Teachers want to have a greater voice in school improvement and evidence suggests their voices matter greatly in the performance of schools. Teachers are the professionals who receive every student who comes to them and who commit countless hours getting to know them as learners and as people. They are also the ones who diagnose what each student needs to learn, design experiences that address those needs, and maintain an environment that promotes each student's long-term development and success. Regardless of whether school administrators manage to provide teachers with adequate time and materials, whether district leaders provide supportive policies and plans, or whether civic agencies provide sufficient social supports for students, teachers—who often spend more waking hours with their students than any other adult—bear the responsibility of helping every child feel and be successful.
How, then, can any attempt to improve schools succeed without tapping into the specialized intel of teachers? As a matter of course, teachers regularly take charge of making schools better places for their students. They secure grants, take on special programs, and pursue advanced degrees—largely on their own time and expense. Although they regularly share these discoveries with colleagues, in online networks, or at conferences, their newly gained knowledge is too often treated by school leaders as an individual accomplishment, not an organizational asset that stands to benefit their schools.
Maybe the problem to be solved isn't getting more teachers to speak up, but creating more school routines that support administrators' ability to tune in.
Establishing the Right Routines
To be sure, both administrators and teachers need to tune in to one another for the sake of students. Yet schools are already structured for teachers to listen to principals. Systems and routines, as well as cultural norms about power and position, guarantee that a principal who has something to say will be heard. What types of routines, then, can school administrators establish to ensure that teachers' ideas are also heard?
Relationship Routines
One barrier that commonly impedes principals' access to teachers' input is the potential threat to professional relationships. Teachers may fear that if they offer unsolicited input, their ideas will be snubbed by the principal or they will be ridiculed by colleagues as a show-off. At the same time, reaching out to teachers for input can be a minefield in which many principals would prefer not to tread. If they reach out only to some teachers, others may feel left out. If they reach out to all teachers, some may feel burdened with an additional responsibility, while others may feel slighted if their input isn't heeded. Relationships among school colleagues are fragile when they are based on tenuous assumptions about one another's motives.
Instead, teacher leaders and principals can work together to ground relationships in authentic acknowledgement of one another's strengths. They can begin or end meetings with appreciations, share shout-outs in weekly newsletters, and publicly post thank-yous when a job is well done. As everyone in a school grows to trust one another's competence, motives become clearer and input takes on new meaning. Teachers appreciate others stepping up and contributing their strengths to make the school better for all, and those who contribute feel validated and proud to be asked.
Meeting Routines
Another barrier that can limit the potential of teachers' voices as an asset for school improvement is not having a venue for participatory decision making. Most principals will say, "My door is always open. Teachers can always come talk to me." This is not the same as inviting teachers into the decision-making process.
Principals must ensure that they reserve space for teacher leaders to contribute to decisions about school improvement. They need to have a venue where educators can exchange perspectives, chew on one another's ideas, and take advantage of what the other brings to the table. Increasingly, effective schools are convening representatives of each grade level and/or content team to establish schoolwide cohorts such as Instructional Leadership Teams, School Improvement Planning Committees, or Teacher Advisory Councils. Within these teams, teachers serve as liaisons to ensure that school progress is informed by their work, that teams are learning from one another, and that all are moving in sync to advance schoolwide progress.
Communication Routines
An additional barrier to including teachers' voices in school improvement is communication. Principals frequently find it is easier to make a decision themselves rather than provide the context and background information needed for others to weigh in knowledgeably. This means, in turn, that teachers are less likely to lend their voices, or a hand, if they don't have easy access to the facts or resources they need to do so effectively and efficiently.
As schools evolve from being collections of isolated classrooms to coherent learning communities, they must use technology to open up communication networks. With cloud-based filing cabinets, we can ensure everyone has access to real-time updates to core documents. With shared calendars, we can schedule meetings and include remote participants using video. With email and chat tools, we can have conversations that keep everyone in the loop and empowered to participate on their own schedule, at their own pace, and even in their own language. We simply cannot ignore the benefits that technology affords for removing barriers to communication and enriching critical conversations with more perspectives.
Seeing the Forest for the Trees
Teachers are natural leaders. As professionals with a service ethic and a moral purpose, they are going to find a way to do what they believe is right for students within and beyond their own classrooms. If school leaders develop routines that ensure teachers' individual areas of expertise and personal passions are tapped as schoolwide assets, the benefits will be magnified. And those voices in the forest will echo until they reach every classroom.
