Other Duties as Assigned: Tips, Tools, and Techniques for Expert Teacher Leadership
By Jan Burgess with Donna Bates
(ASCD, 2009)

Reviewed by Ernie Rambo, NBCT
Middle School Teacher and Mentor (NV)

Teacher Leaders Network

The term “leadership” is often used when discussing a school’s administration. More often these days, we’re hearing about the “teacher leaders” in our schools, those who may or may not seek to be administrators but have an interest in more than standard classroom duties.

This book serves as a “how-to” guide for teacher leaders in K-12 schools. Providing possible scenarios of the challenges that teacher leaders might face as they complete their tasks, the book includes ready-to-use resources for organizing, goal-setting, and reflection. I found Other Duties as Assigned to be a useful reference for both novice and experienced leaders.

Teacher leaders can include department or grade level chairpersons, team leaders, and heads of committees. Teacher leaders might be the educators at your school who organize professional learning communities, write grant proposals, or develop action research projects. Whether you are asked to lead or volunteer to do so, teacher leadership can be rewarding -- but it can also be challenging depending on the faculty’s perception of the roles of teacher leaders in their building.

Other Duties as Assigned presents effective strategies to help a teacher lead effectively while still maintaining positive relationships with one’s colleagues. Jan Burgess and Donna Bates provide a framework for any leader, new or experienced, to take charge of a project or duty without being perceived as taking over the task.

The authors develop a bridge to connect current academic research about school leadership and realistic faculty relationships, maintaining both a collegial and professional voice. In each chapter, Burgess and Bates combine the examples of three fictional teacher leaders, using different metaphors to describe the work that might be required of leaders. In one chapter, leadership is compared to river-rafting, in another chapter it’s rubber bands or real estate. Each metaphor serves its purpose, demonstrating the importance of trusting in the leader, being flexible yet strong, or building relationships.

Questions provided in the book’s margins prompt the reader to reflect upon their own leadership characteristics. Each chapter also includes a “Dear Donna” section where Bates provides suggestions for handling typical situations that a teacher leader might confront.
   
Other Duties as Assigned does not offer groundbreaking information about leadership. That’s not its purpose. Instead, it serves as a conduit between established research and leadership applications and becomes a one-stop resource for learning, recalling, and applying strategies that will help every school leader keep focused on project goals. You’ll find protocols for getting a team organized and for making decisions, and the appendix includes a “Teacher Leader’s Toolkit” with exercises and templates for reflection, goal-setting, meeting agendas, and evaluations. The publisher also tells us how to access an interactive version of the toolkit at no extra charge through their website.
   
Other Duties as Assigned can be useful to all team leaders, novice or experienced, because the chapters examine how to develop team unity while strengthening the professional growth of the faculty. For the teacher who is not sure if leadership is the next step in their career, reading this book provides ample information to inform them of what skills and tasks are expected of a teacher leader. For more experienced teacher leaders, reading Other Duties as Assigned can serve as a reference for how to solve problems in situations when things are not going as smoothly as anticipated.

If a guiding reference book is needed for a book study on the topic of leadership, Other Duties as Assigned would be a useful choice. Each chapter invites teacher reflection and examines topics that easily lend themselves to discussion.

Should you say yes the next time your principal walks up to you and asks you if you can do “just one more thing,” you might want to add: “As soon as I’ve read this book….”

Ernie Rambo chairs the electives department at Walter Johnson Junior High in the Clark County (NV) School District, where she also serves as a new-teacher mentor. She’s active in the Southern Nevada Writing Project and a National Board Certified Teacher.

Bill Ferriter’s participation in the Teacher Leaders Network began in March 2003, on the very first day of TLN’s existence. We kicked off TLN with an email conversation among 200 accomplished teachers, mostly from states in the southeast. The idea was to stage a series of 3-day chats exploring some key professional issues and then see who wanted to stick around and become the nucleus of a national virtual community of classroom educators.

By the end of the six-week startup, Bill’s provocative questioning and his willingness to reflect on his own professional practice — tarnish and all — made him a leader in our fledgling community. He’s gone on to serve as a TLN Senior Fellow, co-author of a major TLN TeacherSolutions report, and the internationally respected TLN blogger known as The Tempered Radical, whose lively mix of classroom practice, policy and politics, and digital learning topics attracts a broad audience and recently led to a monthly column, Digitally Speaking, in Educational Leadership magazine.

As it turns out, Bill’s willingness—compulsion, even—to bare his teaching soul makes him one heck of a book author, too. Building a Professional Learning Community at Work: A Guide to the First Year, co-written with principal Parry Graham, grows out of a several-year struggle by Bill and a group of teacher colleagues at his North Carolina middle school to learn to collaborate in powerful ways. In this interview, Bill recounts some of the pain and gain of that trial by fire, and how he and Graham went about translating their own experiences into a practical primer for other educators who might be willing to set forth on a similar journey.

As a bonus, I've asked Bill to speak to fellow teachers who harbor their own desire to write a book from their teaching lives. Bill generously shares his secret to publishing success, but I’ll warn you in advance. It involves a lot of writing. – John Norton, co-founder and moderator, Teacher Leaders Network.

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What created the burn to write a book for teachers just beginning to explore PLCs? Give us some history.

Bill Ferriter: I think the burn to write a book for teachers just beginning their work with professional learning communities is a product of my own early struggles and successes with collaboration. About five years ago, I had the opportunity to open a new middle school being built as a PLC from the ground up—and I was paired on a learning team with five of the most intelligent and capable language arts and social studies teachers that I’d ever met.

The problem was that we had no real idea what it was that we were supposed to be doing with each other, and that led to early frustrations. Our initial meetings were rambling, unfocused affairs and we often felt like failures. We fought through personal conflicts and professional disagreements, though, and eventually found a working rhythm and synergy that made all of us better teachers. I wanted to try to make those early struggles transparent to other teachers, hoping that the lessons my team learned might sustain others when the inevitable challenges of collaboration arise.

