How Teachers Become Leaders: Learning from Practice and Research
Ann Lieberman and Linda D. Friedrich (Teachers College Press, 2010)NWP's Price: $18.00
This book is a unique insider's look at the process that teachers experience when they assume leadership positions in their schools, districts, states, or Writing Project sites.
The text features vignettes by K-12 teachers, describing their individual leadership roles and experiences to show how teachers take charge in a variety of contexts. The authors identify four major themes: identity, collaboration, making conflict productive, and learning new practices.
Through the teacher leaders' own words, readers witness how the four themes are an integral part of daily practice. Chapters also examine what research indicates about these new and proliferating roles.
How Teachers Become Leaders makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how teachers in leadership positions:
- construct a new identity
- develop the skills and abilities to handle conflict and make it productive
- learn to facilitate the building of learning communities, helping teachers to collaborate with one another
- use the practices they already know and incorporate new ones into their work
- reframe the very meaning of leadership, making it work side by side rather than top/down.
"Lieberman and Friedrich give us the much-needed answers to promoting powerful schools via the wisdom of teachers leading from the classroom to the schoolhouse to the statehouse: an insightful, practical, and most useful book."—Carl Glickman, president, Institute for Schools, Education, and Democracy
