Teacher Leadership (Credit: C. age 11)

This past May I completed a multi-year project called My Masters Degree by submitting my thesis paper titled “Just a Teacher…”

Over the coming weeks and months I will tease out elements that I found particularly helpful in my own learning and/or those elements that resonated with friends and colleagues who have read it.

If at this moment you find yourself with nothing better to do you may want to have a look at the literature review where I explored an emerging view of leadership, particularly teacher leadership.  In researching the topic I was pleasantly surprised to encounter well articulated writing about the collective capacity of classroom teachers to effect change in response to student needs and/or opportunities for growth that exist in their school but outside of their classrooms (aka ‘teacher leadership’).

Or you might be interested in my twenty year journey of coming to see myself as a leader — not an easy thing for any of us to do if we use the traditional model of hierarchal leadership.  I wrote stories about key points in my journey where others saw in me the potential for being part of positive change and helped me to see myself as more than “just a teacher”.

Or you might want to jump straight to the end (page 79) to see the Considerations that I was left with after a lot of reading, reflecting, writing and just plain living out how one makes sense of the words “teacher” and “leader” when they are put together.