The color of innovative and sustainable leadership: Learning from teacher leaders Sonia Nieto Published online: 11 August 2007 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007 Abstract In this article, I address how teachers in urban and suburban U.S. schools with multicultural and multilingual student populations demonstrate leadership both within their classrooms and schools as well as outside of them. Based on research with U.S. public school teachers in two projects (Nieto What keeps teachers going? New York: Teachers College Press 2003, Why we teach. New York: Teachers College Press 2005), various roles that teachers have in initiating, putting into practice, and sustaining change in schools are described. Implications for policymakers and administrators are then briefly explored. I have been privileged to work with many talented and committed teachers over the past 30 years, and in this article, I highlight some of them to explore what it means to be a teacher leader. They include novice and veteran teachers, elementary and secondary teachers, English teachers and mathematics teachers, and others who teach a variety of subjects. They have been different in many ways including their race, ethnicity, social class, lan- guage, sexual orientation, and so on. But as a group, regardless of their own backgrounds, they have been committed to affirming their students and to the ideals of social justice. Most importantly, they are models of what teachers can do when they are leaders. I use the term ‘‘the color of innovative and sustainable leadership’’ to refer to teachers of all backgrounds who are committed to their students, but I focus on ‘‘color’’ because of the general reluctance of educators to think about race, ethnicity, and difference in the United States and elsewhere, and because an increasing number of students throughout Western nations attend schools in which they are the minority, while their teachers are White. In contrast, the teachers who I describe in this article think deeply about—and consciously Article based on keynote address given at the Third International Summit for Leadership in Education, Boston, MA, November 2006. S. Nieto (&) University of Massachusetts, 813 North Pleasant Street, P.O. Box 34640, Amherst, MA 01003-90008, USA e-mail: snieto@educ.umass.edu 123 J Educ Change (2007) 8:299–309 DOI 10.1007/s10833-007-9044-8