Learning about teacher leadership through the lived experiences of high school teacher leaders

As more researchers have studied the benefits of treating schools and learning as complex systems, educators have taken this to a more practical level by encouraging leadership capacity at the grassroots level. On the whole, teacher leadership is used as both an improvement strategy and an empowerment tool to improve our schools. In British Columbia, Canada, the concept of teacher leadership is gaining increased attention; however, its practical application is less well understood. While recent literature has pointed to the value of looking at the complexity and the distributed framework of teacher leadership, very little research to date can provide empirical evidence on the impact that these ideas have on teachers. In particular, it is not clear how different facets of teacher leadership experiences influence teachers’ beliefs, understandings, and emotions, and how these shape emergent practices of leadership. In this study, eights teacher leaders in a large urban school district in British Columbia participated in one-on-one interviews in an effort to add to our understanding of teacher leadership based on these teachers’ lived experiences. The research data were presented as eight vignettes revealing i) what teachers derived from their lived experiences in shaping their role as leaders of teacher-led initiatives, and ii) how teachers’ lived experiences in school initiatives (re)defined their future role as leaders. The participants drew from the personal, professional, cultural, socio-political, and structural dimensions of the work environment and spoke about common themes in their leadership experiences. Furthermore, as a group, they demonstrated certain personal and professional attributes that defined their positions as teacher leaders. The understanding gained from this study enriches our existing views of teacher leadership. By examining this phenomenon through the lens of distributed framework, this study brings contribution to the reconceptualization and future development of teacher leadership practices.