Collaborative work can make any teacher more productive and professionally satisfied, but only when early efforts at collaboration are structured and meaningful. Parry and I believe that Building a Professional Learning Community at Work can provide some of that structure for learning teams at any stage of their professional work together.

Your book is filled with action-oriented subheads, reproducibles, practical recommendations — there's even an annotated chapter guide divided into seasons of the year. It has the feel of authors who have been there and done that. How much easier might things be for teacher teams who take your advice?

Bill Ferriter: I think the real strength of Building a Professional Learning Community at Work is that Parry and I are both full-time practitioners. I still meet with a learning team every week, trying to identify instructional practices that work and ensure the success of every child. Parry still works as a building principal, trying to create the systems that enable teachers and students to thrive.

That first-hand experience with the real work of learning teams is evident in every chapter, handout and subtitle in our text. Our suggestions, strategies, and materials are suggestions, strategies and materials that we’ve used successfully in our work—and the text is really nothing more than a public reflection of the learning that we’ve done as we’ve tried to make professional learning communities happen in our own schools.

 If you had to come up with 4-5 key insights represented in the book, what would they be? Tempt us.

Bill Ferriter: Picking out 4-5 key insights is close to impossible because our readers will all be working on learning teams that have their own unique personalities and challenges. What may look like a key insight or solution for one team may be a strategy, practice or behavior that another team is unprepared for.

Teams new to collaboration are likely to find the strategies for structuring productive meetings to be the most valuable, while highly productive teams might embrace our suggestions for useful data conversations. Administrators—regardless of how long their teachers have been working in learning teams—will love the surveys that we’ve developed to gather information about the overall health of their professional learning teams.

In some ways, that’s the beauty of our book—it is designed to provide customized support for any learning team, regardless of their current circumstances, and is written with all the players in mind.

The "Winter" section of your book is titled "Weathering the Challenges." Is this the stage — 4 or 5 months in — where even the best-intentioned PLCs are most vulnerable to inertia or break-down?

Bill Ferriter: To be honest, I’m not sure that learning teams are ever fully invulnerable. I know that our team has cycled in and out of moments of inertia and breakdown over the past five years.

Sometimes it’s because we try to tackle too many well-intentioned initiatives all at once—simultaneously designing remediation and enrichment programs, collecting and analyzing data, creating a warehouse of best instructional practices. Sometimes it’s because our team composition changes, and sometimes it’s because other priorities take precedence in our personal or professional lives. We’ve found ourselves wandering off the PLC path more than once and for a range of reasons that is almost mind boggling!

I think the key to our success has been our faith in one another and the professional satisfaction that we’ve gained from working together. The levels of trust on our team are high because we’ve got an extensive base of shared experiences with one another. When conflict comes, it’s productive, built on the belief that everyone on our team is working towards a shared mission even when we see alternative routes to the same end point. We’ve learned to listen to one another, to approach collaborative work as an experiment, and to embrace struggles as learning experiences.

You've been at this for some years now. Is there another crisis point several years into the work, when it begins to feel "ordinary" and less stimulating? If so, how did you and your team confront that?

Bill Ferriter: The work of my professional learning teams never feels ordinary to me! After all, I’ve been given the opportunity to reflect on my craft with other like-minded peers. Every year, we find new practices that we’d like to explore, new trends in student learning data that leave us confused, and new structures or processes that might just make our own work more efficient. Our student population changes, bringing new challenges that we’ve got to find solutions for, and new teachers are hired, bringing different perspectives to our conversations.

It’s the process that I’m motivated by—we investigate, we implement, we reflect, we explore, and we learn no matter how long we’ve been together as a group, and investigation, implementation, reflection, exploration and learning are always motivating.

Professional learning teams only become ordinary when we stifle teachers—when school and/or district leaders place an inordinate emphasis on products instead of processes. Districts that create system-wide pacing guides, lesson planning templates, meeting requirements and common assessments in an attempt to make things easier for—or to monitor the work of—teachers ruin the most rewarding aspects of the professional learning community process. We’ve got to give learning teams room to create and to innovate in order to keep the work exciting.

You developed a relationship with PLC experts Rick and Becky DuFour several years ago. How did that come about and what did you learn from that association that helped you and your colleagues back in your own school?

Bill Ferriter: My relationship with Rick and Becky DuFour actually started long before we’d ever met in person. Preparing for my new position at a PLC school, I chewed through Professional Learning Communities at Work—the seminal book on PLCs that Rick coauthored with Bob Eaker—in about 12 hours one weekend, and it was a vision for teaching that resonated deeply. I loved thinking that “someone official” believed in the potential of classroom teachers—and was willing to argue that schools couldn’t succeed until groups of teachers worked together to generate a body of knowledge about what worked in their classrooms and with their students. It was one of the first times that I felt empowered as a professional.

Our first personal contact came a little over a year later, after the National Staff Development Council published a reflection that I had written about the impact that my own professional learning team had on my instruction. Rick read my article and dropped me an email praising the piece. It was pretty amazing to me that a guy whose thinking I respected greatly saw value in something that I had written. We crossed paths in person for the first time at a dinner with the State Board of Education here in North Carolina. “Are you the same Bill Ferriter who wrote a piece about PLCs for NSDC?” Becky asked during our introductions. “Rick and I loved that article!”

Since then, Rick and Becky have been cheering for me—impressed enough by my work to recommend that Solution Tree hire me a PLC Associate. They also provided constant feedback as Parry and I worked through the initial drafts of our manuscript and served as a sounding board in a thousand situations. They are two of the most approachable experts that I’ve ever met, willing to give their time and attention to help others to succeed.

In the end, it’s humbling to know that they believe in me. In the eyes of a lot of people, I’m still “just a classroom teacher.” To Rick and Becky, I’m a classroom teacher with practical experiences to share and a level of expertise that should be respected and admired. I’ll be forever grateful for their confidence in who I am—as a teacher, writer and professional development provider.

In their foreword, the DuFours single out the accessible "conversational tone" of the book. How hard was that to achieve? In fact, how did you and Perry Graham meet the challenge of co-authoring a book — and your first book at that?

