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Abstract Teacher leaders influence their peers by introducing innovative instructional methods and enhancing teaching quality. They have proven invaluable to school principals as they prioritize comprehensive teacher development, bolster teacher effectiveness, and promote teacher retention. Despite their importance, little to no research—prior to the present study—has shed light on the development of teacher leaders and the evolution of their leadership identity. While science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teacher leaders offer a potential remedy for attrition in public schools, a substantial gap exists in understanding how a STEM teacher's self‐efficacy, values, and agency contribute to their transformation into effective STEM teacher leaders, especially in urban‐like learning environments. The present study focuses on STEM teacher leadership identity development and the challenges encountered. It ascertains the interplay between urban‐like learning environments, self‐efficacy, agency, the teacher leader's role within the school, and values in forecasting STEM teacher leadership identity. This research involved 100 in‐service PreK‐12 public school STEM teacher leaders. It yielded significant, positive, and meaningful relations between urban‐like learning environments, self‐efficacy/agency, teacher leader role, values, and STEM teacher leadership identity. These findings can enhance various facets of PreK‐12 STEM education, including educational programming, teacher training, and cultivating STEM teacher leadership.
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This content will become publicly available on October 1, 2026
Cultivating space for teacher leadership: Two cases of negotiating and developing identities across systems
Abstract Teacher leadership research often focuses on individuals in formal leadership roles, including administrative roles outside of the classroom, attending to their knowledge, skills, and dispositions, and their impact on instructional improvement. An emerging view of teacher leaders focuses on individuals who take on responsibility for instructional improvement in a school or district absent a particular title‐often while maintaining a primary responsibility as classroom teacher‐and the role that systems play in supporting or constraining teachers' agency and voice in improvement. In this paper, we draw on a networked ecological perspective on teachers' positioning in school systems as well as a dialogical view of identity to present two cases of teacher leaders navigating multiple systems‐school, district, and other collaborations and professional spaces‐as teacher leaders, negotiating their own conceptions of teacher leadership and their identities as teacher leaders. Through these cases, we offer considerations of how professional spaces in and out of schools and districts can potentially influence evolving perspectives on teacher leadership. We also offer consideration of how identity is key to understanding teacher leader practice and development, as well as attending to influences of various systems on teacher leadership, including particular cultural contexts such as rural schools and communities.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1950217
- PAR ID:
- 10693702
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- School Science and Mathematics
- Volume:
- 125
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0036-6803
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 462 to 474
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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