Teacher Leadership in Professional Development Schools: A Definition, Brief History, and Call for Further Study

Abstract In today’s educational climate of data, differentiation, and accountability, teacher leadership is essential; and professional development schools (PDSs) offer distinctive settings for teacher leader practice and development. Building on chapter one, this chapter defines teacher leadership in PDSs, introduces distributed leadership theory, and provides a brief history of teacher leadership in the United States before asserting several characteristics that render PDSs ideal settings for studying teacher leadership. Instead of asking why we should study teacher leadership in PDSs and other school–university partnerships, a better question might be, why wouldn’t we?