Bill Ferriter: To tell you the truth, writing Building a Professional Learning Community at Work was an amazing experience. Parry is someone who I’ve always had a synergy with—he’s brilliant, and we both like to read anything that we can get our hands on that’s connected to organizational theory and human nature. We’ve spent thousands of hours mentally wrestling with the challenges of making professional learning communities work. It was only natural for us to try to turn those conversations into a text that others could learn from.

And we both brought a different set of writing skills to the project. Parry is a meticulous writer who is skilled at organizing thoughts. He was almost singlehandedly responsible for the general structure and outline of our book, and he did a great job churning out chapter after chapter. I’m more of a wordsmith, so after we’d brainstormed together and Parry organized our thinking into a first draft, I’d add the spit and polish. What’s beautiful to me is that by the time we were done writing, neither of us could tell who had written what. The book had become truly “ours.”

Many teachers have a secret desire to write a professional book. What guidance would you offer? What did you discover along the way that you might not have anticipated?

Bill Ferriter: I think the most important advice that I can give to any teacher interested in writing professionally is start your own blog and start it now! Blogging regularly about your professional passions can help you to polish your voice and to practice articulating key concepts in writing—a process that can be difficult for accomplished teachers who often act on intuition. What’s more, blogging makes your thoughts transparent—your audience can push back at your core beliefs, pointing you in new directions or forcing you to find the flaws in your logic. While public challenge may not feel comfortable at first, your thinking will become more nuanced and sophisticated over time.

Better yet, publishers are constantly scouting collections of teacher blogs for potential writers. Almost every professional writing opportunity that I’ve had in the past six years—writing for NSDC and ASCD, having articles published in Educational Leadership and the Journal for Staff Development, landing a contract with Solution Tree—started after someone spotted something that I’d posted online. Blogging is the great equalizer, giving everyone the chance to be recognized and to cultivate an audience.

What havoc did writing a book wreak on your teaching and personal life? How much writing time, how much research time, how much time with editors? How long did it all take?

Bill Ferriter: Building a Professional Learning Community at Work was an 18 month project, John. That’s something I don’t think most teachers interested in writing realize. Parry and I signed a contract with Solution Tree after submitting a proposal and having finished one chapter from start to finish. That was enough to convince Solution Tree that our project was worth pursuing.

From that point, the grind began—and at times, it really felt like a grind! We read everything that we could read, searching for research that supported our key points. While we were confident in our core beliefs—we work in learning communities full time, after all—we knew that readers would respect our opinions more if we could back them up with the conclusions drawn by other recognized experts.

Simultaneously, we were drafting and revising chapters, meeting with one another to bounce ideas around, and changing directions. Typically, Parry would produce a first draft of a chapter and then send it to me. My job was to reorganize and/or reinforce his initial attempts to put our thinking into writing. I’d add language, polish bits that I thought needed polishing, add new recommendations based on my experiences as a classroom teacher, push against points that I wasn’t completely sure of, and create handouts and tools that would support the content of our chapter. Then Parry would review what I’d written before we’d begin a new chapter.

Only when we’d finished our entire manuscript did BPLC make it to Solution Tree’s editors. They sent our text out to three independent reviewers—as well as to Rick and Becky DuFour—for initial comment. All of those people sent extensive feedback that Parry and I were asked to try to incorporate into the final product. After about two months of systematic revising, Parry and I handed off our final copy to the editors at Solution Tree, who worked through the piece to make sure that our language was consistent and articulate.

I probably spent somewhere between 10 and 20 hours a week writing BPLC. It was essentially a part time job! That’s why teachers need to find the right time in their professional and personal lives to tackle book projects. If you haven’t got the time to invest in a book, you’re going to end up frustrated and overwhelmed. And frustrated, overwhelmed writers rarely turn out quality work.

If you’ve had a new baby, started in a new position, or have family responsibilities that you just can’t be away from, it might not be the time to write. Wait for the cycles of your life where professional and personal responsibilities leave an open window for extra work.

Is there another book in the works? You're well known in the edu-blogsphere and beyond for your work integrating Web 2.0 tools and ideas into your everyday teaching. Is that the next project?

Bill Ferriter: I’m actually in the middle of my second book as we speak—co-authored with Adam Garry, another professional colleague and friend. It’s tentatively titled Plug Us In: Five Digital Projects that can be Tackled Today — it's an attempt to create a series of practical activities that teachers can use to introduce 21st Century skills into their classrooms.

What makes Plug Us In unique is that the focus of our writing is on the kinds of skills that today’s students need to master in order to succeed—persuasion, collaboration, communication, information management. While we introduce extensive sets of tips and tricks for using digital tools—things like blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, Voicethread, social bookmarking and shared annotation applications—in our text, they all serve to strengthen good instructional practices.

I’ve got to tip my hat to long-time TLN member Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach for that orientation! Years ago, she convinced me that technology conversations needed to be focused on good teaching instead of new tools. Tools are simply a vehicle for making good teaching—and efficient learning—possible. Those ideas have driven my own thinking about teaching with technology ever since, and they play a prominent role in Plug Us In.

The manuscript is due in the spring—and I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the text will be published in the fall of next year.

Protocols for Professional Learning (The Professional Learning Community Series)
By Lois Brown Easton
(2009, ASCD)

Reviewed by Michael Fisher
Instructional Coach and Consultant (New York)
Teacher Leaders Network

I appreciate the opportunity to read and review Lois Brown Easton’s book on Professional Learning Protocols. It is a book that I know will have an impact on my own practice as a staff developer, and I’ve already used and shared many ideas from the text.
   
Because I work with schools helping teachers to set up Professional Learning Networks, both in-house and digitally, this book is specifically geared to my work with fellow educators. Many times, when I go into schools, teachers have not had much of an opportunity to meet in collegial groups, and they are satisfied with the “island mentalities” they have been allowed to cultivate over many years. This leads to not only missed opportunities, but also to feelings of inadequacy and a sense of constantly being under attack for failing to do this or that.

