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Leadership
Efficacy: The Subtle Driver Behind Teacher Leadership
Dr. Bohdan Christian shares result from two studies on teacher practice.
Posted January 25, 2021
When growing something in your garden, you pay attention to soil dryness, sun exposure, when the first sprout appears and how it fairs, and more. You watch these areas to determine how you’re doing as the plant’s caretaker and to inform how you adjust your practice. In education, watching areas of practice is all the more vital. Teachers and other educator leaders monitor areas like classroom management, instruction, and student engagement to judge efficacy and make informed adjustments in the best interest of students.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Bohdan Christian, who is a first-generation college graduate and 20+ year veteran urban school educator. Dr. Christian has designed and created schools-within-schools through a distributed leadership concept that leads to continual school improvement and educational effectiveness. Dr. Christian modified the schools-within-schools concept by dividing the K-8 building into smaller units (grades K-2, 3-5, and 6-8 are each assigned to a specific floor or region of the building and then compartmentalized to meet the specific needs of its students so as not to attempt a one-size-fits-all approach). Here Dr. Christian gives us insights gained from two studies on teachers' professional and classroom practices that have implications for educators, schools, and students.
Jenny Rankin (JR): I loved reading your studies addressing teachers' perceptions, efficacy, leadership, and practice. Please explain how these aspects of a teacher's job are intermingled.
Bohdan Christian (BC): A teacher’s sense of self-efficacy is based upon a system of beliefs around competency and effectiveness to teach. These beliefs may, in turn, drive their perceptions of school leadership and participation in that leadership process. Self-efficacy in teaching also affects how one participates in professional conversations within communities of practice, which leads to further development of a teacher’s self-efficacy in teaching. Since efficacy is highly personal, each teacher has an individualized interconnection between his or her perceptions, efficacy, leadership, and practice that is played out in the classroom and may not be readily visible at the school level.
JR: How do you define “teacher efficacy”?
BC: Currently, teacher self-efficacy in teaching is measured by three distinct areas of practice. These include classroom management, instruction, and student engagement (TALIS, 2018). In general, teacher self-efficacy is their belief that they can operationalize a set of classroom practices that influence educational outcomes that include interest, motivation, and achievement.
JR: How do you define "education" and its relationship with teacher efficacy?
BC: Education is a proposition that brings together ideas and subject matters to relevant perennial problems that engage hypothetical deliberations. Education seeks to clarify peculiarities and conceptual interrelations between subject matter. Education aims to clarify fundamental issues and how these problems influence other problems. Education identifies methods of solutions that can be applied and tested across all subject matter.
Education affords the person to operate in any field of discussion and comfortably in the world of ideas. Education affords the person to read, write, speak, listen, understand, think, and apply those skills to understand oneself and others to reconcile ideas and thoughts. Education regards each person, not as a means to an end but the end in itself. Education allows each person to think for themselves as free-thinking, independent individuals with no requirement to meet others' expectations.
JR: What are your views on teachers’ professional practices?
BC: Teachers’ professional practices (TPP) comprise a multi-dimensional set of professional activities that stress collaborative participation and sharing knowledge that affects school processes (OECD, 2018). Wenger (2003) described the collaboration as a practice that plays a leading function in the professional development of individual stakeholders within organizations. Stakeholders within collaborative organizations begin to understand that leadership, decision making, learning, and culture have many distinctive features. Spillane (2015) described this collaboration in a school as complex and situational and can be formal opportunities for learning or arise informally from challenges found within a classroom or across a school.
JR: How do you view leadership, and what is the difference between distributed and instructional leadership?
BC: Leadership is not necessarily a positional structure but a series of defined actions or practices that accepts flexible approaches to change and improvement. These flexible approaches stimulate stakeholders to find and or create conditions that improve organizational processes and structures while building both individual and collaborative identities.
Instructional leadership is primarily concerned with defining the school’s mission, managing the instructional programs, and promoting the school's overall climate to reflect a positive and inclusive environment.
Distributed leadership, on the other hand, incorporates the fact that multiple individuals within a school can and are responsible for a school’s outputs; that also includes school administration. A distributed perspective allows those individuals not formally involved in a leadership capacity to inform and engage in leading and managing various school practices. This perspective then allows accounting for different school configurations and the interactions of situational and contextual stakeholders within a school.
JR: What is the role of perception and its connection to efficacy and leadership within your two studies on teachers' professional and classroom practices?
BC: Perceptions are the process of acquiring information through our senses (sight, hearing, etc.). These perceptions are tied to a set of patterns that define a specific meaning (a smile, frown, etc.). Patterns are concrete or abstract. A musical score is abstract, but the relationship between tone, volume, and tempo is concrete.
A pattern of the perceived is also a pattern of perceiving, which is related to experiential experiences. Perceiving is the process of selection and organization until a pattern becomes a compartmental experience. Therefore, the sense is an apparatus for receiving and transmitting signals. These signals may or may not be accurate and may be shaped by multiple periods of experience.
JR: Thank you for your time and for all you do to help students and those who serve them.
References
Ainley, J., & Carstens, R. (2018). Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) 2018 Conceptual Framework. OECD Education Working Papers, No. 187. Paris, France: OECD Publishing. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1787/799337c2-en
Ball, D. L., & Cohen, D. K. (1999). Developing practice, developing practitioners: Toward a practice-based theory of professional education. In G. Sykes & L. Darling-Hammond (Eds.), Teaching as the Learning Profession: Handbook of Policy and Practice (pp. 3-32). San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.
Ball, D. L., & Forzani, F. M. (2009). The work of teaching and the challenge for teacher education. Journal of Teacher Education, 50(5), 497-511. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487109348479
Forzani, F. M. (2014). Understanding “core practices” and “practice-based” teacher education: Learning from the past. Journal of Teacher Education, 65(4), 357-368. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487114533800
Lonergan, B. J. (1992). Collected works of Bernard Lonergan: Insight: A study of human understanding (R. M. Doran & F. E. Crowe, Eds.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press for the Lonergan Research Institute.
OECD. (2010). TALIS 2008 Technical Report, TALIS. Paris, France: OECD Publishing. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264079861-en.
Spillane, J. P. (2015). Leadership and learning: Conceptualizing relations between school administrative practice and instructional practice. Societies, 5, 277-294. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5020277
Wenger, E. (2003). Communities of practice and social learning systems. In D. Nicolini, S. Gherardi, & D. Yanow (Eds.), Knowing in Organizations: A Practice-Based Approach (pp. 76-99). Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
