Teacher Leadership Under the School Renewal Approach: Conceptual Differentiation, Theoretical Elaboration, and Empirical Illustration

Teacher leadership has gained increasing attention since the 1980s. With the various operationalizations of teacher leadership in research and practice as well as mixed results of effects of teacher leadership, we sought to investigate the difference in teacher leadership under the school reform and renewal approaches. We delineated nuanced differences in teacher leadership under the two approaches and provided empirical illustrations, including (a) boundary spanning vs. embedded co-construction, (b) compliant sense-making vs. holistic, generative sense-making, (c) episodic, task-based engagement vs. sustained, identity-based stewardship, (d) initiative-driven activation vs. developmental capacity building, and (e) parallel leadership vs. integrated leadership. The illustrations were based on three large school leadership projects conducted from 2017 to the present. The article creates a nuanced understanding of teacher leadership by situating its construct and practice in a larger school improvement context.