Page 131 - Innovative Professional Development Methods and Strategies for STEM Education

The Role of Teacher Leadership for Promoting Professional Development Practices

between the two parties. Teachers feel like MBAMP works for them by facilitating service opportunities;
MBAMP benefits from teacher-leaders assistance at events. For the teacher’s sake and for the benefit of
the event itself, the leadership team requires support and nurturing. A motivated, well-supported VLT
means participants who deeply understand the content of the event, affects the desired change in the
teaching practice of the participants and ultimately benefits students of the participants. The MBAMP
director works to nurture the leadership team members in a variety of ways including but not limited
to: maintaining regular email contact, visiting classrooms, facilitating team-wide meetings, taking the
team to conferences, and helping teachers present at conferences. It is important to note that—beyond
the event itself—the teacher-leaders act as ambassadors to their district and their county. In the end, each
team member is promoting an ideal that they believe in by doing service to their community. The VLT
is truly a body that affects positive change.
Volunteer leadership teams that are a grassroots movement are a successful way to produce profes-
sional development and train teacher leaders. This model is geared toward an apprenticeship approach,
whereby people interested in teacher leadership move through the five different stages to become teacher
leaders who are self-sustaining and growth oriented. Applying a growth model approach to a professional
development organization sustains the membership of teachers as they become intrinsically motivated
to improve their practice and develop leadership skills.
One of MBAMP’s core values is to support teachers in developing a trajectory toward leadership
growth. In Figure 5 we make a case that teacher leadership in a team is an opportunity for teachers to
organically grow into powerful leadership roles. Teachers might start being little more than an observer
on a team, but 4 years later they can be leading their own team and explaining mathematics content and
pedagogy that used to elude them. This approach to teacher leadership promotes:

• Teacher-to-teacher mentoring
• Teachers visit other teacher in their classroom
• Collaboration across grades
• Sharing and developing pedagogical and content knowledge.

One place that illustrates this outcome is the movement of the teachers from level to level in MBAMP
participation, the outcomes are difficult to document, but they are being observed by the MBAMP director.

CONCLUSION

Collaboration, community building, and participation in communities of learners are key features to
high quality professional development (Ball & Cohen, 1999; Borko, 2004; Loucks-Horsley, et al, 2003;
Wilson & Berne, 1999). We also believe one key element in learning to participate in a professional
community is valuing the unique skills, experience and knowledge that each teacher brings with them
as a teacher leader. MBAMP professional development is centered on what teachers are doing in the
classroom and the expertise they have to share.
As one teacher leader stated “I use my classroom as a lab to try new lessons or ideas that I consider
sharing with other teachers”. Approaching professional development from a constructivist stance is a
powerful method as it allows group members to explore an area of interest and develop expertise at their
own pace. When teacher leaders view their classroom as a learning lab they are demonstrating what is

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