November 19th, 2018

This week I am writing my blog on the Teacher Leadership article. Although it may not necessarily be a new learning, I believe it was an important reminder that as a teacher, no matter how much experience you may have, you will not get any promotions. If you are looking to step up in your professional career, you will have to assume an administrative position. I found it quite shocking that those in administrative positions typically only remain in these positions for 3-4 years. For my personal experience, the administrators in the schools I have attended have been working in these positions for much longer than 3 years. I was also unaware that there are two roles of teacher leaders; formal and informal. The two roles of teacher leaders are quite different from one another in many ways. As I was reading through this section of the article, I was trying to figure out where I would place myself in these two roles. I truthfully was unsure which role I would fit best.

The first connection I made within this reading was to how teacher leaders can contribute beyond the school. Most of the work that teachers do within the school is what gets noticed, but there is so much that teachers do to educate themselves, and to encourage other teachers to do the same. I connected to this because I have personally gone to PD days within a school division for my job as an educational assistant. Another connection that I made was to one of the conditions of promoting teacher leadership. The condition is “administrators who encourage teacher leaders,” I feel as though this condition is true for us as education students. The professors that I have had thus far have always encouraged me to be a leader.

One question I have after this weeks reading is how can we as teachers foster environments to create student leaders?