In the fourth week in T3, when we are looking at leadership values for T&L evaluation, I wanted to share with you a meta-analysis from the Educational Research Review about the association of teacher leadership and student achievement, published in November 2020.
Objectives: There is a lot of literature around teacher leadership. However, unlike most of the existing literature, this analysis seeks to establish an empirical basis for whether or not teacher leadership impacts student achievement. For this analysis, teacher leadership is defined as those who maintain normal classroom responsibilities as well as assuming leadership responsibilities outside of the classroom. This can be formally (by way of a leadership post) or informally (demonstrating those leadership behaviours).
Summary:
Overall, there is a small positive correlation between teacher leadership and student achievement.
There appears to be a slightly higher impact of teacher leadership on Maths achievement, rather than reading achievement, although both are positively impacted.
Teachers involved with curriculum, instruction (classroom pedagogy) and assessment decisions demonstrated the strongest relationships with student achievement.
This meta-analysis uses some studies with small sample sizes. This suggests that whilst this is a good start, further work to show the empirical basis for the relationship between teacher leadership and student achievement needs to be conducted.
How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflection questions arising from this that might be helpful to consider are:
How do I show leadership as a teacher, either formally or informally? What are my areas of strength, and areas for development?
What does curriculum, instruction and assessment leadership involve? How do leaders in these areas think and make decisions? How can I show these leadership qualities?
If anyone would like to discuss this further with Jaya - please do comment below! I’d be delighted to open up these discussions and conversations.
This is really interesting Jaya, thank you. It took me a couple of years to "discover the benefit of sharing the leadership responsibility" (p.1) and I fully agree that "as many researchers have argued, principals are not the only source of leadership" (p.14) and in my first WA faculty meeting, the first bullet point about my preferred leadership style explained that I aim for "Distributed leadership whenever practical".
ReplyDeleteMultidimensional frameworks can usefully inform our thinking/planning but I appreciate the authors' caution (p.15) that "A small number of studies were available in several analyses. This is an unignorable issue when calculating average effects for individual teacher leadership dimensions". That "issue" is part of my reason fo encouraging healthy scepticism before stating that "the research shows..." :-)