Teaching & Learning Conference Presentation

Greetings to anyone who attended or is interested in our presentation at the Teaching & Learning Conference 2014. We’re glad to share what we’ve done, what we’ve learned, and what we’re still figuring out about teacher leadership.

My partners in this presentation are Pat Graff (NM), Lanelle Gordin (CA), Cheryl Suliteanu (CA), Maren Johnson (WA). Below you can find the main point of the presentation and some useful links. Presentation slides are available at the bottom of the page, though the settings for background images didn’t transfer from Powerpoint and will make some slides hard to read. The slides with information you’re most likely to want to look up or follow up are pretty clear though.

The central idea of our presentation is that teacher leadership is essential to school improvement and advancing the profession. New roles for teacher leaders are already emerging, and we must ensure that as these roles evolve they are formalized (yet flexible!), sustainable (funded and integrated), and truly professional (requiring demonstrated accomplishment and skill). Not everything we talk about is entirely there yet, and our examples are all variations on the theme, but we think our stories are instructive regarding how teacher leaders are changing the field and where we should be headed.

Thank you to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards for putting on this excellent conference and inviting us to speak, and thank you to all who came to see our presentation (or cared enough to read this blog post anyways!).

Resources and connections (links open in a new window/tab):

• For the ACT report on teacher career pathways, see our Publications page.
• More information on California’s Greatness by Design report (and a link to find the report).
• Bay Area New Millennium Initiative report on teacher career pathways.
• Read more about the Riverside County Teacher Leadership Certification Academy.
• Stories from School group blog (including posts by Maren Johnson) from the Center for Strengthening the Teaching Profession in Washington.
• On Twitter: Cheryl Suliteanu @CSuliteanu – Maren Johnson @maren_johnson – David B. Cohen – @CohenD

Our slides (with apologies for formatting issues that come up in the transfer from Powerpoint to Google Docs):