Jenkins, K., Olin Zimmerman, S. & Jenkins, D. (2005). Using a Web-Assisted Leadership Course to Initiate School Improvement in K-12 Schools. In C. Crawford et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference 2005 (pp. 1170-1173). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.
Retrieved from http://www.editlib.org/p/19184.
Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (SITE) 2005
Phoenix, AZ, USA
2005
ISBN 1-880094-55-X
Caroline Crawford, Roger Carlsen, Ian Gibson, Karen McFerrin, Jerry Price, Roberta Weber & Dee Anna Willis
AACE
More Information on SITE
We argue that schools can continually be transformed by the creation of a community of learners in and around the school, and that the means for making a school a learning community is by distributing leadership throughout the school, particularly to teacher leaders. Two of the authors offered an on-line, web-assisted graduate course in Teacher Leadership and School Improvement to a cohort of masters' level students, all of whom were classroom teachers. The purpose of the course was to help these teachers acquire knowledge and skill for exercising the innate leadership capacities that they often did not realize they had. What we found, contrary to a lot of common misperceptions, is that teacher leaders seek opportunities to lead and, given the chance to lead, they tend to be successful. The direction of these findings holds great promise for using broader conceptions of leadership to deal with it. We learned many lessons from the cyber-interactions and the real-world experiences of the teachers in this course.