Teacher teams: promoting teacher involvement and leadership in secondary schools

Employee involvement efforts in schools have increasingly encouraged employee involvement in planning and governance procedures. Most involvement efforts could be described as suggestion involvement or individual job enhancement approaches, although these currently emphasized approaches to teacher involvement have had limited impact due to the limitations of traditional school control mechanisms and the professional norms of schools. Correspondingly, leadership is being reconceptualized more broadly to emphasize shared influence by many employees across the organization, with work group influence rather than individual influence a more promising strategy for school effectiveness. Specifically, research suggests that teacher teams may be able to exercise greater influence and may have greater impact on school outcomes and effectiveness than leadership by individual teachers. The implications of these two developments suggest teachers' work may need to be redesigned to have a group or team emphasis. Correspondingly, secondary schools would require restructuring from a traditional discipline-based, departmentalized structural arrangement to a more student-centered school within-school structure. These work design and school restructuring changes hold promise for increasing teachers' involvement and leadership in secondary schools.