Teacher Leaders – Building Collective Efficacy

When teachers share a belief that they and their colleagues can impact student achievement, they share a sense of collective teacher efficacy. When schools provide teacher leaders with greater agency, they can have a greater influence on peers by promoting both student achievement and a collaborative, positive school culture. This program explores the relationship of teacher leadership to collective efficacy, the greatest factor impacting student achievement. (Hattie, 2016) When leaders strategically plan to enable conditions in building teacher leaders’ capabilities this can develop a culture focused on collective efficacy.

Challenges

A compliance-based approach, where teachers are expected to follow directives and procedures without much input or autonomy, can limit the opportunities for teachers to develop and exercise their leadership skills. This can, in turn, affect motivation, confidence and willingness to take on more responsibilities to influence positive change within the school. Oftentimes, there are such limited leadership roles on offer, anyway, that teachers may not feel that any are a ‘good fit’ for them and their skills.

Given that some teachers report feeling that they operate in ‘silos’ and have limited input and power to make decisions that affect their work and their students’ outcomes – particularly strategy development and identification of improvement areas – addressing this situation is key to improving teaching and learning, driving innovation and building a positive school culture.

Solutions

To counter this situation, the Teacher Leaders: Building Collective Efficacy program targets key areas to drive collaboration, shared accountability and provide teachers with skills and understandings to lead effectively:

• Define new roles (with clarity) that allow for autonomy for teacher leaders
• Empower teacher leaders’ voice and ownership in building high-quality professional learning teams and culture
• Develop influential competencies for teacher leaders for a variety of contexts and situations
• Provide structured and detailed action plans for teacher leaders to drive across teams, develop targeted action-research projects that are aligned to the school priorities and informed by data

Benefits

1. Strategic Planning
   Develop a focused, data-informed project to lead across teams, faculties or whole school.


2. Refine Influencing Skills
   As leaders of others, teacher leaders will refine their ability to engage staff in order to specifically address collective efficacy.


3. Build Leadership Density
   Develop leadership density and alignment across your school, promoting student achievement and a collaborative and positive school culture.