TLN Teacher Voices

Teacher Leadership 3.0 – An Interview with Gayle Moller

 When Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders first appeared in the mid-1990s, teacher leadership was not on the lips (or minds) of most superintendents and principals. Or, for that matter, most teachers.

In the ensuing years, through three editions, Sleeping Giant has become a much-read classic, inspiring countless teachers to come out of their isolation and accept roles as leaders, colleagues and collaborators. Although the book has also become a staple in higher education leadership programs, in the new edition co-authors Marilyn Katzenmeyer and Gayle Moller continue to speak directly to teachers in classrooms and schools, urging them to wake up and take greater ownership of their profession.

To celebrate the appearance of this new edition — updated to reflect the many advances in teacher leadership during the past eight years — we spoke to co-author Gayle Moller, who in 2003 served as an expert advisor during the creation of the Teacher Leaders Network. We also invite you to read TLN member Nancy Flanagan’s review of Sleeping Giant, as well as her Teacher Magazine essay about the book's impact on her own life. — John Norton

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Thanks for talking with us, Gayle. You have many fans in the TLN community. Awakening the Sleeping Giant was first published in 1996. A second edition appeared in 2001. Why did you and co-author Marilyn Katzenmeyer decide that the time had come for a third edition?

In 1996, when we first wrote about teacher leadership, there were few people who acknowledged that teachers could be leaders. At the same time, when teacher leaders read our book they said: “You wrote about me!”

The opportunities for teacher leadership have increased substantially since those days. Our editors at Corwin Press approached us, noted the continuing interest in the 2001 edition, and suggested that the time might be right for an update. Marilyn and I knew the population of teacher leaders was continuing to grow, so we agreed.

What’s changed since 2001?

In the last eight years, school system leaders have begun to acknowledge that they’re not getting the results they would like. And many realize that mandates and limited professional development are not effective ways to improve results. The perceptive district leader is now turning to teachers who are competent and can work with their colleagues at the school building level.

New teacher leadership roles — literacy coaches, mentors, and staff developers — are becoming commonplace. In addition, the National Board certification process has helped many potential teacher leaders realize how they can improve their own practice and help other teachers. External support systems, like the Teachers Leader Network, are encouraging teachers to move outside their “comfort zone” to interact with other teacher leaders. When Education Week relaunched Teacher Magazine in 2006 with a specific focus on teacher leadership, many of us took it as a sign!

What's new or revised in the 3rd Edition?

We’ve done quite a lot of revising in this latest edition. Throughout the book, we show how teacher leadership has evolved over the last 20 years by linking current research and practice to new developments. There’s a new chapter written specifically for teachers who take on new instructional leadership roles. In that chapter we address things like deciding to be a teacher leader, negotiating the principal-teacher leader relationship, working with peers, and facilitating professional learning.

To encourage more conversations about teacher leadership, we’ve added two new instruments. The “Teacher Leader School Survey” measures how supportive a school culture is of teacher leadership. We’ve also included the “Teacher Leader Self-Assessment,” which can help potential teacher leaders determine how they currently match up with leadership standards.

The book is based on a leadership development model that includes planning for action. In this new edition, we introduce an action research process called the “Influencing Action Plan.” It’s a practical tool that helps teacher leaders work through strategies to address school site problems and issues.

Finally, we wrote a new chapter on the future of teacher leadership. In that chapter we predict, based on current developments, what teacher leaders might be doing in the years ahead.

Book Review: The Sleeping Giant Awakens

Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders (3rd Edition)
Marilyn Katzenmeyer and Gayle Moller
Corwin Press (June 2009)

Reviewed by Nancy Flanagan, NBCT
Teacher Leaders Network

The second edition of Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Helping Teachers Develop as Leaders sits on a shelf above my workspace, its spine cracked and tattered. Text is highlighted — in three colors — and the volume is awash in sticky tabs, margin comments and random scraps of paper bearing quotes and additional book recommendations. I have assigned the book twice as a text for a graduate course I teach called "Teacher as Change Agent" and consider it a seminal work in the field of teacher leadership, my personal passion.

To be a useful source of ideas for positive change over time, updates to any education book must be significant, and content must have lasting value and importance. Teacher leadership is a rapidly evolving theme in the broader field of educational leadership. Books that once represented cutting-edge thinking are eclipsed as new research, conceptual frameworks and tools emerge. Works that once had great relevance and utility for practitioners are reexamined  in the cool light of collected and analyzed data. Major policy shifts re-prioritize educational goals, and technology modifies leadership practice.

