Leadership programme aims to inspire teachers

The HertsCam Network aims to spread the word about the exciting work being done by teachers in schools in Hertfordshire. The HertsCam Network was set up around 10 years ago with Hertfordshire local authority and the Faculty of Education. Teachers from Hertfordshire were initially funded to do a two-year Masters in Education course at the University, but the network was more ambitious.

“We wanted to have an impact on the county as a whole,” said David Frost, a senior lecturer in Education and member of the Leadership for Learning team.

They created a network of groups based in Hertfordshire schools whose aim was to allow individual teachers to become leaders and improve their schools.

Frost says the idea is very much a hands-on project which seeks to improve teaching in schools by helping teachers to lead innovation and share ideas.

The Faculty supplies leaders for each Network group, including teachers who have completed the MEd in Leading Teaching and Learning course. They both lead the network groups and do further research focused on leading teaching and learning. The link with Cambridge is important because it promotes the values of scholarship and raises teachers' and students' aspirations.

“It is not just about professional development but about teachers being agents of change in schools,” he said. “It is all very well to do research, but the teaching profession needs to know how teachers can lead innovation,” he added.

The Network produces a journal called Teacher Leadership which includes academic articles authored by MEd graduates and 800-word write-ups of the innovations that teachers in the network have put into practice. Each teacher in a network group has to develop a portfolio of evidence showing how they have led change in their school.

“The aim is to provide stories that teachers can read in 15 minutes and be inspired by,” says Frost. “The style is that of an academic journal so it lends weight to what the teachers are doing.” The newly launched website — www.teacherleadership.org.uk — includes articles and stories from the journal.

One teacher wrote about how she encouraged her students to do research examining how their school works. Another looked into ways of raising pupils' self esteem and invited them to log rises and falls in their self esteem. Another teacher developed the idea getting pupils to design their own journals to log changes in their self-esteem. Yet another looked at ways to enhance the degree of freedom children are given to decide what they learn.

In addition to regular meetings of individual network groups throughout the school year, the HertsCam holds network events every term which around 100 teachers attend. They run workshops for each other on the ideas that they have put into practice in their schools.

Word about what the Network is achieving has spread internationally — there has been interest from Greece, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Australia and the US - and Frost says he is in dialogue with a number of national organisations in the UK which have expressed interest in the programme. The National Union of Teachers has agreed to sponsor a special issue of the teacher Leadership journal.

Frost, who was a school teacher himself, is working on plans to create an international network for inspiring teachers to exercise leadership. “It's scary when you're a teacher wanting to exercise leadership,” he says. “To change things you have to persuade your colleagues to think differently, but innovation cannot be sustained if you do it on your own. We need to help teachers to be brave.”