all busy, had varying levels of teaching experience, and held different views on what equitable practices should look like for our students. How could I transform a culture of unproductive meetings among a diverse group of busy teachers into a space for real collaboration?

I decided the most reasonable place to start was with norms and personal goals. That is how I start my own classes, so I assumed it was a good way to start any group meeting. Even though I felt uneasy sharing my own vulnerabilities, I chose to be transparent about my hope of creating a shared leadership space. I had no idea what it would look like, but I wanted to try.

At our first meeting of the year, I sought to create a foundation where everyone’s voice could be heard. I set the agenda and brought in some norms adapted from the Knowles Fellowship. I read them aloud, asked for suggestions (none were offered), and moved us on to setting personal goals for the year.

This was not going well. I told myself to keep going with my plan of discussing goals. I said, “My personal goal this year is to work on making teacher leadership a collective action and not an individualized one.” The silence was deafening.

“Well…does anyone else have a goal to work on this year?”

The conversation slowly grew, but it shifted to classroom management, learning new tools and systems, then sorting and labeling all the STEM materials in the building. Walking away from that meeting, I was worried that I had already made mistakes that would keep our group from becoming truly collaborative. We had checked the boxes in disseminating information, but the discussion and collaboration lacked the depth I had hoped for.

A second attempt

Reflecting on that first meeting, I knew I wanted to create a space where everyone could feel confident sharing their voice, but again, how? People I looked up to as leaders leaned on others for guidance or support. They were never focused on the spotlight, just the drive to do better. What if we changed the culture of teachers being isolated in silos and instead created something more powerful than just a single person in a single classroom?

We needed time — the thing everyone needs and no one has enough of — to develop our ideas and blend them together.

I reworked the agenda for our next meeting to include time to share what was going well and what was not, a revisit of the norms with space for feedback, a discussion of what people wanted from our STEM meetings, and a section for proposed ideas. I figured that if anyone really disliked the way things were going, this structure would give them a chance to speak up. I sent the agenda out a few days ahead of time, and people responded with suggested topics. A small step in the right direction!

During the meeting, I took notes and recorded what each person said, attaching their name to their ideas. Suggestions were shared and adapted. We checked in, we listened, and we genuinely focused on hearing one another. Ideas were tossed around, and before we knew it, the meeting was over.

Out of our silos

At this point, I was beginning to feel more confidence and a stronger sense of cohesion with the team. To continue momentum, I wanted to collaborate on classroom materials so that everyone could see themselves in the resources we were building for students. My thought was that if we all have a stake in the result, we will all be willing to work hard to collaborate. I had seen this work in my classroom, so I hoped it would work with my colleagues.

We needed time — the thing everyone needs and no one has enough of — to develop our ideas and blend them together. I started to question what I could and couldn’t do as a leader. How do I balance the team’s need for time with my responsibilities to lead collaboration?

That was when I realized that I could do both. I decided to dedicate the entire next meeting to building these materials together. In a profession where every minute is scheduled, setting aside a meeting with no plan or agenda felt almost radical. Our profession doesn’t always give space to collaborate, explore, and just have time to think.

At the meeting, we dove straight into the work, building rubrics, templates, guides, and grade-level resources aligned with our shared expectations. We reread each other’s work, gave feedback, made copies, and tweaked formatting. The hour passed so quickly that we looked up only when students walked in and asked if we were going to be late for our own classes.

Hitting our collective stride

As often happens in education, meetings were delayed, priorities shifted, and it was two months before we met again. As the meeting approached, I found myself wondering what should go on the agenda. School leadership had asked us to review our rubrics for the end of the year, but we had already done that in our last meeting. I decided to leave the agenda open-ended. That increased my anxiety, but I felt a quiet confidence that our team could find a way to navigate it. If everything went silent, I knew I could bring up equitable practices, and we could dig into that.

I was amazed at how quickly our team dynamic seemed to shift when we were working toward a common goal. Everyone was stepping into different leadership roles and sharing their knowledge.

Yet almost as soon as the meeting started, people jumped in with ideas. One team member suggested reaching out to our STEM students to make sure they were on track with their research projects, so we all pulled up our student lists and reviewed the materials that had been sent. Another teammate brought up the importance of sharing students more equitably. Students would typically come to their “favorite” teachers and ask for help, this created inequities. We worked together to split up the load of emailing and checking in and created a new system to track student support and teacher involvement. People set phone reminders to follow up with their assigned students. Then someone suggested sharing our expectations for STEM students with other teachers, so they would understand the research criteria and structured supports we were using with students.

I was amazed at how quickly our team dynamic seemed to shift when we were working toward a common goal. Everyone was stepping into different leadership roles and sharing their knowledge. We were all acting as teacher leaders. I walked away from that meeting filled with joy. It felt incredible to watch the meeting take on a life of its own. We were growing together, and in that moment, I could feel the first real sprouts of shared leadership taking root.

My willies gave way to something more powerful: shared ownership. It was not perfect by any means, but it was something. A glimpse of what could be possible when teachers have time and space to collaborate and grow.

Celebrating and looking ahead

In the last month of 2024-25 school year, we met as a team to celebrate each other and the work we had done. I shared how much I appreciated working with everyone and expressed my admiration for the organization and progress we had made together on student expectations. I even mentioned that I had heard students talking about how we were all on the same page. Team members said they appreciated that student work was being seen as meaningful and that the division of labor in reaching out to students was working well. Looking ahead to 2025-26 year, they shared ideas for streamlining communication.

Finally, I asked how everyone felt about taking it to the next level by looking at student or classroom data. This was the step I had hoped we could take to begin evaluating inequities in our classrooms. There was mild agreement, but also some hesitation.

Although the team was hesitant, I decided to once again lead with vulnerability. My plan has been to, first, share a draft of this article with my team as an open invitation into my thinking and, second, to bring my own classroom data to meetings to spark conversations about our practices. Like much of teaching, there is no guidebook for this adventure.

Leadership shifts

My team of teacher leaders is amazing. Throughout my journey with them, I’ve come to understand that teacher leadership requires three main shifts:

From authority to facilitation
From agenda-driven to community-driven meetings
From individual to distributed leadership

How do we encourage more collective teacher leadership in a system that isolates teachers on a regular basis? When school departments focus on collaborative activities and shared vision, research has found that student achievement increases (Lomos, Hofman, & Bosker, 2011). How would the system change if our department meetings made this shift?

I am lucky enough to have been involved in a fellowship program where I could lean on other early-career educators. But not everyone has access to that. Professional development in districts often misses some of the core qualities of effective PD: active learning, collaboration, and coaching or support (Darling-Hammond, Hyler, & Gardner, 2017). If we really want teachers to stay in the classroom and be strong teacher leaders, shouldn’t we provide more effective and accessible support?

Teacher leaders need both support and freedom. Not guidance in what to do every minute, but a helping hand to navigate our discomfort. We need authentic buy-in and uninterrupted, scheduled time and space to work with our teams. When norms and vulnerabilities are openly shared and all have opportunities to contribute to agendas, workload, and material development, teachers can collaboratively build a distributed leadership model.

While stepping into an individualized leadership role can feel nerve-wracking, clear intentions, collaboration, and shared goals help distribute responsibility and make the role more manageable for the “leader.” Ultimately, any teacher who collaborates with colleagues to improve practice is a teacher leader. Together we are stronger.