A primary goal of the Regional Alliance is to build leadership capacity in support of math and science reform at each Alliance School. For the last four years, Alliance staff have worked with leadership teams, helping them to formulate reform goals and gain the skills and resources they need to meet those goals. while working with these schools, the Alliance has sought to gain a better understanding of the role of leadership teams in promoting reform. Recently, staff researchers examined how team members perceived their work. In this article the researchers discuss some of the conditions that appear to contribute to a team's effectiveness.

To understand the function and effects of Alliance School leadership teams, we have interviewed thirteen elementary school teams and their principals. In our research so far, we have uncovered a variety of patterns among those teams that have proven effective in creating reforms.

The problem

The most successful leadership teams were able to identify a specific challenge or problem that their institution was facing. This problem served as an enabling condition that existed in the school, making it ripe for change. Not unlike Goldilocks, who found that porridge could be neither too hot nor too cold, the chair neither too big nor too small, Alliance School leadership teams needed to focus on a problem that met three general criteria.

1. The problem needed the proper audience. It had to touch upon the professional practices of teachers in a clear and substantive (though never overwhelming) way. Teachers had to have primary responsibility for the work, which related directly to the practice of teaching and learning, and in which other teachers could share in creating or implementing the solution.

2. The problem had to affect a substantial number of teachers at the school. To create whole-school reform, it is necessary that most, if not all, of the reform touch the whole school.

3. The problem needed to have some external focus such as state curriculum frameworks or state tests. The frameworks require schools to realign their curriculum. The tests highlight specific problems in students’ understanding of material or of students’ problem-solving abilities.

Developing support for an innovation

Once the enabling problem is clearly and widely understood, the next piece of school change depends on the collaboration of activist teachers. What is it that the Alliance activists do? For one, they do not focus on the innovation no matter how compelling they declare its merits to be. In planning their work, there is a clear focus on the development of a solution to the problem. To do this, the successful activist needs to link the problem with the training that he or she has received. The problem provides a point of leverage from which to widen the distribution of the training.

It is interesting and important to note that instead of focusing on the innovation, the team keeps the language of reform centered on those matters most appropriate to teachers: teaching and learning. We may all know of an individual teacher who finds a curriculum he or she loves and then tries to convince other teachers to use that curriculum. In that instance, the teacher is trying to push for an innovation by focusing on the innovation. However, unless other teachers see the need for the innovative curriculum, the imple mentation of that curriculum will most likely be limited to, at most, a handful of other teachers.

Successful Alliance School teams build support and understanding of the underlying problem. All teams involve other teachers at one or more stages in the process of developing the problem and how to address it. Many teams recruit as many as four or five additional teachers to work with them. Other teams involve the rest of the faculty through disseminating information to them, collecting their feedback, or planning activities for or with them. Through this give and take, the teams then focus their work on the solution to that problem, and the solution is then one in which all teachers can see the positive effect on their teaching and their student’s learning. In this way, leadership teams develop an innovative solution to their collectively determined problem. The process is shared; in other words, the buy in is built in.

Leadership teams own leadership development

Teacher teams, then, are responsible for creating, implementing, and sustaining an effort to address a whole school problem. Their actions—conducting professional development workshops, presenting before the school board, being recognized as a point person for a whole school reform activity—appear to be consistent with common notions about expression of leadership. Further, these teachers are viewed as leaders on many levels. The Regional Alliance staff directly refer to them as leadership teams. In addition, every principal interviewed thought of their team of teachers as leaders.

In contrast, very few teachers from the teams referred to themselves as leaders, or when they did, they viewed all the teachers in the school as leaders. As one teacher stated, "I consider everyone [all teachers at the school] a mentor or a lead teacher." In fact, members of all but one team from the schools in the northeast identified themselves as teachers rather than leaders. Given the widespread support for the teachers as leaders, why do the teachers not identify themselves as leaders?