Easton’s career includes 15 years as a teacher, and long service as a curriculum leader and professional developer in Arizona and Colorado, including work with the Coalition of Essential Schools. In her introduction, she promises that through the use of protocols, teacher communities can “achieve trust and create a culture that is essential for collaborative work on issues of substance.” Schools can’t wait for a perfect culture to begin using protocols, she says. Instead, “it is through their use that the culture will develop and trust will emerge.”

Protocols, Easton tells us, are:
• Processes that help groups achieve deep understanding through dialogue.
   
• Structures for groups that allow them to explore ideas deeply through student work, artifacts of educator practice, texts relating to education, or problems and issues that surface during the day-to-day lives of educators.
   
• Guidelines for conversation based on norms that everyone agrees upon in order to make the dialogue safe and effective.
   
• A facilitated set of steps which everyone understands and has agreed to that permits a kind of conversation that people don't usually have when they discuss things.
   
• A constructivist approach to discussion that allows for deep development of ideas as certain people talk while others listen and then the talkers listen and the listeners talk, with each round characterized by reflection and exploration.
   
• A way for educators to build collaborative communities, sometimes called critical friends groups (CFGs) or professional learning communities (PLCs).
 Over the course of six chapters, Easton then explores the whats and whys of protocols and how they can be put to use to examine student work and professional practice, to address learning issues and problems, and to promote effective professional discussions. Each chapter describes various protocols in step-by-step detail. (See sample chapters here.)

The protocols in this book help to inspire the atmosphere and culture of trust and collegiality that is necessary to open and maintain conversations among teachers. When there is a framework of understanding, and a foundation of value for everyone’s participation and unique voice, it helps everyone move forward.
   
Besides the great examples she describes, Easton creates a defining framework around protocols and how they should be used. This supplies teachers and meeting leaders with detailed tools from which they can choose to facilitate different types of gatherings, whether the purpose is to share ideas, analyze a specific problem, or deal with something unpleasant in an honest but supportive way.
   
I especially liked that the author included a section on protocols to use with students. I am always being asked what I think about the peer review or peer collaboration process and what resources I have. Using protocols is a perfect way to examine, review, revise and discuss student work. The protocols listed facilitate both student to student interactions and teacher to student interactions.
   
This book also contains protocols for examining professional practice and for addressing issues and problems. Out of these, I found the Success Analysis protocol to be immediately useful, and have used it several times in professional development recently with wildly successful results. In fact, I just proposed to another staff developer that she may want to include a reference in her new book to this particular tool, as the content she is writing about is quite conducive to using protocols.
   
Overall, I see Protocols for Professional Learning as very necessary to the field and unique in its delivery. It’s short (70 pp.) and to the point and written in such a way as to be immediately useful to practitioners, be they teachers or administrators. It could also be useful, in part, to students, as they construct ways to be mutually supportive but also understand that all voices are necessary and needed. I was impressed and excited by what I read, and look forward to more from Lois Brown Easton and ASCD’s Professional Learning Community series.

 When Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders first appeared in the mid-1990s, teacher leadership was not on the lips (or minds) of most superintendents and principals. Or, for that matter, most teachers.

In the ensuing years, through three editions, Sleeping Giant has become a much-read classic, inspiring countless teachers to come out of their isolation and accept roles as leaders, colleagues and collaborators. Although the book has also become a staple in higher education leadership programs, in the new edition co-authors Marilyn Katzenmeyer and Gayle Moller continue to speak directly to teachers in classrooms and schools, urging them to wake up and take greater ownership of their profession.

To celebrate the appearance of this new edition — updated to reflect the many advances in teacher leadership during the past eight years — we spoke to co-author Gayle Moller, who in 2003 served as an expert advisor during the creation of the Teacher Leaders Network. We also invite you to read TLN member Nancy Flanagan’s review of Sleeping Giant, as well as her Teacher Magazine essay about the book's impact on her own life. — John Norton

* * * * * * * * * *

Thanks for talking with us, Gayle. You have many fans in the TLN community. Awakening the Sleeping Giant was first published in 1996. A second edition appeared in 2001. Why did you and co-author Marilyn Katzenmeyer decide that the time had come for a third edition?

In 1996, when we first wrote about teacher leadership, there were few people who acknowledged that teachers could be leaders. At the same time, when teacher leaders read our book they said: “You wrote about me!”

The opportunities for teacher leadership have increased substantially since those days. Our editors at Corwin Press approached us, noted the continuing interest in the 2001 edition, and suggested that the time might be right for an update. Marilyn and I knew the population of teacher leaders was continuing to grow, so we agreed.

What’s changed since 2001?

In the last eight years, school system leaders have begun to acknowledge that they’re not getting the results they would like. And many realize that mandates and limited professional development are not effective ways to improve results. The perceptive district leader is now turning to teachers who are competent and can work with their colleagues at the school building level.

New teacher leadership roles — literacy coaches, mentors, and staff developers — are becoming commonplace. In addition, the National Board certification process has helped many potential teacher leaders realize how they can improve their own practice and help other teachers. External support systems, like the Teachers Leader Network, are encouraging teachers to move outside their “comfort zone” to interact with other teacher leaders. When Education Week relaunched Teacher Magazine in 2006 with a specific focus on teacher leadership, many of us took it as a sign!

What's new or revised in the 3rd Edition?

We’ve done quite a lot of revising in this latest edition. Throughout the book, we show how teacher leadership has evolved over the last 20 years by linking current research and practice to new developments. There’s a new chapter written specifically for teachers who take on new instructional leadership roles. In that chapter we address things like deciding to be a teacher leader, negotiating the principal-teacher leader relationship, working with peers, and facilitating professional learning.

To encourage more conversations about teacher leadership, we’ve added two new instruments. The “Teacher Leader School Survey” measures how supportive a school culture is of teacher leadership. We’ve also included the “Teacher Leader Self-Assessment,” which can help potential teacher leaders determine how they currently match up with leadership standards.

