THE FUTURE OF THE TEACHING PROFESSION
When teachers exercise their agency beyond the classroom, with colleagues, with parents and other agencies or with policy, they exercise leadership. When they do so as part of a collective endeavour leadership becomes a shared activity. Despite a body of writing on teacher leadership, much of it fails to grasp or explore the connections between individual agency and the collective. Teacher leadership is construed as a role or as status within the institutional hierarchy rather than captured in the flow of activities. The roles and activities of leadership flow from the expertise required for learning and improvement, not from the formal dictates of the institution. (Elmore, 2008 in OECD, 2008) In Italy, Brotto and Barzano (2008) describe a teacher workshop for aspiring principals in which a distinction is made between ‘stare con’ (‘being with’) and ‘essere per’ (‘being for’) - ‘being with’, marked by ‘contagious’ listening, empathy, teamwork and sense- making, allied with ‘being for’ as mutual empowerment and service to one another (2008: 235). There are strong resonances with Liebermann and Friedrich’s accounts of teacher leadership in a US context. They [teachers] learned to recognise the fear that accompanies sharing practice publicly and came to understand more acutely what underlies the reticence to expose practice to one’s peers. They developed a wide range of strategies for building community, for drawing expertise from teachers’ participating in professional development, for sharing knowledge and for sharing leadership with others. It encouraged them to work collaboratively and to go public with both their successes and their questions. (Liebermann and Freidrich, 2007, p. 49). In Latin-American countries, Ecuador, Chile, Mexico and Paraguay, each with their own very different political and socio-economic histories, there appears to be a common growing understanding that teachers should less be passive recipients of policy direction and become more active participants in shaping the educational process (Aguerrando and Vezub, 2011). It is through a culture of inquiry and self-evaluation deeply embedded in the daily routines of classroom life, that schools gain strength of conviction to expose what constrains authentic learning and, with an enhanced sense of agency, able to show how things can be different. (p.66) 134