Leadership

Our contract mandates that each school in the district have a leadership team comprised of administrators and representatives of assorted groups at the school. I think the goal is that teachers and ed techs have a say in some of the decisions that impact our workplace. In the past, at our school anyway, team leaders have had various levels of success in meeting this goal for a number of reasons; none of which I am going to get in to here. The point is, that our team exists and as of last year, I have been a part of it as the 7th grade rep. Twice a year, our district requires that all of the schools' team leaders get together to discuss a shared reading and leadership in general. At the our last few meetings, we discussed the role of leadership teams in schools and especially in shaping school culture. The discussion our team had began around questions of how a team can shape culture in a school but quickly went to questions of should a team be responsible for shaping culture and even went so far as to begin to question if a team should exist at all. This was a really important discussion that didn't necessarily reflect where we thought we needed to go but, was an important philosophical discussion nonetheless. And although I feel pretty strongly that a leadership team should exist, I do agree that our team, like most I imagine, could use work.

Before I go any further, I want the readers to know that I am not airing any dirt laundry here. Our discussion did address our school but, we also talked about schools and teams in general and that's where this is all coming from.

Anyway, the whole point of writing about leadership is that I think , especially at the middle level where we encourage student decision making and choice, that teacher decision making and choice is vital. Like our students, when teachers have a say in what happens at their school, it creates a situation where ownership is shared with administrators. Who better to change climate than those who are affected on a day to day basis by the climate of the workplace. The students for whom we work tirelessly day in and day out have a stake in their schools, we know this. But schools should be great places for the adults in the building too, especially since for most of us, this is the place we spend the majority of time during our day and for a lot of us, it's where much of our attention is focused even when we aren't in the school building.

To make a teacher led leadership team to be effective takes a lot of work. Work that I can't define. But, just like we strive to make our classrooms student centered, I think that leadership teams can help to make certain parts of our schools less administratively centered and more teacher centered (and of course along the way, these teams will help to make a better place for students too).