Evolving Identities: Understanding the Development of Teacher Leaders Across Their Careers

The purpose of this study is to examine how teacher leader identities evolve across different career stages. The succeeding research posits that teacher leadership challenges the conventional leadership model where leadership is invariable in nature. To help answer this question, the study relies on constructs and framework of social theory of learning. These frameworks help to explore identity development within the context of education practice. The study also connects teacher leadership models and the career stage theory to frame leadership identity as a developmental trajectory whose scope is negotiated over a professional lifespan. The study is constructed as a narrative inquiry with narrative synthesis of existing literature. The use of narrative synthesis for the data analysis involved the use of text to explain the findings. The synthesis process then allowed for an organization of the primary themes capturing the trends and variations in the data.