Enacting teacher leadership: a case study of teachers working in the zone of the classroom.

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the teacher leadership practices by post level one teachers in the zone of the classroom. Grant (2010) stipulates four zones in which teacher leadership is enacted. The first zone is that of enactment of teacher leadership practices in the zone of the classroom which aligns with this study. The aims of the study were to explore leadership practices of level one teachers in their interactions in the zone of the classroom. The case study school, Freedom High, has been referred to as a T60 school because of its underperformance, despite being newly built and fully resourced by the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education (KZN DOE). According to the Department of Education, the National Senior Certificate is a yardstick that measures a school’s performance. I used qualitative approach and case study methodology to understand how the five participants understood their leadership practices. I generated the data using the focus group interview and observation methods. This was done by capturing the responses that emerged from the participants to clarify their understanding of their leadership practices and how they enacted these practices in the classroom. The study draws on distributed leadership and teacher leadership as its theoretical framework. What stemmed from the study was that teachers understood teacher leadership practices but they were experiencing challenges in exploring practices fully. Another finding was that principals do not give teachers the freedom to lead in their classrooms for fear of being overshadowed as instructional leaders. It also emerged that principals do not promote nor encourage teacher leadership from post level one educators and they regard this practice as an option rather than mandatory.