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Evolution of Schools with Collective Teacher Autonomy
Teacher partnership schools might seem brand new, but as this resource from Education Evolving shows, they’ve actually been around for quite a while.
How did teacher partnership schools (also known as teacher-led and teacher-run schools) get their start?
The phenomenon of teachers designing and running their own schools has been developing for longer than most of us realize.
Education Evolving, the creator of a resource exploring the origins of these schools, explains:
It’s “like asking where a river starts. You have to go upstream, where you will find no single source, but several little streams flowing together. Earlier efforts to create ‘professional communities of practice’ and to advance ‘site-based management’ suggested that teachers ought to have larger roles, but never fully contemplated that schools could be entirely designed and run by teachers. Ruth Anne Olson’s 1980s concept of teacher ownership of professional practices made a real impact on the notion of what would be possible if teachers had autonomy to control what matters for school success.
This timeline documents the critical roles school districts, unions, and chartering laws have had since then in developing collective teacher autonomy and greater professional roles for teachers.”