"Like a lot of teachers, we'd sit in the teachers' lounge thinking of better ways of handling things," Mark Fertel says, reminiscing about when he taught in a large high school in Chicago. "What I wanted was a say in how best to teach the kids I was teaching," he adds.
Top-down administrative hierarchies in large urban schools and little or no collaboration with peers can leave teachers like Fertel feeling isolated and struggling to maintain classroom order. The bureaucratic structure often makes them feel their ideas are not heard outside the teachers' lounge, they say.
Yet urban teachers face intense pressure to improve student learning. Teachers who want to lead their school improvement efforts must also manage a more diverse student and teacher population—including a larger proportion of students living in poverty and more new or underprepared teachers—than their suburban counterparts deal with daily. To tackle the challenges of their schools, urban teacher leaders strive to share decision making, work in teams, and build a professional school community focused on better achievement for all members.
After reflecting on how to create a more positive environment for teachers, Fertel and several colleagues developed a plan and started their own small urban high school. The result, Chicago's Best Practice High School, operates with teacher collaboration and leadership as integral elements.
Best Practice is organized with one teacher per subject at each grade level, and all the teachers for a grade level have a common planning time. This arrangement provides an "easy opportunity for teachers to develop leadership because you're placing them in the position of deciding what those kids need and how to get it to them as quickly as possible," Fertel asserts.
Lauren Barry, freshman English teacher at Best Practice, says that collaborating with her peers creates a sense of curriculum ownership and that the school's model of teacher leadership conveys a sense of empowerment to students as well. "Our model allows for many voices to be heard and choices to be made, by teachers and by students," she says.
Laying the Groundwork
Some schools are benefiting from training programs tailored to the challenges of urban educators. A preservice program in Massachusetts, the Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) program, puts each participant to work in a classroom for a year under the guidance of a master teacher. Started this year, BTR is a joint effort of Boston Public Schools, the Boston Plan for Excellence, and Strategic Grant Partners, a consortium of family foundations.
The program operates in much the same way as a medical residency program in a hospital, combining practical training with rigorous coursework. Four days out of the school week, teacher residents work in the classroom with a master teacher. One afternoon and one full day out of the week, residents take courses and study to earn dual certification in their content area and in special education, which is a high-needs area for Boston Public Schools. Master's-level coursework is taught by a mix of Boston's most effective principals, teachers, and instructional coaches; academics from local colleges and universities; and community leaders.
"We lose half of our new teachers every three years," says Ellen Guiney, executive director at the Boston Plan for Excellence, and the residency training is designed to help change that. Managing kids in one class with hugely different levels of literacy "is a great challenge," she acknowledges. "We want to be able to prepare teachers to do that, because that's the reality of urban schools."
BTR aims to recruit a diverse group of prospective teachers and provide extensive training in the specific needs of Boston Public Schools. Participants receive a stipend and a loan for the tuition. By going through the BTR program, teacher residents "know the theories that Boston is basing its instructional approach on, and they put that theory to work in the classroom," Guiney says. The best way to understand how to teach math according to the district's approach is to teach math under one of Boston's master teachers, she adds.
The role of the master teacher, or mentor teacher, is key to modeling teacher leadership within schools, experts say. "There's enormous expertise in urban districts, but it hasn't been organized to take advantage of it and give teachers opportunities to have leadership roles," says Guiney.
Coordinated Development
Teachers need the right tools to continue to develop as leaders throughout their careers. In Portland, Me., and Seattle, Wash., the Strengthening and Sustaining Teachers (SST) program uses the collaboration of universities, the teachers' union, and the school district to link preservice, induction, and inservice teacher training via a five-year program. Jane Goetz, coordinator of teacher development in Seattle Public Schools, says the partners were careful not to overload the preservice component of SST. "Often, in a preservice program, so much is crammed in," observes Goetz. Teachers can't always convert that training to practice, she notes.
To spread the training out, SST coordinators looked for what could be cut from the preservice stage and moved to the induction stage. They discovered an abundance of classroom management training that didn't seem to pay off in practice.
Why isn't classroom management effective when taught primarily during preservice? "That particular class may not be relevant at the time it's being taught," says Goetz. "A preservice teacher observes an experienced teacher, and a lot of what the teacher does is not very transparent—it looks easy. It's not until you have your own classroom, and you experience that sense of isolation, that the need for classroom management becomes so apparent," she adds. SST's efforts to fine-tune teacher preparation through a partnership of invested organizations will benefit the participants and their schools, Goetz asserts.
For teachers already in service, California State University (CSU) at Hayward has a master's degree program in urban teacher leadership, which is coordinated by Michael Kass. The CSU program allows teams of teachers from a particular school to develop leadership skills together. The teacher teams spend the first year identifying and exploring problems and possible solutions at their school site, and the second year using research-based strategies and models to more deeply explore these problems and their proposed solutions.
The CSU program takes an antiracist approach to improving issues of equity in urban schools, Kass says, and teacher leaders act as the agents of this change. For example, one team of teachers in the program worked to bridge the social gap between Spanish speakers and English speakers at their bilingual school. Once a month, the team met with the staff to explore cultural differences and share new strategies.
Lifelong Leaders
Education leaders are often marked by their commitment to lifelong learning. Several teachers say they found the process of certification with the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards a powerful way to cultivate the confidence to seek leadership roles. Sherry Adams, a Board-certified teacher, works to recruit minority teachers for certification because the process breeds teacher confidence and ownership of a standards-based curriculum, she says. "When you have an entire staff of confident teachers—my goodness! You could move a mountain!" exclaims Adams, who teaches 4th grade at Seaborn Lee Elementary School in Fulton County, Ga.
One National Board-certified teacher in California tackled just such a challenge by helping develop a ready-to-use middle school science curriculum for the Oakland Unified School District. Anthony Cody, from Oakland's Bret Harte Middle School, used his leadership skills with a team of teachers to create and disseminate a standards-based curriculum that would be exciting and hands-on. Like many urban districts dealing with a large number of new teachers, the Oakland Unified School District contended with varying degrees of teacher competency with the science curriculum.
Cody saw the collaboration on the districtwide curriculum as an opportunity to serve "not only those of us at the more stable sites but also the teachers at the less stable sites." When there's such high turnover, he adds, new teachers "need to be able to walk into the classroom and have something that they can present. Textbooks are really inadequate for working with this population—you need a lot of hands-on activities and materials."
Cody's group of about 30 district teacher leaders held five mini-conferences, where they presented the new curriculum units, distributed more than $100,000 worth of hands-on materials, and hosted guest speakers from the education community at large. More schools should be "developing the capacity to respond to our own problems," Cody says. He adds that administrators who are able to nurture and tap that capacity will discover that "challenging teachers to solve their own problems can really bring out the best in teachers."
Poised to Lead
Urban teachers face unique challenges, so they often are the most keenly aware of what is necessary to improve their schools. Urban teachers need support for professional collaboration, and they need to be in systems that are working to develop leadership skills from within. "Principals can't do it alone," says Kass. "Effective, lasting school change has to be a collaborative effort. I was a principal for many years, and if I hadn't had teachers willing to be shoulder to shoulder with me, I don't think we would have been able to change much."
Goetz adds, "If we're going to make the kinds of changes we hope to have, in terms of student achievement, in terms of school transformation itself, then we really have to capitalize on the potential of teacher leadership in our own buildings."