Teacher Leaders: Transforming Schools from the inside. Occasional Paper Series 23

Teacher leadership is "hard." Many of the reasons are obvious: Teaching is a highly labor-intensive profession to begin with, leaving little downtime for work with other adults. School schedules are notoriously stingy with space for adult collaboration. Teachers are rarely paid to exercise leadership; when they are, they are never paid enough. This volume is a modest attempt to restore the issue of teacher leadership to the prominence it deserves and requires. Although there is considerable overlap among the essays, they have been organized loosely into three categories: "mentoring," to address the essential question of teacher helping teacher; "transforming school culture," to reflect some of the many ways teachers make a difference in the environment immediately beyond their classrooms; and "advocating" for change, to spotlight the voices teacher leaders find ways to project in the interest of creating broader and more enduring change. This issue contains the following articles: (1) Becoming a Teacher Leader within Your Classroom: A Dialogue (Nayantara Mhatre and Jill Stacy); (2) Walking a Hall of Mirrors (Kami Patrizio); (3) Ask Not What FHS Can Do for You, But What You Can Do for FHS (Jessica Endlich Winkler); (4) Empowering Teachers: Developing Meaningful Leadership (Jennifer Groves); (5) Making Sense of Distributed Leadership: A Conversation Among Teacher Leaders (Kathleen Dickinson Rockwood); (6) Leadership and Agency as a Novice Teacher (Clare E. Tin); (7) BETLA Teacher Leaders: An Unselfish Sense of Purpose (Lillian Hernandez and Cristian Solorza); and (8) Leading Without Permission (Robin E. Hummel). Introduction by Gil Schmerler is also included. [This issue of Occasional Papers was supported, in part, by Bank Street's Adelaide Weismann Center for Innovative Leadership in Education.]