Are Teachers Leaders?

Is this leadership?

The other day I read an post by Russ Goerend (@RussGoerend), which raised a ques­tion by mak­ing this state­ment: Teach­ers aren’t lead­ers [Self-fulfilling Prophe­cies]). Russ wrote this post in response to a con­ver­sa­tion he had with Scott Mcleod, where Dr. Mcleod stated that teach­ers are not “lead­ers and pol­i­cy­mak­ers who have influence/power.” This state­ment was in ref­er­ence to an event in Iowa where Will Richard­son was meet­ing with a hand­picked group of ‘edu­ca­tional lead­ers’ (which appears to include two grad­u­ate assis­tants, not sure how much power/influence grad­u­ate assis­tants have, but that is nei­ther here nor there). I com­mented on the post and tweeted about it, pro­vok­ing an inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion with mem­bers of my PLN.

Mr. Goerend had a bone to pick with Dr. Mcleod and I am glad that he did. Teach­ers, par­tic­u­larly young or new teach­ers feel pow­er­less enough when they vol­un­tar­ily become a cog in the machine that is edu­ca­tion, then to have some­one as well respected as Scott Mcleod omit them from a meet­ing of edu­ca­tional minds because they have no influ­ence or power does noth­ing to help moral. Dr. Mcleod com­mented on Russ’ post and even invited him to the event after there was a can­cel­la­tion. But to be clear, although he states that he sees teach­ers as lead­ers in this com­ment he hosted an event touted as an edu­ca­tional lead­er­ship con­fer­ence and delib­er­ately left teach­ers out.

Or is this?

My beef is only with part of Dr. Mcleod’s state­ment, and that is the part that asserts that teach­ers are not lead­ers. The truth hurts some­times and the bot­tom line is that teach­ers are not pol­icy mak­ers, and prob­a­bly never will be in my life­time. No mat­ter how vision­ary I feel when talk­ing with like-minded teach­ers on Twit­ter, YouTube is still blocked at my school and will be until my Super­in­ten­dent decides to unblock it. No mat­ter how use­ful it would be to my stu­dents, I can­not uni­lat­er­ally pur­chase a lap­top lab for my class­room. Fur­ther­more, no mat­ter how much time I think we are wast­ing prepar­ing stu­dents for tests, to the detri­ment of other essen­tial skills it is my pro­fes­sional respon­si­bil­ity to teach the cur­ricu­lum given to me by the state edu­ca­tion depart­ment; the policy-makers.

It is the dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion of those two phrases that must hap­pen for teach­ers to main­tain their san­ity, and hold on to the faith that they truly are mak­ing a dif­fer­ence. Teach­ers are not pol­icy mak­ers, but they cer­tainly are lead­ers. Con­versely, many pol­icy mak­ers I know are poor lead­ers yet they are given the power to affect the futures of a great num­ber of young people.

Here is my advice to teach­ers to assert your leadership:

1. Be a role model. — Lead stu­dents and col­leagues by exam­ple, prac­tice what you preach (don’t be afraid to preach), and always be true to you word.
2. Build real rela­tion­ships. — Build real rela­tion­ships with every other mem­ber of the sys­tem you work in includ­ing; stu­dents, par­ents and admin­is­tra­tors. If oth­ers can trust you, they will lis­ten to your advice. You might not make a pol­icy deci­sion but over time you can have great influ­ence over them.
3. Acknowl­edge & con­grat­u­late suc­cess. — again with all mem­bers of the system.
4. Be per­sis­tent & per­va­sive. — insert squeaky wheel adage here, don’t give up!