The book is based on a leadership development model that includes planning for action. In this new edition, we introduce an action research process called the “Influencing Action Plan.” It’s a practical tool that helps teacher leaders work through strategies to address school site problems and issues.

Finally, we wrote a new chapter on the future of teacher leadership. In that chapter we predict, based on current developments, what teacher leaders might be doing in the years ahead.

I've been told your book is a long-time "best seller" for the publisher and is often required reading in college courses. As a subject of study, how has teacher leadership evolved in academia -- both at the undergraduate and graduate levels?

This question reminds me of a conversation we had in 1995 with a well-known editor of educational publications. He was giving us feedback on our first draft. Although he had invited us to write this book, after reading the draft he said that he didn’t agree with us that there could be degree programs in teacher leadership. I’m sure that he regrets that statement now, because today a search of the Internet produces links to numerous teacher-leader degree programs both at the master’s and doctoral levels. 

Corwin Press recently sent us a list of 65 universities who used the 2001 edition of our book in classes during the 2008-2009 school year. Also, Marilyn and I receive many requests from doctoral students to use instruments included in our book for their research studies.

The changing licensure and certification areas in several states, including Kentucky, Delaware, Alabama and others, include teacher leadership as an area teachers may add. North Carolina has adopted a teacher leadership standard for beginning teachers. Just last week, it was announced that the Kansas State Department of Education and ETS will work together to create the first national assessment to identify teacher leaders for certification. These changes will impact curriculum and coursework at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.

Before I retired, I taught a course in teacher leadership at Western Carolina University for seven years. This is a required course for any student receiving a master’s degree in education. Western Carolina believes that when teachers gain new knowledge and skills through a graduate degree program, they have a responsibility to influence their colleagues toward improved practice.

Higher education is also supporting centers designed to provide leadership development for undergraduate and graduate teachers. One example is the Center for Teacher Leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, led by Terry Dozier, a former National Teacher of the Year who served as the Clinton Administration’s top policy advisor on teaching issues.

We are also seeing more research. In 2004, Jennifer York-Barr and Karen Duke synthesized the last 20 years of research on teacher leadership, and much more has appeared since. Although most of the research is descriptive of teacher leader impact, there is an impetus to find measurable results that link it to student learning.

So it seems that teacher leadership development and research is gaining recognition in higher education.

Your original subtitle back in 1996 was "Leadership Development for Teachers." In 2001 you chose "Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders," which also appears on the 3rd edition. Did you give any thought to a new subtitle, reflecting the growing feeling among some teachers that they have a personal role in developing themselves as leaders? What's your own view?

Yes, we thought about another subtitle. But we felt that “Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders” was still a good description of the purpose of the book. The personal role of teachers in their own development is reflected in the Leadership Development for Teachers model that serves as the foundation for the book. In this model we invite teachers to answer these personal questions:  Who am I? (personal assessment) Where am I? (school culture), How do I lead? (influencing strategies), and What can I do? (planning for action). 

For all the editions of this book, we wrote “Application Challenges” at the end of each chapter. These suggested activities focus on how PK-12 teachers, administrators, and higher education faculty can provide experiences to help teacher leaders navigate the complexity of leading other adults. Notice the first group we addressed is “teachers.”

We not only feel teachers have a responsibility for their own learning, as leaders they also must help with the professional development of their colleagues. In my work with teachers, I’ve found that the idea of being accountable for others’ learning is new to them. So in one chapter we address how teacher leaders are responsible for facilitating the learning of themselves and others.

We also believe that everyone has a role in providing teachers with leadership development opportunities. You do this through your moderation of the Teacher Leaders Network. Marilyn and I contribute through our book and Leadership Development for Teachers, a professional development program we created. School district leaders and school administrators now offer many more opportunities for teachers to grow and develop as leaders. And certainly higher education has taken a more active role in this area.

I believe we all have ownership in teacher leadership development. Even so, no group will be more influential than teacher leaders themselves. If other supports aren’t forthcoming, then teacher leaders need to advocate and work with the system to get what they need.

In the new edition, how do you and Marilyn sort out the different definitions of teacher leadership — from informal school-based roles, to "official" job descriptions, to quasi-political roles at the local, state and national level where policy is made and influenced?

Our definition of teacher leadership has evolved through the three editions. We’ve added a new component to our definition in this edition. We now say that teacher leaders accept responsibility for achieving the outcomes of their leadership.

In our discussions with school leaders, especially teacher leaders, we found disillusionment with people who take on leadership responsibilities and don’t follow through with their commitments. So we felt we needed to acknowledge that leaders are competent when they are accountable.

Sorting out the variety of roles for teacher leaders is complex. The roles span from leading in individual classrooms to national policymaking. We explore informal teacher leader roles in our book — these are situational and the most difficult to put into categories. Informal roles usually come about when a teacher sees a problem and steps in to exert leadership. These informal roles may be short-lived or continue as long as the teacher has commitment to the issue.

What are relatively new are the formal, instructional leadership roles — especially those that place teachers in coaching or peer assistance roles. We’ve always had some formal teacher leaders, such as department chairs or grade-level team leaders, but asking teachers to move into their colleagues’ classrooms to address instruction is daunting. We’ve written a new chapter focused on these kinds of formal roles.

Finally, we believe the emerging teacher leadership we now see in the policy making area must be encouraged. In the last chapter of our book we offer ideas on how teachers can be advocates beyond their school buildings. Building advocacy skills is part of leadership development. The Center for Teaching Quality is a model for helping teachers learn and practice these skills as they work to influence the development of policies that impact their students and their teaching lives.

In 2006, you co-authored a book about teacher leadership with another colleague, Anita Pankake, aimed specifically at school principals. Why the urge to write Lead with Me: A Principal's Guide to Teacher Leadership and how did the ideas in that book influence the new edition of Sleeping Giant?

Ask a teacher leader about the person who most influences his or her daily work and the answer is “the principal.” Within the current structure of schools, this is the individual who has the formal power to promote or discourage teacher leadership. Although assistant principals and other formal leaders are important, the principal is the key to the success of teacher leadership. Principals not only have power over fiscal and human resources, they have information that teachers need in order to be effective as leaders.

