This article summarizes how one principal empowered teachers at a struggling charter school to lead its academic turnaround. The principal employed five key steps: 1) Sharing specific achievement data and goals to build transparency and trust; 2) Carefully selecting teacher leaders for a senior leadership team based on strengths; 3) Connecting teachers to prestige models of best practices; 4) Requiring instructional decisions be grounded in student achievement data; and 5) Publicly acknowledging teacher and team successes to foster collaboration. Through these steps, teachers discovered their leadership potential and led the school to significant academic gains, with 100% of students passing state exams within five years.

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International Journal of Leadership in
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Every teacher carries a leadership
wand
Dorit Tubin
a
a
Department of Education, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev,
Beersheva, Israel
Published online: 28 Apr 2015.
To cite this article: Dorit Tubin (2015): Every teacher carries a leadership wand, International
Journal of Leadership in Education: Theory and Practice, DOI: 10.1080/13603124.2015.1028463
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2015.1028463
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3. Every teacher carries a leadership wand
DORIT TUBIN
Turnaround schools require empowered teachers to discover their leadership wand. Based
on a case study conducted on BART Charter School, this article highlights five steps for
leaders who wish to empower their teachers and allow them to lead their schools to suc-
cess: 1) Let your people know; 2) Nominate the fittest, 3) Connect teachers to a prestige
model, 4) constantly ask for valid data and 5) share success and responsibility. Conceptual
explanations and practical examples describe each step in a chain of turnaround events in
a successful turnaround school.
Napoleon Bonaparte once said that every private in the French army
carries a ‘field marshal wand’ in his knapsack. Translated to a school con-
text, this could mean that each teacher carries a leadership wand and,
thus, if teachers are empowered, they can influence teaching and learning
within and beyond their classroom and contribute to much larger school
improvement efforts. A central question inherent in this metaphor is ‘how
can a principal empower a school’s teachers to discover their leadership
wand and contribute to the school’s success?’ This question is what
prompted this paper, based on a case study conducted on a particularly
successful charter school in Western Massachusetts during the 2013
school year.
When one school leader, Ben Klompus, was appointed as principal of
an academically struggling charter school, he knew that leadership
mattered and believed that if he was to lead the school’s academic turn-
around, he would need to find a way to empower his school’s teachers to
discover it. In this article, I summarize the five important leadership
moves that this principal employed to help this school’s teachers lead the
school to be successful.
BART Charter Public School, founded in 2004, is a tuition-free
college prep charter school with about 30 faculty and 20 staff who serve
308 students in grades 6–12. While 60% of the student body comes from
low-income families, only 10% of the student body has parents who
graduated from college. All of the school’s five graduating seniors have
been accepted into college. Additionally, in 2012, 100% of 10th grade
Dorit Tubin is a senior lecturer and the head of the Principal Training Program, in the Department of
Education at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Email: dorittu@bgu.ac.il. Her research
focuses on educational organizations, successful school leadership, and the interactions between
schools and national culture. She has published in journals such as the Journal of Educational
Administration, The Journal of Educational Change, The Internet and Higher Education and the
Educational Administration Quarterly.
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
INT. J. LEADERSHIP IN EDUCATION, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603124.2015.1028463
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4. students were proficient or advanced on both the English Language Arts
and mathematics (MCAS—Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment
System) exams and 100% of 10th grade students passed their science
MCAS exam. The school was one of only 4 districts (out of 393 districts)
in Massachusetts to achieve this result. Recently, the school received an
award from the Massachusetts Governor’s office for ‘Closing the Achieve-
ment Gap’ and ‘Demonstrating High Growth’. It has also been recog-
nized by the US Department of Education’s Effective Practice Incentive
Community (Silver Gain School, New Leaders for New Schools) for
accomplishing breakthrough student achievement gains.
Five years ago, during the spring of 2008, things were different. The
school failed to meet its performance targets and was placed on academic
probation by the state, with the threat of forced closure if ‘adequate yearly
progress’ was not met within two years. As a new principal, Klompus
believed that in order for a successful turnaround to take place, he needed
to ground the school in a deliberate use of achievement data, invest in
collaborative adult learning and help strong teachers take on the leader-
ship of faculty teams.
