School Leaders Serving to Develop Teachers as Equity-Focused Change Agents

Background

As diverse populations across the United States continue to increase, inequities also continue to be present for students of color, for English-language learners, for students from low-income households, for LGBTQ+ students, and for students with disabilities. This creates the need for schools to ensure that teachers are equipped with strategies to respond to an increasingly diverse society (Carnes, 2019; Gollnick & Chinn, 2017; Kim & Connelly, 2019; and Yuan, 2018). In addition, strategies must align with national standards for professional learning and support continuous learning for all teachers while building teacher leaders as integral players of distributive leadership within a school and school system. Thus, strategy is a key component for developing conscious awareness and understanding on how to provide a lens of equity to support ALL educational (principal and teacher) leaders, teachers, and students towards excellence.

The strategic process of achieving equity is a continuous one and requires educational leaders to identify disproportionalities and overcome both intentional and unintentional barriers that arise from bias or systemic structures, which affects equitable education. An equitable education is achieved when school leaders create a climate and culture of equity through their instructional leadership, collaboration, advocacy, encouragement of transformation, and engagement in evidence-based practices (Theoharis & Haddix, 2011).

Promoting equitable education is complex; therefore, school systems and leaders must support new teachers prior to their arrival in schools as teacher preparation programs begin to focus efforts even more intentionally on preparing socially just teachers (Chittooran, 2020). The most well-intentioned teachers have their own beliefs, biases, and blindspots when it comes to equitable education, and school leaders become responsible for the service of developing and supporting ALL teachers to become equity focused change agents in the building and classroom. Equity change agents are those who are willing to embrace and adapt to new initiatives within an organization aimed to challenge the status quo and who work diligently to institutionalize and manage such change efforts. Likewise, concerted efforts must be made to create and sustain equity centered schools by ensuring that highly effective, well-prepared teachers and schools leaders are developed. Recognizing that not all individuals start from the same place, school leaders must strategically adjust and focus their lens on equity to ensure equity and excellence for ALL students.

Purpose

Distributive Leadership Theory suggests that sharing decision-making and establishing buy-in with key stakeholders lead to collective responsibility for new initiatives and sustained change (Spillane, 2005); building teacher leaders as change agents is critically important to create more equitable schools. In addition, when considering an equity lens and equitable practices in schools, leaders at both the building and district levels must consider the existing culture and assess readiness for change. In this chapter, the development of teachers’ equity lenses is explored through both servant and distributive leadership by school leaders with an intentional focus on professional learning surrounding teachers as agents of change. Thus, this chapter highlights some elements of school culture and organizational theory that help to set the stage for impactful change. As Rosenblatt (2004) acknowledged, healthy change and development are critical for a school to survive, and both play an essential role in accomplishing progressive social change in the larger society. Lastly, since school leaders play such key roles in change and the development of teachers, this chapter includes elements of distributive leadership that employ an equity lens. Thus, the specific objectives for this chapter include the following:

• 1.

  Exploring and understanding the importance of both servant and distributive leadership;

• 2.

  Growing educators to become change agents through professional learning;

• 3.

  Developing organizational and school culture, centered upon change; and

• 4.

  Cultivating an equity-lens to impact leadership practices and outcomes in schools.

Cultivating teacher leaders is paramount to sustain equity focused change efforts and provides the nucleus for such change efforts to evolve.