Looking at the bigger picture, Anita and I were concerned about the sustainability of improvement in a school. A new principal comes into a school and often changes are made that become obstacles to continuing effective practices. We feel that principals have a responsibility to build a critical mass of teacher leaders to help sustain the work that helps students learn. 

Anita and I also work with principals who want to build teacher leadership in their schools, so we could see the need for a “how-to” book on this topic. The book provides specific strategies for promoting, developing, and sustaining teacher leadership.

Throughout Awakening the Sleeping Giant, 3rd edition, we stress the importance of principals and their responsibilities for building teacher leadership. An entire chapter is focused on how to develop a supportive school culture for teacher leaders. In this edition, we include the new tool called “Teacher Leader School Survey.” We’ve used this instrument with literally thousands of teachers and they find it powerful — especially when other teachers from their schools complete the same survey and they discuss the school’s results. 

We don’t put all the responsibility on the principals, because teachers have an obligation to build a positive relationship. In one chapter in our new edition we help teachers learn how to negotiate their leadership roles with their principals. Relationships are complex and none more so that the one between the principal and the teacher leader. Once we recognize this, we can work to make it a productive one.

As one of the co-founders of the Teacher Leaders Network, I was great to see the recognition you and Marilyn gave to the TLN community in the new edition. As an early adviser to TLN, you've had the opportunity to observe its development and listen to the many virtual conversations that have taken place among its members over the past six years. What roles do you think organizations of teacher leaders that cut across school, district and state boundaries can play in strengthening the profession and improving schools?

During my career, external organizations like you’re describing were the lifeline I needed in order to be successful “back home.” My primary work was in leadership development and if it had not been for the National Staff Development Council and the International Network of Principals Centers, I don’t know how I could have survived. Although I lived in a large urban area during most of my career, I was isolated from like-minded folks. At that time, there were no virtual professional communities like TLN, so I attended conferences, took on leadership roles, and read the organizations’ publications. Over time I developed a network of colleagues, and some are my friends to this day.

So you can see my bias for this type of organization for teacher leaders. These are the organizations that give teachers the courage to live out their convictions, sometimes in hostile environments. To “talk” with people who care about the same issues helps teacher leaders to know that they are not alone. Imagine finding someone in a state far from yours who is facing the same challenges! When teacher leaders can be part of a social network that helps them in their professional lives, it is powerful. TLN is an example of this power. I know because I’ve read TLN members’ stories that both inspire me and cause me anguish about their dilemmas.

For years, Marilyn and I have dreamed about a national organization for teacher leaders. Principals and other educational administrators have several national organizations, such as the National Association of Secondary School Principals. Why isn’t there an organization for teacher leaders?  Many teacher leaders are active in ASCD, NMSA, and other subject-specific professional organizations, but there is no general organization designed specifically for teacher leaders. In our new edition, we explore this possibility. Maybe the TLN members will initiate this for all teachers who are or want to be leaders.

In the preface to your new edition, you quote one of my colleagues — Melissa Rasberry at the Center for Teaching Quality — who said, "The stars are aligning for teacher leadership." What are the possible futures for teacher leadership? What has to happen to achieve the most positive future, from your point of view, and how likely is that?

Isn’t that a wonderful quote? It has inspired me for several years. Thank you, Melissa! In this edition we wrote a new chapter on the future of teacher leadership. With so many initiatives in the early stages of development, we felt it was important to push for change in the future.

I’d like to share a few examples of what we hope will emerge:

•    First, the flat teaching profession must give way to meaningful career ladders for teachers. Depending on the personal circumstances of teachers, they can select the challenges they want to take on or remain competent in their individual classrooms. Regardless of teachers’ decisions, we need predictable and fully funded avenues for teachers to take on leadership responsibilities. There should be an organizational expectation of leadership — unlike the current school culture where teachers are often ridiculed if they take on leadership roles.

•    Next, if teachers agree to assume additional responsibilities they should receive commensurate pay. Like many people, I remember the attempts at merit pay over the years, so we need to learn from these mistakes and build a comprehensive system based on multiple criteria assessed by several people. Performance-based compensation programs are developing across the country. Several members of TLN worked on an in-depth report that describes what should exist in these types of programs.

•    A final example of our futuristic vision is the measurement of and attention to working conditions in schools. This is a foundational issue for promoting teacher leadership. The Center for Teaching Quality has created a measurement tool for this purpose. In many states, the results are publicly communicated.  The most important step, though, is that school systems take the results seriously and work with schools to make changes when the working conditions are not supportive of teaching and don’t create an environment that can sustain leadership.

Your last question is “how likely is it” that these trends will become the norm in our profession. Personally, I believe that we do not have a choice. We have to make sure they become a reality. Otherwise we will continue to lose outstanding teachers, who are ready to be leaders, to other professions -- or to administrative roles that take them further from the classroom than they really want to be.

Will there be a 4th edition?

Whew, you always ask the most difficult questions!  Marilyn and I both recently retired. We felt an obligation to complete this recent edition as our parting gift to teacher leaders. Of course, who knows what the future holds for anyone, including Marilyn and me. Thank you for asking.

In this interview with author and professional learning teams expert Anne Jolly, you’ll learn at least three things:

• Details of a new edition of her book Team to Teach, a practical guide to organizing and sustaining PLCs and PLTs that promote continuous professional growth.

• Jolly’s eight secrets of PLC success.

• Her answer to the question: If you were asked to create a school reform design, what would its chief components be?

“Effective PLTs are teacher leadership hothouses,” Jolly tells us. “They’re places where teachers increase their professional knowledge and leadership skills – and they can also serve as perfect vehicles for teachers to begin to put leadership into action at several levels.”

NSDC describes Team to Teach as a “step-by-step book…written
in plain, easy-to-read language.” Jolly provides backgrounders that set
the stage for each of 10 chapters designed to familiarize teacher teams
with a proven process that can help them become high-functioning
working groups. The book also offers a comprehensive set of tools that
facilitators will find useful along the way.

