Teacher leadership almost always looks good on paper.

Truly, I would love this model to win from an individual and collective perspective. It’s tiring watching the same set of people who aren’t “on the ground” get opportunities to speak, travel, and present their ideas. It’s equally exhausting hearing representatives of our school systems say we lack morale and conviction about our daily work while stunting our growth as professionals for reasonable or petty reasons. But, if we’re talking about “what’s best for kids,” we’d be remiss to not continually explore our failures to live up to the classroom intrigue we’ve developed.

A part of me is always curious about educators’ stories that show little to no flaws in their literature. That’s suspect given the immense new work we must take on in the 21st century of transforming our school system to lean on racial and social justice as a core tenet of schooling. Until then, teachers who call themselves leaders will always have to negotiate written and unwritten rules about the responsibilities they’ve taken on, the systems they have to fight, the adults they have to parlay with, and the young people whose gravitational pull gets more abstract the further we step away.

For more, please read here and let me know what you think. Thank you!