Teacher Leadership For School Improvement

Current approaches to educational reform worldwide often fail because most school improvement programmes associate leadership with the head of the organisation, rather than adopting a distributed leadership perspective where all teachers, regardless of their positions, are empowered. In this book, as an alternative approach to school improvement, Dr. Bolat offers a non-positional teacher leadership approach based on a distributed leadership perspective. This approach is based on a conceptual framework that reflects a new understanding of school improvement. In this new understanding, school improvement is defined as ‘a process of change towards enhancing student outcomes through focusing on learning and teaching at the classroom level and on the internal conditions that support it’. The framework focuses on all these levels to develop schools. The most distinguishing aspect of the framework is that it rests on teachers’ capacity to lead change and work collaboratively. It assumes that teacher leadership is a driving force in improving schools, while not denying the pivotal role of headteachers. Dr. Bolat puts these principles into practice through an intervention called Teacher-Led Development Work and provides evidence that teacher leadership has the potential to contribute to school improvement when teachers are empowered to exercise leadership.