The educational leadership literature cites several ways of empowering
teachers in this way. Muijs and Harris (2006), for example, found that a
culture of trust and having supportive structures, principals who nourish
teacher leadership and innovative forms of professional development were
needed for teacher leadership to be successful. Teamwork has been found
to contribute to teachers’ empowerment, especially when it focuses on
instruction, connects instruction to curriculum, connects instructional talk
to classroom practice using assessment data, and when teachers work col-
laboratively on planning lessons and conducting classroom observations
(Troen & Boles, 2011). In addition, teamwork encourages teacher leader-
ship when it is characterized by a shared ethos, clarity, experience and
flexibility (Goodall, 2013). While these studies point to factors associated
with teacher leadership and effective teamwork, they do not differentiate
between the causes and outcomes and do not specify the chain of events
that lead to more empowered teachers. I address these issues in the fol-
lowing five steps, distilled from the leadership practices observed at
BART Charter Public School.
Let your people know
For teachers to be willing to take risks, engage in a process of school
improvement and show their leadership abilities, they must feel that they
have some control over their destiny and transparent access to the student
achievement information that matters most. While the threat of school clo-
sure may create a sense of urgency which can accelerate change (Kotter,
2007), if teachers do not have transparent access to reliable data, urgency
can lead to resistance and resentment. Sharing information reduces uncer-
tainty and serves as a basis for trust and transparency. Such processes
allow the principal to see who cares and to differentiate teachers who share
the school’s vision between obedient followers and potential partners.
2 D. TUBIN
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5. Practices
At BART, this stage started with sharing and prioritizing very specific aca-
demic goals and planning strategic structural improvements that would
allow those goals to be met. Specific examples of this planning included
increasing the time spent on English and mathematics classes, increasing
the amount of tiered support systems in order to better provide needed
remediation for targeted students and more. Teacher leadership and voice
were crucial factors in establishing buy-in. The principal took groups of
teachers to visit higher performing schools to observe these practices in
place. Once back at school, the principal leveraged all professional
development opportunities—including a three-week August professional
development schedule—allowing teachers to study and problem solve how
these practices might look at BART school.
Throughout the day, week and month, there are numerous opportuni-
ties for collaborative information sharing. Specific examples include a
brief, five-minute morning meeting with all faculty prior to each school
day, weekly faculty and team meetings and monthly data team meetings.
Each of these opportunities provides important moments when these
community members take the time to ensure that information is
communicated clearly and questions and concerns may be voiced.
Nominate the fittest
After getting to know the teachers, their strengths, proficiencies and val-
ues, the principal chose members for positions on a senior leadership
team that further helped him develop the entire staff. Choosing the senior
leadership team members is a dynamic process in which the senior leader-
ship team members are assessed according to their ability to lead towards
common school goals. A new principal may have a senior leadership team
in which there are teachers that already hold leadership positions, but are
not suitable for the role, or others who are excellent, but are prone to
burnout or new teachers (novice and expert alike) who have yet to prove
themselves. The whole process should contribute to the mutual develop-
ment of the principal and the teachers, where the principal may set the
direction, clarify school’s goals and values and provide the needed condi-
tions, and the teachers challenge and otherwise influence their peers, even
beyond their classroom doors. Failure to choose those teachers best fit for
such leadership roles may not only inhibit school improvement, but is
likely to produce little to no teacher improvement as well.
Practices
The principal carefully chose his senior leadership team from among the
existing and new teachers and began to support them with individual and
group coaching, leadership and teamwork. Together they developed the
mission, translated it into practice and were asked to continually evaluate
EVERY TEACHER CARRIES A LEADERSHIP WAND 3
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6. their achievement according to the school goals. The principal and the
senior leadership team served as role models for others as they modelled
transparent and reflective leadership practices.
Connect teachers to a prestige model
With wisdom and knowledge spread across the organization, one of the
principal’s roles is to unearth this knowledge and to connect the teachers
with the best of it. The act of belonging to prestige groups—those which
possess a strong reputation for sound instructional practice and perfor-
mance—can enhance teachers’ self-esteem and their willingness to try
new practices. This shortens the learning curve and allows participants to
avoid pitfalls and waste time in inventing wheels that already exist. Pres-
tige models can be defined by their well-known name, public approval,
innovativeness or a combination thereof. Affiliating the school with a pres-
tige model helps justify the changes and reassures teachers, parents and
the school community of the new educational vision.
Practices
This stage parallels the two former stages by engaging the faculty and
administrators in reflective practices that can introduce critical conversa-
tions about the state of teaching and learning within the school. In this
school’s case, one of the initial first steps that the organization took to set
the stage for a successful turnaround was to contract a reputable consult-
ing group to provide a mirror for the organization, allowing members to
examine themselves and their school deeply. An outcome of this study
showed that the school needed to develop a collective vision of what a
‘powerful learning environment’ looked like. To do this, the principal
leveraged the site visits to higher performing schools to identify the attri-
butes of their classrooms that made them ‘powerful learning environ-
ments’. One outcome of this study was the adoption of a short
observation protocol that named 12 characteristics of a powerful learning
environment (developed by Boston Collegiate Charter School). Once the
team brought this tool back to campus, the entire faculty examined it to
see how well it aligned with the school community. The teachers then
pledged to develop competencies in order to increase the likelihood that
these practices would be regularly observed. This proved to be the first
step towards instituting peer observation, which, in turn, created a sense
of trust and collaboration and increased teacher proficiency and openness.
