Learning from Teacher Leaders

In the early 1980s the author was a professor at Teachers College (TC) for over seven years and there he met Matthew Miles, a well-known quantitative researcher who was interested in doing research in schools. Everyone was doing something to engage teachers, create improvement strategies, and hopefully learn how better to teach students. Teacher Centers in many schools was run by union leadership and were situated in schools so that teachers could get ideas, support or conversation right in their own school. The teachers&s; union called their teacher leaders teacher specialists , who tried to be sensitive to peers and the building of colleagueship, rather than creating another hierarchical role. The specialist&s;s short-term goal was to re-introduce the idea of using Learning Centers in the first grade, while pursuing her long-term goal: to establish a network of teachers exchanging ideas, tasks and Learning Center methods, with the ultimate aim of improving teaching and learning in the school.