When Teachers Lead: An Analysis of Teacher Leadership in One Primary School

Abstract

While teacher leadership is a concept that lacks consensus in the literature and may be underexplored in schools, it is a practice that is worth pursuing for its many cited benefits to school improvement. However, the extent to which teacher leadership thrives in any school is dependent on school conditions such as prinicpal support and schoool culture. This is evident in an analysis of teacher leadership episodes from one primary school in Trinidad, which the author undertook in order to identify the supportive structures as well as barriers to teacher leadership. Evidence on teacher leadership from developed countries such as the USA and the UK, where the concept is more widely known, was used to form the analysis, which revealed an emergent form of teacher leadership existing at the school.