Reconceiving School Leadership: Emergent Views

The changing demands being placed on schools and schools' characteristics as professional workplaces require that educators expand their views of leadership to include more flexible, inclusive, and varied leadership models. Teachers play an increasingly important role in school leadership, and inclusive, interactive, and reciprocal models of leadership provide more appropriate ways of understanding the social processes involved in teacher leadership. New work designs for teachers promote teacher leadership for a variety of reasons: to nurture a more democratic, communal, or communitarian social system for schools and schooling; to draw on teachers' expertise and experience as a school resource; to provide more appropriate work designs and incentives for teachers; and to create a more professional workplace in schools. Teacher leadership structures prominent in many reforms are examined in light of these purposes and the goals they seek to advance. Nonhierarchical theories of leadership from the general leadership literature are used to analyze these new work structures and the goals they seek to advance.