Teacher Leadership Roles and Teacher Collaboration: Evidence From Green Hills Public Schools Pay-for-Performance System

ABSTRACT

Despite the growing appeal of teacher leadership and teacher collaboration, we know little about the relationship between teacher leadership roles and collaboration. In this study, we use surveys (n = 523) and interviews (n = 47) of teachers to examine whether teacher leadership roles were associated with collaboration. We find that collaboration was an incentive to pursue a teacher leadership role and teacher leaders perceived their role improved and increased collaboration with peers. Teacher leaders’ perceptions varied significantly by role type, school level, and school effectiveness. These findings offer promising evidence for school leaders interested in using teacher leadership to spur collaboration among teachers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We use a pseudonym for the district that employed this program.

2. The total number of PPP teacher leaders represent 40% of the GHPS workforce (1,299 out of about 3,200 over 2 school years).

3. Our used each item as a separate outcome, a decision driven by measurement considerations. Although we preferred a composite measure of more and better collaboration, factor analysis revealed that the three items together did not reliably measure perceptions of more and better collaboration. We believe the lack of consistency in responses between the items was the result of the item, “Through the <ROLE>, I am interacting more with teachers outside my school”. We interpret this difference to occur because teacher leaders’ answering this item face different barriers to interacting with more colleagues in other schools than they do in their own school. Based on this rationale and with the aim of aiding readers in interpreting our measurements, we consider each item as a distinct outcome.

Additional information

Funding

Funding for the research on which this paper is based was provided by a Teacher Incentive Fund grant to the Green Hills Public Schools.