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.
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Vilson I fully agree on your argument that school system needs to evolve with the current time in order to properly express current issues. Honestly, I had never truly considered exactly how “perfect” each educator who publishes their educational experience with little to no flaws (except Paulo Freire), as if education is as simple as each of them portray it to be. It reminds me of how Freire encourages those who desire to teach to admit to their shortcomings and express if there is an aspect that they are unsure about, for showing that form of weakness does not make a teacher less credible, but more human. And by turning certain accomplishments into almost forms of punishment, as you mentioned with leadership, seems to counteract the idea of what a teacher could and should be. Rather than a teacher being a figurehead with note cards to read in front of a crowd upon stepping into the leadership position with a mix of colleague respect and jealousy, those who teach deserve their own voice to be heard.
There needs to be the level of humanity, as well as the recognition and acceptance of a new responsibility when a teacher takes upon a leadership role. Because, as it should be, teachers are leaders and guides for their students, but rather than being a figurehead leader, they are a student leading other students. Through connection and understanding, a teacher can be a figure that both students can approach without fear, and other teachers can look to for the example of how a teacher should run their classroom.