Other examples of connecting to a prestige model include the eventual
membership in a network of schools which share a structured interim
assessment process (Achievement Network, Inc.) as well as participation
in a professional programme at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.
This Data-Wise program1
enabled the team to become more sophisticated
users of student achievement data and to create systematic assessment
practices to help improve teaching and learning (Boudett, City, &
Murnane, 2005).
4 D. TUBIN
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7. Constantly ask for valid data
Based on the ‘Data Wise’ model and its associated training, the principal
asked that all instructional decisions be grounded into the data. In a
top-down way, the principal infused the teacher teams with data about
school improvements, the senior leadership team provided their team
members with data about their departments and the teachers planned
their instruction based on student achievement. The data became the
basis for all decisions, changing the focus from the teachers’ performance
to students’ learning and achievement and creating culture of self-testing
and reflection.
Practices
The principal and the senior leadership team created detailed norms for
gathering and analyzing student data: each teacher was initially required
to administer weekly tests, with interim assessments every six weeks. The
results of these assessments were analysed by the faculty during a three-
hour professional development cycle that took place during the week of
test administration. The teachers were asked to develop outlines as to
how they planned to remediate the deficient areas evidenced in the data.
This form of internally driven professional development training deliber-
ately connected teachers with the students’ achievement. The teachers
checked how their students were doing, checked their own teaching and
came up with new or different instructional practices to improve student
achievement.
Share success and responsibility
To help nurture teachers’ leadership, their efforts and outcomes, negative
and positive, must be publicly acknowledged. Feedback helps reinforce
the best practices, enhances trust and openness and boosts a culture of
collaboration.
Practices
At this school, sharing and acknowledging success occurred in full faculty
meetings and team meetings alike. In the general meeting, in front of all
the school staff, the principal presented the latest data about student
achievement and asked the teachers to name that which contributed to
this success. Nearly half of the 35 teachers in the room mentioned other
teachers, staff members or teams and specified their contribution towards
the student success on display. This brief meeting, which took no more
than 15 minutes, resulted in many smiles and an enhanced esprit de
corps. Once the faculty dispersed into their own team meetings to exam-
ine the data, all of the teachers examined their students’ performance
while the team leader (a member of the senior leadership team) asked
EVERY TEACHER CARRIES A LEADERSHIP WAND 5
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8. them to name the students that made the most improvement and try to
explain it. This resulted in a proud, optimistic atmosphere. They then
moved on to analyse the last exam, to connect the outcomes with their
instruction and to plan ahead.
The five steps described here illustrate how teacher empowerment can
result in improved student achievement. The principal cannot nominate
the appropriate senior leadership team if there are no clear goals, the
senior leadership team cannot get enough community support for change
without an umbrella of a prestige model and the teachers cannot develop
their leadership wand without time and support to allow data-focused
professional development. Further, effective teams must acknowledge
each other’s efforts, celebrate achievements and agree to work collabora-
tively to problem solve obstacles. As observed at the BART Charter
Public School, these actions create a culture of collaboration, trust and
transparency, which reinforce the school’s norms and serve as an arena
for teachers’ leadership development. While each school and its environ-
ment is obviously unique, it is our hope that many of the insights gained
here can be applied to schools in need of teacher leadership.
Acknowledgement
The author would like to thank BART principal—Ben Klompus, for his
willingness to open the school door for this study, and for his collabora-
tion and contribution to this paper.
Note
1. Data-Wise: Using Assessment Results to Improve Teaching and Learning—http://isites.harvard.
edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=datawise
References
Boudett, K. P., City, E., & Murnane, R. (Eds.). (2005). Data wise, a step-by-step guide to using
assessment results to improve teaching and learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Press.
Goodall, J. (2013). Recruit for attitude, train for skills: creating high performing leadership teams.
Educational Management Administration & Leadership, 41, 199–213.
Kotter, J. P. (2007). Why transformation efforts fail. Harvard Business Review, 85, 96–103.
Muijs, D. & Harris, A. (2006). Teacher led school improvement: Teacher leadership in the UK.
Teaching and Teacher Education, 22, 961–972.
Troen, V. & Boles, K. C. (2011). The power of teacher teams: With cases, analyses, and strategies for
success. London: Corwin Press.
6 D. TUBIN
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