ABSTRACT
Education reformers and policy leaders, such as those at the recent International Summits on the Teaching Profession, often call for teacher leadership. The authors examine how some nations have created conditions that encourage classroom practitioners to collaborate and to lead reforms. And they offer strategies for ramping up the spread of teacher leadership across the globe, drawing on insights from our work with the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ) Collaboratory, a virtual community of educators. A recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report, following on from its review of policies in top-performing nations, concluded that the most effective form of school leadership may very well be self-sustained teacher collaboration. The authors focus on six major findings from TALIS that help us better understand teacher leadership in an international context, with America as an instructive counterexample to top-performing nations like Finland and Singapore as well as others.
