Abstract:

The relationship between theory and practice, the role of ‘evidence’ in teacher education policy and strategies are crucial for the quality of teaching and learning. Teacher leadership (TL) has become an important part of educational research; literature highlights the lack of TL training, especially in pre-service and beginners programs (Szeto & Cheng, 2018, Tintoré et al., 2023). The concept of TL reflects role changes over the last decades - from administrators to managers preoccupied with school outcomes, with more freedom but high accountability regimes, increasing collaboration and shared responsibility (Pont, 2020). Teachers become change agents in their professional contexts using their leadership skills. Teaching with the adequate strategies will provide better understanding on TL: an outcome of the actions, interactions and influences upon each other of everyone, including students, parents, administrative, technical and other support staff, teachers, school leaders, policy makers (Frost, 2021).The goal of our paper is to identify TL skills development strategies useful on teacher training; we present three study cases on teaching TL using inquiry based learning, problem solving and creative strategies, involving the students reflectivity, from Romania and Spain. Taking as a reference the ideas that school improvement is produced through shared and distributed leadership, and the teacher leader figure is essential to achieve these (Harris, Jones, Huffman, 2018), all three universities – Alexandru Ioan Cuza from Iasi, Romania and Universidad Villanueva of Madrid and University of Granada (Spain) propose and implement Teacher Leadership Projects under the goal of efficient training of teacher leaders. The objectives were to promote democratic practice that enables future teachers to lead innovation collaboratively and to strengthen distributed leadership in schools. Reflective and narrative techniques constructed collaborative learning spaces (constraints of hierarchy are minimized) and agency, reflectivity and development of self-learning through critical exploration of the creative and affective dimensions of leadership are facilitated.

Even the proposed TL activities starts using some narrative techniques or with reflections from the Stephen R. Covey book “7 habits of highly effective people”, the learning became visible as all participants make tacit knowledge explicit, explore its applicability to other contexts and transform the knowledge into a shared resource; the TL applied training project had shown its effectiveness, but in the same time it shows the resistance to change the structures and mentality related with the figure of a teacher leader, that exists in some schools, and even in universities (Moral-Santaella & Sánchez-Lamolda, 2023).

Using study case methodology we identified the commonalities and the differences between our three approaches, highlighting the need for an experiential TL teaching during university programs addressed to pre-service and beginners. The main conclusion, starting from the collected data, is that these narrative approaches have encouraging results on developing reflective ability and leadership skills. Further multi-countries research on teaching TL could help to develop a comprehensive Teacher leader profile and to learn from other TL experiences, in different contexts.

Keywords:

Teacher leadership, Reflective teaching, Experiential learning, Teachers professional development, Narrative methodology.