Teacher Leadership

In recent years teacher leadership has undergone one major revolution and is in the process of undergoing another. The first came about as schools turned out to be far too complex for the responsibility of formulating and achieving their goals to be vested entirely in principals and head teachers. As a consequence, the rise of distributed leadership as an alternative model for understanding schools and their functioning is now commonplace. The second major revolution affecting teacher leadership is the rise of the Internet and ICT, and the way these give rise to greater and more flexible opportunities for students to become autonomous learners. Autonomous student learning now occurs in significant new ways and under parameters that are far more expansive than school-based learning. An effective model of teacher leadership thus needs to capture these changes in order to reflect the new realities of student learning and student engagement with their schools.

Kokila Roy Katyal is Assistant Professor at the Hong Kong Institute of Education working in the area of educational leadership. Colin William Evers is Professor of Educational Leadership in the School of Education, University of New South Wales, Australia.

1. Current views and the Need for a New Model of Teacher Leadership 2. The Internet and its Implication for Teacher Leaders 3. The Nature and Function of Teacher Leadership: Looping Back or Looking Forward? 4. Instructional Leadership and Autonomous Student Learning: Resolving the Paradoxes 5. Teacher Leadership and Student Engagement: Bridging the School and the 'Real World' Divide 6. Involving the 'Clients': Why Teacher Leaders Need to Reinforce Home-school Connectivity 7. Educating Teachers for Leadership: Enhancing Preparedness and Professional Knowledge 8. Teacher Leadership in Context: Towards Critical Self-learning