Research On Pathways Of Primary And Secondary School Teacher Leadership Cultivation In The United States

The concept of teacher leadership emerged under the background of the American education reform in the 1980 s. In 1986, a report called A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the 21 st Century by Task Force on Teaching as a Profession of Carnegie Forum on Education and Economy pointed out that the real power of improving student achievements lay in teachers and they should be entrusted with new responsibilities, suggesting that teachers should be leaders of curriculum, instruction, school reconstruction and professional development. In the same year, Holmes Group released its first report named Tomorrow’s Teacher and made it clear that teachers’ leadership roles could attract talents into the profession and at the same time retain teachers. Since then, theoretical and empirical researches of teacher leadership have been gaining increasing attention from American scholars and have gradually become the central theme of American teacher education research.With the primary and secondary school teacher leadership cultivation in the United States as the focus of study and the documentary method, case study and comparative approach as the research methods, this thesis analyzes the pathways of cultivating primary and secondary school teacher leadership in detail and arrives at the conclusion that there are mainly four pathways: offering education programs to develop teacher leadership, building platforms to support teacher leadership, establishing funds to sustain teacher leadership and implementing teacher professional development programs, with the characteristics of the variety of institutions implementing teacher leadership education, the practicality of the cultivation process, the comprehensiveness of supporting resources, the moderation of the assignment of teacher leaders’ teaching tasks and the feasibility of teacher professional development programs. Though the United States and China stand poles apart in culture, national conditions and education systems, both countries devote to cultivating primary and secondary school teacher leadership and promoting teacher professional development to achieve the goal of improving student achievements and the overall teaching quality. The common pursuit of these two countries makes it possible that we can learn from each other. Inspirations that can be drawn are as follows: improving teacher leadership degree education, expanding the range of teachers to receive teacher leadership training, taking full advantage of the internet, moderately distributing teaching tasks and clarifying the goals of teacher professional development.The United States has always been at the forefront of teacher leadership research and has achieved fruitful results in both theory and practice. Therefore, research on the pathways of its primary and secondary school teacher leadership cultivation will certainly exert significant influence on the development of Chinese primary and secondary school teacher leadership.