Anne is a
second-career teacher who began life as a lab researcher and evolved
into an accomplished middle grades science educator — and Alabama’s 1993
Teacher of the Year. A charter member of the Teacher Leaders Network,
Anne continues to consult with schools and districts interested in
translating the learning-community concept into a viable vehicle for
everyday school improvement. We invited her to talk about Team to Teach and the current state of PLC development in American schools.

Continue below to read our conversation and learn more about Team to Teach.

Author Anne Jolly: Team to Teach

Since its first publication as a regional ed lab product in the early 2000s, the “Facilitator’s Guide to Professional Learning Teams” has been an underground bestseller in schools and districts across the U.S. A few years after its initial release, as the PLC movement caught fire, the National Staff Development Council wisely selected this spiral bound how-to guide (subtitled “Creating On-the-Job Opportunities for Teachers to Learn and Grow”) for distribution through its web-based bookstore. Sales were brisk.

In 2008, the time came for a completely new edition. NSDC invited author Anne Jolly to revise the guide, incorporating her learnings from nearly a decade as a PD consultant working with school-based learning teams in the southeast.

The result — published just in time for the NSDC annual conference last December — is Team to Teach: A Facilitator’s Guide to Professional Learning Teams. We began our conversation with some background about the book itself.

Team to Teach is subtitled “A Facilitator's Guide to Professional Learning Teams.” Tell us something about its potential audiences.

I wrote Team to Teach for those who are directly involved in setting up professional learning teams and making them work, and for those who are involved in enabling and supporting the teams. This includes teacher leaders, principals and other school staff, and central office administration.

Think about it this way: Educators often leave conferences and workshops revved up and excited about establishing professional learning communities in their schools. They understand the value of teachers collaborating on their work and they know what needs to happen. But when push comes to shove, the key to having successful PLCs is knowing how to implement the learning teams and make them work. Educators often don’t have much experience working together as adult learners on the “big stuff” of effective teaching and learning.

It's one thing to agree you need to establish teams and that these teams need to research, reflect, implement, redesign, etc. But unless you are able to organize yourselves effectively and move forward in ways that anticipate the common problems of collaboration, the initial excitement often begins to fade. In a nutshell, this book is written for the people who need to make successful teamwork happen. And that includes principals!

Would you describe your book as more theoretical or practical? And who is the "facilitator" in the title?

This book is definitely a practical guide. Each chapter addresses a different stage in building successful teams. Each chapter begins with a background section for the facilitator that builds knowledge about what needs to happen during that particular stage of implementing and sustaining the teams. The remainder of the book consists entirely of a selection of tools that may be used during specific stages and actions. I’ve included suggestions for how, why, and when to use those tools. There are over 100 pages of just tools in the book.

The facilitator mentioned in the title is primarily the person who will work directly with team members — training them, guiding them, troubleshooting, and sustaining team momentum through times when the old way of doing things as individuals seems so much easier. That person may be a teacher in a leadership role or another educator from inside or outside the building.

The book was first published in the early 2000s. Tell us something of its history and how you came to write it.

In 1999 I taught in a brand-new middle school that used a teaming approach. I was in a team of five teachers who taught the same students and had a time set aside each day for teachers to work together. We even had our own team meeting office in the center of our circle of classrooms.

All of us were excited about the possibilities. I'll never forget our first team meeting. We all came in, smiled as we poured cups of coffee from our very own coffeepot (we had scrounged an old but usable microwave for our office too) and sat down around our new, circular table in reasonably comfortable chairs. We looked at each other expectantly. Then it slowly dawned on us. We had no idea what to do.

We each taught different subjects, so where should we start? What should we accomplish? Like most other teacher teams in our school, we soon fell into familiar patterns of discussing kids, test scores, grades, and discipline. We did share ideas and put together an interdisciplinary unit, but this didn't result in changes in our classroom instructional practices.

Likewise, each month teachers across all grade levels in our school met together in department meetings. We talked about department business. The meetings were useful, but none of them actually resulted in teacher learning that led to improved instruction. How were we supposed to do that? We didn’t really know.

The "How to" idea loomed large in my thinking. I began contacting educators like Shirley Hord and Carlene Murphy who were working on teacher collaborative learning. They talked with me about the ins and outs of establishing successful teams. I read books on professional learning communities by Rick DuFour and others engaged in this work. I read research by Linda-Darling Hammond, Karen Seashore Lewis and others. And gradually a pattern begin to emerge on how this process might be laid out.

 
At this point, you must have been eager to put what you were learning into action.

You’re absolutely right. And I was fortunate to find funding that allowed me to work with two middle schools full time during the following year to establish effective teams. I learned a lot from these early attempts. My action research diary of that year's work relates all the ups and downs, sometimes in graphic detail. You can still read it on the Web, if you don’t believe I mean that!

My research and concentrated efforts to continually develop and revise this PLT work has really been ongoing since 2000. The first draft of the book emerged in 2000, as a part of some coursework for an advanced degree. After I finished my degree, I began working with SERVE — a regional education laboratory from that era that served six southeastern states. During my years with SERVE, my work was almost totally focused on researching, designing, and developing professional learning teams. SERVE put out the first published version of the book in December of 2004 and NSDC began distributing it in 2005-06.

The most recent edition, Team to Teach, was published with a new look and format by NSDC in 2008. I'm now happily "retired" and heavily engaged in working with professional learning teams. The power and the potential of teacher collaboration totally captivates me.

How has the book evolved in terms of content and target audiences over several editions?

The target audience for this book has never changed. It still speaks to the person or persons responsible for establishing, guiding, and facilitating successful teams of teachers. And the content hasn't really changed in terms of basic mission. The book continues to focus on establishing successful teams of teachers who engage in ongoing professional development to ratchet up their instructional practice in areas where their students need them to be better teachers.

In your articles, webinars, and talks, I often see you link the work of teacher learning communities and the roles of teachers as leaders in school improvement. Tell us about that.

