How Teachers Become Leaders

This is a unique insider’s look at the process that teachers experience when they assume leadership positions in their school, district, state, or writing project site. The text features vignettes by K–12 teachers, describing their individual leadership roles and experiences to show how teachers take charge in a variety of contexts. The authors identify four major themes: identity, collaboration, making conflict productive, and learning new practices. Through the teacher leaders’ own words, readers witness how the four themes are an integral part of daily practice. Chapters also examine what research indicates about these new and proliferating roles.

How Teachers Become Leaders makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how teachers in leadership positions:

• Construct a new identity.
• Develop the skills and abilities to handle conflict and make it productive.
• Learn to facilitate the building of learning communities, helping teachers to collaborate with one another.
• Use the practices they already know and incorporate new ones into their work.
• Reframe the very meaning of leadership, making it work side by side rather than top/down.

Ann Lieberman was a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and is now at Stanford University. Linda D. Friedrich is the Director of Research and Evaluation at the National Writing Project.

"This book gets right into the practice of teacher leadership itself. A splendid and essential read for all teachers everywhere."
—Andy Hargreaves

“In this engaging new book, Lieberman and Friedrich show us how teachers learn to be leaders. Intentionally capitalizing on the synergy of research and experience, the authors pose important new questions about what leadership means in today’s challenging educational climate, including fresh insights about community, identity, and productive conflict.”
—Marilyn Cochran-Smith, coauthor of Inquiry as Stance

"Lieberman and Friedrich give us the much-needed answers to promoting powerful schools via the wisdom of teachers leading from the classroom to the schoolhouse to the statehouse: an insightful, practical, and most useful book." —Carl Glickman, president, Institute for Schools, Education, and Democracy