Two ideas are at work, we believe, that help explain teacher self-perceptions. Returning to the idea of the enabling problem, the teachers saw themselves as working to address a problem that was commonly shared. This was not so much leadership as it was being good citizens. Teachers had an ownership of the problem, but they did not necessarily look beyond the problem. When asked why they joined the team or participated in the reform activities, teachers responded, "We just did it," "That was something that needed to be done, and we did it," or "It was just a part of the job." In one sense, they do not feel they have done anything special—they are just doing what they must do as teachers.

Second, teachers have a highly egalitarian view of their role in schools, and these teachers are no exception. The egalitarian culture is so strongly embedded in many schools that teachers may try to avoid taking on the label of leader so that other teachers will, in practice, follow them.

One of the schools interviewed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, attended the Regional Alliance Summer Institute in 1996 and 1997. They have now been without the support of the Alliance for two years, but the teachers trained by the Alliance have taken a significant leadership role in the school. While working with the Alliance, the school had whole faculty meetings in which many school decisions were made. In the last year, the director of the school retired. This is often a severe problem for schools in the midst of a reform process. However, two of the Alliance team members, who had taken more significant leadership roles in the school, moved into defacto leadership roles and helped to sustain the school’s momentum for reform. Currently, this school, under the direction of these two teachers, is working with other schools. School faculty have also served as informal mentors to two other Alliance schools.

Sustaining the reform

We have described qualities of teams that were able to institutionalize reform to address one problem, but how can leadership teams be used to work on many problems? How can a group brought together to address one problem continue on to look at other reforms or challenges? Even though the teams were effective and successful in ameliorating the problem, the majority of teams felt that they would not continue once the support of the Alliance ended.

Alliance leadership teams came together and focused their energies on a specific problem or problems, and they have had considerable success in solving or addressing these problems in their work. In fact, some teams said that even after the support of the Alliance ended, they would stay together until the problem was effectively solved. Teachers had developed ownership of the problem and wanted to finish the job. Nevertheless, the ownership is, in an important sense, situated or bounded. Consequently, one might expect that teams disband when their task is finished.

Most teacher teams conducted their meetings on their own time, and many teams had weekly or biweekly meetings devoted to their work. Some teams even had a small number of their meetings during the school day. Over time, this extra work cannot be sustained. But even more important in a profession in which lack of time is a continual lament, providing time for teachers is perhaps the most significant recognition that they can receive about the quality and importance of their work. Teams that choose to continue after the support ends share one important characteristic: Their principals have structured the school day so that the team could have most of its meetings during school time. Although principals did support their teams in numerous way—;emotional support, formal and informal recognition—it was the purposeful allocation of this most precious resource, time, that enabled the teams to progress. It is critical that administrators recognize this need for ongoing support if the team is to move on to new challenges and new opportunities for school improvement. Principals and others must respond to this vital opening for the institutionalization of innovation.

Final thoughts

Interestingly, it appears that teachers’ perception of leadership may not be an important factor in addressing the problem. Rather, ownership of the problem may be more significant if the intention is to have teachers address only one issue and not to continue working together. But to get teachers interested in sustaining the work of school improvement, teachers need to develop leadership skills and a perspective that includes the whole school.

Further, an important factor in sustaining teams beyond the support of the Alliance is the organizational support shown to teams by their own schools. Teams feel more likely to continue meeting or working as a team (in some form) if their school has provided them formal support in the form of time to meet during the school day. While other kinds of support such as resources, emotional support, or awards were important to teachers, the support was not as significant as in-school meeting time.

The Regional Alliance can provide teachers with a foundation in understanding a whole school perspective, but in order for teams to be successful, the principal must still help teachers look beyond their classroom practice. Principals can do so by providing teachers time to meet in school, therefore demonstrating to teachers that their newly developed perspective and vision and its effects on student learning are seen as important by the school staff and admin-istration. In these ways, teacher leader-ship teams can implement innovations that go beyond one classroom to the whole school, and from one specific problem to continual work to improve the learning of every student.



Jay Feldman and Russell Faux are educational researchers who study the effectiveness of teacher professional development efforts.