When Katzenmeyer and Moller published the first edition of Sleeping Giant, in 1996, the concept of teacher leadership was neither well-known nor clearly defined.  Over the 13 years between the first and third editions, many national organizations and educational thinkers have attempted to identify critical characteristics of practitioner expertise and influence, and develop models, standards and structures for advancing teacher leadership. The new edition of Awakening the Sleeping Giant keeps pace with these developments. It continues to stand as a practical and effective foundation for the work of developing leadership in teachers — a kind of primer around the basic rationale for paying attention to teachers' craft and collegial knowledge, and a self-help plan for teachers interested in building their own leadership skills.

Revisions in the third edition were carefully incorporated; one of the nicest is the replacement of "expert" quotes at the beginning of each chapter with quotes from real teacher leaders. New self- and system-assessment tools have been added, and Katzenmeyer and Moller include updated thinking on the long-range career development of teachers who lead, generational differences in teacher expectations, and a range of new insights garnered from recent research. While each new edition has grown by approximately 40 pages, the authors have also judiciously removed or modified outdated or less-useful sections. The Resources section includes a well-chosen collection of important books and organizations, and the References list is comprehensive and thorough, a great launching pad for anyone interested in studying teachers as leaders. Moller and Katzenmeyer also generously acknowledge many teacher leadership initiatives, communities and authors in the text, including the Teacher Leaders Network.

The first two chapters of the book provide a framework for understanding the multiple definitions and kinds of teacher leadership and offer a well-researched justification for promoting leadership in teachers. Plainly, there are clear benefits to empowering teachers, beginning with increased student learning, accountability, creativity, retention, teacher satisfaction, and sustainable improvements in practice. In Chapter Three, the authors make a case for intentional development of leadership capacity in all teachers, beginning in pre-service teacher preparation and continuing with experiences in sharing expertise, building learning communities, and changing roles over the span of a career.

Chapters Four through Six describe an interactive, three-part model of leadership development: Personal assessment, changing school cultures to utilize teacher expertise, and cultivating individual leadership strategies and skills. The pieces of this model are interdependent — and the most exciting and progressive examples of teacher leadership happen when teachers understand their own strengths, fill their leadership tool bags, and work in an environment where adults can and do collaborate.

Katzenmeyer and Moller debunk the myth of the single charismatic school leader and offer hope to teachers whose school cultures seem inhospitable to the influence of teachers with good ideas. They provide a number of research-supported suggestions for reaching out to formal school leaders with evidence that distributing leadership tasks makes organizational sense and leads to more effective teaching and learning.

Chapters Seven and Eight examine some of the emerging challenges to new conceptions of teacher leadership, and the authors sketch a template for ongoing scholarship and structures to continue building knowledge and leadership models. Again — "teacher leadership" was virtually unrecognized in the educational leadership literature two decades ago. As teachers step forward to be change agents,  eager to take responsibility for improving instruction and taking control of their own work, the path is not likely to be smooth. Moller and Katzenmeyer offer a persuasive rationale for pursuing the goals of teacher leadership in spite of obstacles and setbacks.

While the authors provide conclusions and recommendations in each chapter for principals, district administrators and university professors — and most teacher leaders would love to have their superintendents and graduate advisors reading and endorsing the ideas presented in the book — Sleeping Giant's natural audience and greatest impact is likely to be with practitioners. Well-researched and full of useful citations, the volume is less a scholarly investigation of changes in the practices of teacher leaders than a guide to developing and advocating for leadership from the classroom.

A teacher colleague, currently a graduate student at a local university, confessed that she found the book eminently useful in her own thinking and personal growth as a leader —— but said she had been discouraged from using it as a resource in developing a framework for her dissertation research on teacher leadership. She was told that Sleeping Giant was a "practitioner book," full of self-assessment surveys, tools, resources, and concrete (non-academic) language. She described the text as "leadership code switching for teachers" — turning significant and complex educational concepts into constructive, accessible suggestions for teachers.

This strikes me as both true and a ringing endorsement for the third edition of Awakening the Sleeping Giant. I seldom buy a new edition of a volume I already own, but I'm making an exception with this book.

Nancy Flanagan is a 30-year teaching veteran, a former Michigan state teacher of the year, and a consultant specializing in teacher leadership and virtual professional communities. She blogs at Teacher in a Strange Land.

Read an interview with Sleeping Giant co-author Gayle Moller here.