When I was the Alabama Teacher of the Year, back in the mid-nineties, my field of vision gradually expanded beyond the issues facing my classroom and local community. I began to sense that schools across the nation had similar problems and that we teachers were the people who held the ultimate solutions. Teachers were the ones with the passion and energy to make real teaching and learning happen. And we were the ones who generally had less opportunity for real input into policies and procedures that either allowed or threw up barriers to good teaching and learning.

When I was at Cranford Burns Middle School in Mobile, Alabama, I had a principal who valued and encouraged teacher leadership. This school was fertile ground for me to begin my initial work on designing effective teams, and my principal was my biggest cheerleader. He encouraged my leadership inclinations and supported me in building my skills and taking the lead in developing teams in the school.

Effective PLTs are teacher leadership hothouses. They’re places where teachers increase their professional knowledge and leadership skills — and they can also be perfect vehicles for teachers to begin to put leadership into action at several levels.

 After nearly a decade of doing this work, what have you come to understand about what it takes to make PLTs function effectively and contribute to school success?

Well, let me just list a few of these with minimum elaboration.

1. The principal is the key to the success or failure of professional learning teams. The principal must understand the process and provide teachers with training and support. He/she must personally offer appropriate feedback to teams on a regular basis, and allow teachers to be risk-takers.

2. Team members must understand that these meetings are about professional learning and growth. I suggest that teams keep a visual reminder of this in front of them at meetings to prevent them from drifting back into old meeting habits.

3. Teams must set a clear purpose and goal for their work together. Otherwise they'll never get anywhere

4. Setting norms is often short-changed but it's critical for effective teaming. It generally works best when teachers set norms following discussions of behaviors they value in other team members.

5. Sharing teaching ideas is an important part of teamwork; however, team members are more likely to incorporate needed changes into their professional practice if they examine research and articles on instruction to broaden their knowledge base, and work together to develop and collectively implement new strategies.

6. Teams can be successful whether they are voluntary or mandatory. In either case it's important to provide the necessary help in terms of support structures and incentives. In the case of mandatory teams, it's especially important to roll out the initiative correctly and provide thoughtful and consistent follow-up.

7. It can take up to 3 years for professional learning teams to become ingrained as a way of doing business in the school. When this happens, the culture of the school begins to shift and teachers begin to support one another as professionals. In fact, team members begin to take responsibility for the success of each other as teachers.

8. There is no "one size fits all" in establishing a successful teaming process. Mechanically following suggested procedures in the Team to Teach book will not bring about magical results. The school leadership must be knowledgeable about successful teaming, committed to establishing collaborative teams, and understand how to tailor this process for the faculty.

Thinking a bit more broadly, after years of working with teachers and principals in many schools, if you were asked to create a school reform design, what would its chief components be?

I'd put a group of principals together and give them this challenge:

Imagine that you have freedom to design your school to operate anyway you want it to, and that you will be provided with sufficient resources do implement the design.

• What will your teachers be doing from the time they walk in in the morning until the time they leave in the afternoon?
• What would you (the principal) be doing during the school day?
• How would you like the school day to be structured?
• What types of meeting rooms, student learning rooms, laboratories, classrooms, and other space would you like to have in this school?
• What clerical positions would be needed? What would clerical staff responsibilities be with respect to facilitating teaching and learning?

In my best-case scenario, a good school reform design has teachers focusing exclusively on teaching and learning during the school day. The principal also takes a leadership role in the instructional process and involves teachers in helping him/her make instructional decisions.

The school day is structured so that teachers have two hours a day to work together to address student strengths and weaknesses and improve instruction. Teachers have comfortable and relaxed surroundings in which to work together. They have access to technology and a high comfort level in using it. School firewalls have been altered so that students in the school can access and create wikis, blogs, social bookmarks, rss feeds, and other digital tools when useful for learning.

Teacher class sizes are never so large that teachers are unable to give students the individual guidance that they need. Students who consistently disrupt learning for other students in class are temporarily placed with a smaller group of similar students within the school where trained teachers work with them in academics and behavior modification. There's plenty of opportunity for hands-on learning, projects and problem-solving. There's an attitude that if kids — as they did in my last teaching position — look out the window and see an environmental mess made by construction of
the new school they're attending, they can get their hands dirty doing something about it.

The school has enough clerical staff to handle non-instructional paperwork, and non-teaching staff monitors students at lunch, during class changes, and at other times when students are not engaged in instructional activities. This frees up extra time for teachers to meet with parents, attend IEP meetings, and prepare for classes.

Teacher leadership is viewed as a necessary role in the school. Opportunities are provided for teacher leaders who wish to remain in the classroom to expand their responsibilities and be rewarded financially for taking on more leadership roles and responsibilities.

Those are a few components I'd include.

What's next for Anne Jolly?

Other professional work I'm involved in today includes writing engineering curriculum for middle schoolers that addresses student science and math objectives while helping them apply this knowledge. I’m doing this with the Mobile Area Education Foundation in a system-wide initiative called Engage Youth in Engineering. It's exciting to be asked to design curriculum that is bound to engage kids – and to do it in my content area, where I still have a great passion.

I'm also exploring ways teachers can use digital tools to collaborate, save time, and help in their own learning and student learning. I'm working with a colleague, Skip Olsen, on this project and we find it endlessly fascinating. We'd love to have input from schools and teams that find digital tools to be useful and have had some success with them. If any readers would take time to give us input, please send ideas to ajolly@bellsouth.net. We are interested only in free digital tools, not vendor tools.

And, last but certainly not least, I'm still learning more about successful teaming. I'm compiling what I believe is an ever-stronger base of tools and information for facilitators. I’m also beginning to focus some of my work directly on principals as the linchpin people when it comes to enabling successful teamwork.

Other than that, I plan to keep flunking retirement!

Until November 10, 2009, you can view (at no charge) a recent Education Week webinar featuring Anne Jolly and Nancy Fichtman Dana as they discuss how to create the framework and establish ground rules for building successful professional learning teams.

[Photo of Anne Jolly by Joe Songer, for Teacher Magazine]