Session Information
26 SES 06 B, Teacher Leadership and Teachers' Dealings with Educational Leadership
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper provides an account of the introduction of the non-positional approach to teacher leadership as a vehicle for enhancing teachers' role in educational reform in Kazakhstan. The paper draws on the interim outcome of one academic year-long action-based research that aims to develop teacher leadership in four schools in Kazakhstan.
The current educational reform in Kazakhstan is believed to be greatly benefitting from the input and engagement of teachers who are critical in implementing educational policies (OECD, 2014). This is because teachers can act as key mediators in social change (OECD, 2005). Particularly, teachers in Kazakhstan are learning new instructional practices, translating them into their own context and transmitting them to other teachers (Bridges et al., 2014). Therefore, we need to think about how to enable teachers to sustain and lead the change locally, or to put it another way, how to make the top-down reform initiative sustainable by the bottom-up support (Yakavets et al., 2015).
Hence, the aim of this study is to explore teacher leadership that can be exercised by all teachers as a part of their teaching practices (Frost and Harris, 2003; Harris and Mujis, 2005; Frost, 2010; Frost, 2012). Frost (2011) refers to such leadership as a non-positional teacher leadership (NPTL). Leadership is perceived as a moral act, wherein teachers identify their professional values by systematic reflection on their own practice, set vision in relation to their own concerns or schools' needs and act to bring about the change into their practices, schools and community (Frost et al., 2000; Frost and Durrant, 2003a; Frost, 2008). By enabling teachers to own their professional development, NPTL may facilitate ongoing practice-based development, interaction, engagement and collaboration between colleagues (Frost and Durrant, 2002; Harris and Mujis, 2005). This approach may also increase the role of teachers' voices, which has a potential to facilitate educational change (Frost and Durrant, 2002; Bangs and Frost, 2016).
However, in order to voice the local initiative, teachers need to learn how to lead the initiative and be supported in their endeavours (Yakavets et al., 2015). Therefore, the development of infrastructures and processes are necessary to enable teachers to make meaning of (Fullan, 2007) and lead change. At the time of writing, the International Teacher Leadership (ITL) initiative has facilitated teacher leadership in 150 schools in 17 countries around the world, which involved more than 1000 teachers. Their experience suggests that teacher leadership has a number of positive elements, such as introducing democratic values, speeding up the modernisation of the educational system, increasing school effectiveness and enabling innovation at the local level (Frost, 2011).
Teacher Leadership for Learning and Collaboration (TLLC) is the name of the intervention-programme that draws on the ITL initiative and the UK-based teacher-led development work (TLDW) methodology that has been adapted to local socio-cultural and educational context after the reconnaissance stage. There rationale for using this approach is two-fold. First, it has been systematically developed and refined over a period of time (Frost and Durrant, 2003b). Second, the impact of NPTL and its adaptability to different educational settings have been verified in a number of educational contexts (Frost and Durrant, 2002; Frost, 2011; Frost, 2013). Moreover, this approach contains the characteristics of professional development that were identified as important by practitioners in my context. Therefore, my research concern is as follows:
How can I develop and evaluate a strategy for enhancing the teacher's role in educational reform in Kazakhstan using an approach that enables teachers to exercise leadership for the purposes of enabling the sustainable development of practice?
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
References: 1. Bangs, J. and Frost, D. (2016) Non-positional teacher leadership: distributed leadership and self-efficacy in Evers, J. and Kneyber, R. (Eds.) Flip the system: changing education from the ground up, 91-107, London: Routledge, 2. Bridges, D., Kurakbayev, K. and Kambatyrova, A. (2014) Lost - and found - in translation? Interpreting the Processes of the international and Intranational Translation of Educational Policy and Practice in Kazakhstan in D. Bridges, (Eds.), Educational reform and internationalisation: The case of school reform in Kazakhstan, 263-286, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 3. Frost, D., Durrant, J., Head, M. and Holden, G. (2000) Teacher-led school improvement, London: Routledge and Falmer 4. Frost, D. and Durrant, J. (2002) Teachers as Leaders: Exploring the impact of teacher-led development work, School Leadership and Management, 22:2, 143-161. 5. Frost, D. and Harris, A. (2003) Teacher Leadership: towards a research agenda, Cambridge Journal of Education, 33(3), 479-498. 6. Frost, D., and Durrant, J. (2003a) Teacher leadership: Rationale, strategy and impact, School Leadership and Management, 23(2), 173-186. 7. Frost, D. and Durrant, J. (2003b) Teacher-led development work: guidance and support, London: David Fulton Publishers. 8. Frost, D. (2008) 'Teacher leadership' - values and voice, School Leadership and Management, 28(4), 337-352. 9. Frost, D. (2010). Teacher leadership and educational innovation, Zbornik Instituta zapedagoska istrazivanja, 42(2), 201-216. 10. Frost, D. (2011) Supporting teacher leadership in 15 countries: the International Teacher Leadership project, Phase 1 - A report, Cambridge: Leadership for Learning. 11. Frost, D. (2012) From professional development to system change: teacher leadership and innovation, Professional Development in Education, 38(2), 205-227. 12. Frost, D. (2013) Teacher-led development work: a methodology for building professional knowledge, HertsCam Occasional Papers, University of Cambridge Faculty of Education and HertsCam Network. 13. Fullan, M. (2007) The new meaning of educational change. New York: Teachers College Press. 14. Harris, A. and Muijs, D. (2005) Improving Schools Through Teacher Leadership, Berkshire: Open University Press. 15. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2005) Teachers matter: attracting, developing and retraining effective teachers, Education and training policy: Overview. 16. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2014) Secondary Education in Kazakhstan, Reviews of National Policies for Education. 17. Somekh, B. (1995) The Contribution of Action Research to Development in Social Endeavours: A Position Paper on Action Research Methodology, British Educational Research Journal, 21(3), 339-355. 18. Yakavets, N., Frost, D. and Khoroshash, A. (2015) School leadership and capacity building in Kazakhstan, International Journal of Leadership in Education, 1-26.
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