Cultivating and Sustaining Personal Leadership Development: Redefining Teacher Leadership at Teach For America in the Los Angeles Region

Abstract

Traditional leadership development programs are based on an old paradigm of leadership focused on the technical learning of new skills and abilities required for successful job performance or promotion. In the context of education teacher leadership development has meant acquiring the pedagogical knowledge and management skills necessary for formal leadership roles such as grade-level teacher leaders, school deans, or instructional specialist. Missing from this traditional view of teacher leadership development is a focus on personal and adaptive learning. Instructional skills are unequivocally necessary for developing teacher leaders, but technical skills alone will not prepare teachers to meet the increasingly complex and challenging demands of teaching and leading in low-income public schools. The skills and capacities needed for teachers to meet these challenges are adaptive in nature and developmental in process. Redefining teacher leadership to include personal leadership development requires an intentional process for cultivating teachers’ developmental capacities for self-reflection, self-awareness, introspection and perspective taking of differing views and situations. The strategic project was an effort at redefining teacher leadership development, and more broadly leadership development, at Teach For America (TFA) in Los Angeles. The primary goal of the project was to design and implement an 8-month personal leadership development pilot program for second year teachers in Los Angeles. The leadership pilot, which is rooted in constructivist-developmental theory, focused on cultivating teachers’ personal leadership by fostering three habits of mind: Understanding Self, Understanding Others, and Understanding Self in the context of Others. The project’s secondary goal was to cultivate the personal leadership of TFA staff and build their capacity to facilitate it for others. Focusing on staff development was an effort to create the conditions at TFA that would ensure a sustained and an ongoing focus to developing personal leadership across the organization. Early results from the project indicated that Teach For America finds value in personal leadership development as a critical component to teacher and staff development. However, there was not a strategy to meaningfully and systemically integrate personal leadership into their existing teacher leadership development model. Additionally, TFA staff lacks the knowledge and skills necessary to develop personal leadership in others. Although the strategic project was focused on developing teacher leadership the analysis brings to light the challenges and opportunities for cultivating personal leadership development of adults in schools or in any organization. Implications for Teach For America and the education sector is a call for more holistic and systemic approach to leadership development that includes both a focus on personal and professional development.