I want to let you know about an article I just published at Ed Week about teacher leadership called, “Beyond tokenism: Toward the next stage of teacher leadership.” The article is a collection of thoughts that I’ve had percolating for quite some time now that seek to answer these questions:

  • Now that teacher leadership has taken hold as an idea—and that is a relatively new reality—how does it look in practice? What works and what doesn’t?
  • What constitutes a worthwhile leadership experience for a teacher? What roles waste our time and talent, and how can we shift in response?

Teachers need to push the envelope and conversation around teacher leadership to make the most of our knowledge, skills, and interests, and other educators need to give some thought to the same questions.

Please check out the article! I’d love to hear from people about how this matches or doesn’t match their realities. I will say that I’ve reached a place where my current involvements in teacher leadership do fulfill the criteria I lay out in the article, which is a great feeling. More on those experiences sometime soon. First, I really felt the need to point out both how far we’ve come and what work we have to do to keep pushing forward.

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Author

Ariel Sacks

Ariel Sacks began her 13-year teaching career in New York City public schools after earning her master’s degree at Bank Street College and has taught and coached in grades 7-9. She is the author of Whole Novels for the Whole Class: A Student Centered Approach (Jossey-Bass, 2014) and writes a teaching column for Education Week Teacher.

Ariel’s work as a teacher leader with the Center for Teaching Quality involved her in co-authoring Teaching 2030: What We Must Do For Our Public Schools – Now and in the Future. She was also featured in the CTQ book Teacherpreneurs: Innovative Teachers Who Lead Without Leaving.

She is currently working on a book about the role of creative writing in equitable, 21st century schools, and she speaks and leads workshops on the whole novels approach.

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