AFT’s Barnett Berry and Kim Farris-Berg have produced an article that details the history of teacher-powered schools, the research supporting these innovative models, and examples of successful implementations. An excerpt appears below:
The Center for Teaching Quality and Education Evolving have created the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative to raise awareness of the opportunity for teachers to take on leadership roles and to nurture the efforts of teacher teams. More than 90 teacher-powered public schools are located in 18 states across the country, and the initiative is aware of another 30 under development. They serve students of all grade levels in urban, suburban, and rural environments, and include both district and charter schools. A growing number have been launched and supported by teacher unions, including some that are exploring taking on the role of professional guilds.
Teacher-powered schools offer compelling evidence that teachers can and do create schools that increase their engagement in teaching, inspire powerful student learning, and directly address social justice issues.
Many of the teacher teams that started teacher-powered schools took advantage of existing openings to seize authority, while others asked for and negotiated authority (even though it wasn’t being offered outright).
In teacher-powered schools, teams of teachers have secured autonomy to collaboratively design and lead many aspects of teaching and learning. Keeping students at the center of their decisions, they make choices about a wide array of factors, including the design of the instructional program and professional development, colleague selection, budgeting, and whether to give (and how much to count) district assessments. In many teacher-powered schools, teachers also evaluate their colleagues through peer review processes, as is often the case in other professions. While some teams running teacher-powered schools opt to have a principal or lead teacher, these administrators are chosen by the team—and view themselves as “servant leaders” who share decision-making responsibilities.
In developing its online inventory of schools, the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative conducts a formal interview process to document whether the team of teachers at the school exercises full or partial decision-making authority in certain areas. It then designates a school as “teacher-powered” if teachers have this authority in any area.
Through its interviews with teachers in these schools, the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative has identified at least 10 arrangements through which teachers have gone about securing autonomy to design and run teacher-powered schools, a testament to the fact that each group of teachers must determine what will work best. Some groups secure formal autonomy through site-based management arrangements with their school district, and others take advantage of state laws such as Maine’s, which allows innovation schools, and other states’, which authorize charter schools. Other arrangements are initiated by union locals, in partnership with school districts.
To see more go to: http://www.aft.org/ae/summer2016/berry_farris-berg
