Spanners and enhancers: The role of teacher leaders in school evolution

Abstract

This study explores how the New York City Department of Education attempted to impact instruction and school quality through Teacher Career Pathways, a teacher leadership program. We apply Complexity Theory for Teacher Leadership (CTTL) to examine how teacher leaders may contribute to the improvement of stakeholder experiences and school quality. Using mixed methods, we compare schools with formal teacher leaders appointed into roles with targeted responsibilities and positional authority to lead to schools without formal teacher leaders. Diverging from prior literature, we find that schools with formal teacher leaders show improvement in school quality that matches targeted program areas not mirrored in schools without teacher leaders, suggesting formality may provide an important role in school change. In line with CTTL, we suggest that the effectiveness of formal teacher leaders may be attributed to their functioning as boundary spanners and network enhancers, reinforcing and amplifying changes over time.