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Coaching Teachers
To Be Leaders

What Is Teacher Leadership?
A principal and teachers must create a shared understanding of teacher leadership for their school in order to give it value and make it real. Creating a shared understanding begins with the process of "unpacking personal assumptions."

How Do I Know I'm Ready to Share Leadership?
It is not unusual for principals to be concerned about sharing leadership with teachers. Few teachers and principals have formally been prepared to share leadership. Sharing leadership often requires a principal to make a personal transformation.

What Do Teacher Leaders Do?
Describing teacher leadership is a little bit like trying to pin down a wave. So it is no wonder that teachers can have a difficult time talking about leadership. To help teachers talk about their leadership, principals can help them create personal leadership statements.

Meet Evelyn Cortez-Ford Evelyn Cortez-Ford is the founder of School Leadership Coaching, a company committed to helping teachers, principals, and district administrators develop their full leadership potential and create successful schools. A pioneer in the field of teacher leadership coaching, Cortez-Ford's doctoral research focused on the evolving field of teacher leadership. As an educator for more than 20 years, she has served as a National Board Certified Teacher, clinical supervisor, professor, and consultant. She has presented numerous workshop and conference programs across the United States and Canada. You can learn more about Evelyn Cortez-Ford and her company on her Web site, schoolleadershipcoaching.com. Read more of Ellen Cortez-Ford's nine-part Coaching Teachers To Be Leaders series.

What Structures Need To Be in Place To Make Teacher Leadership Thrive?
The hierarchical structure of schools perpetuates a tradition: principals lead and teachers teach. Given that structure, it is difficult to imagine how teacher leadership can thrive. But it can thrive, and principals are instrumental in creating conditions to make it happen.

How Do I Develop Skillful Teacher Leaders?
Teachers can learn to take on leadership responsibilities, and principals are in a great position to provide job-embedded leadership development for teachers by creating a vision for teacher leadership; capitalizing on teachers' strengths; and celebrating successes.

What Can I Do To Develop Collaborative Relationships With Teachers?
In professional learning communities, teachers are active participants in bringing about change. That collaborative culture has blurred of the roles of teacher and principal. The empowered status of teachers requires teacher-leaders and principals to reframe their relationships.

What Do I Do When Teachers Depend Too Much on Me for Leadership?
A group of teachers and the principal assemble for their weekly School Leadership Team meeting. Surprisingly, nobody at the meeting seems ready to share. They seem to be depending too much on the principal for leadership. Why is that? What can be done about it?

How Do I Maintain Momentum for Teacher Leadership?
No one ever said that building opportunities for teacher leadership would be easy. Excitement for teacher leadership fades, commitment wanes, old patterns surface, and the principal wonders, How do I maintain momentum for teacher leadership?

How Do I Know If Teacher Leadership Is Working?
Creating a community of leaders seems like the right thing to do, but how can schools ensure that teacher leadership is supporting the achievement of school goals? To ensure that schools are improving, a variety of data must be collected…