Teacher Collaboration Leadership and Change

Article Review: Leadership and Change
According to Ankrum (2016) in his article “Utilizing Teacher Leadership as a Catalyst for Change in Schools,” teachers are an often-underused resource for schools to institute meaningful changes and to provide critical data to educational administrators to support new initiatives. Rather than viewing teachers as passive followers, they should be viewed as active participants in the change process. The article is founded upon a concept of leadership theory known as distributed leadership (versus charismatic or visionary leadership) which suggests that leadership is best distributed in different ways throughout an organization for it to function effectively. Given the individualized nature of instruction and the fact that teachers do function in many ways already as de facto leaders in the classroom, this would seem like an appropriate paradigm.
Teacher leadership, the article notes, can take formal and informal roles. Teachers as a whole are already more apt than other types of employees to take leadership in occupational settings and to go above and beyond their job descriptions to help students. The article also suggests the value of teacher collaboration to offer different strategies to help struggling students. A quantitative survey conducted by Ankrum (2016) of 175 leaders who were attending Teachers College Summer Principals Academy (SPA), and the cohort from the National Superintendent Academy (NSA) identified teachers as catalysts for school change and called teachers significant in the change process. Professional development was also flagged as critical to foster school improvement.
As an instructor working in a school setting for children with emotional and behavioral disorders, I believe the results of the survey have additional validity, given the special needs of students experiencing challenges. In such instances, students often struggle with completing tasks of everyday life, and regardless of their job descriptions, teachers must fill in the gap to ensure that students are willing and able to learn. Also, parents often lack critical coping mechanisms to deal with their children and teachers may need to act as the educators of parents as well as educators themselves. Finally, because students can present a wide spectrum of functionality and emotional difficulties, individualized attention is a must. This makes professional collaboration even more essential, as teachers must always be learning from one another. Teachers can also offer emotional support to their fellow educators, since instructing emotionally challenged students can be very stressful from the instructor’s perspective.
My main concern in reading the article, however, is the lack of concern it shows for compensating teachers for the additional time they spend helping students and working with fellow teachers to optimize the instructional environment. Yes, teacher leadership is very important, but it is also very time-consuming. Adding to teacher’s additional responsibilities by having them perform formal as well as informal leadership tasks must be viewed in the context of their other requirements. Much is expected of teachers already and to expect them to perform additional administrative responsibilities and engage in more formal professional collaboration may be more of a burden than a blessing, although I do think that teachers are eager to ensure that the curriculum is shaped by their input to a greater degree than it currently is at my place of work.
Overall, I think that the study performed by Ankrum (2016) is valuable. But it is only the beginning. Teachers need to provide input as to how their contribution will be solicited and offer feasible strategies of how to integrate it into their workdays without forcing them to perform even more work above and beyond the call of duty.

References
Ankrum, R. (2016). Utilizing teacher leadership as a catalyst for change in schools.
Journal of Educational Issues, 2 (1), 151-165.