International Journal of Teacher Leadership Volume 2, Number 2, Winter 2009 http://www.csupomona.edu/ijtl ISSN: 1934-9726 ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Commitment of Leadership Teams: A District-Wide Initiative Driven by Teacher Leaders Lisa Jo Vernon-Dotson Duquesne University, USA Karen Belcastro Jill Crivelli Kristen Lesako Robert Rodrigues Sheila Shoats Lisa Trainor Chartiers Valley School District, USA Professional learning communities allow groups of colleagues to unite by their interest in common topics about their school operations, functions, and practice. Recently, traditional top-down management styles have been overshadowed by shared leadership models, such as professional learning communities, which stress collaboration through the distribution of leadership. This autoethnographic study uses personal narratives to chronicle one district’s journey toward full implementation of a teacher-led, district- wide initiative. Through the use of professional learning communities as a standard practice for engaging school professionals in problem-solving, all teachers are vested in collaboration and joint problem solving using a shared knowledge base about students, teaching, and learning. From the perspective of teacher leaders immersed in the effort, the authors trace the school reform process from its inception sharing the challenges, successes, obstacles, and joys that emerged. Based on their work, the authors also provide suggestions for future practice and research. School reform efforts have inundated the United States’ educational system for more than a quarter of a century. Sparked by the National Commission on Excellence in Education’s A Nation at Risk (NCEE, 1983), education restructuring began focusing on building a ‘capacity’ for change within schools. Today, successful school reform relies solely on the abilities of individual stakeholders within school settings to manage change as the organization. According to Muijs and Harris (2006), “building the capacity for school improvement requires paying careful attention to how collaborative processes in schools are fostered and developed” (p. 961). As teachers begin to collaborate, analyze current functions of their schools, and adjust their practices, they become participants in whole school change. They become aware of and concerned about school-wide issues and are able to brainstorm possible solutions and act to make change happen (Lieberman & Miller, 2007; Little, 2007; Vernon, 2003; Vernon-Dotson, in press). School reform issues and other wide-spread changes in schools that have been documented as successful were achieved, in part, through effective teaming and collaboration (Harris, 2008; Hord, 2004, 2009; Vernon-Dotson, in press). Distributed Leadership Model In today’s schools, traditional top-down management styles are being overshadowed by shared leadership models which stress collaboration through the distribution of leadership and participative decision making by teams of stakeholders within the school (Copland, 2003; Gronn, 2002; Leithwood & Riehl, 2003). According to Spillane and Diamond (2007), distributed leadership is best understood as a practice distributed over leaders, followers, and their situation. Although this type of approach often describes leadership as being performed by the entire educational community instead of by a few designated leaders at the top of the administrative chain (Copland, 2003), it does not mean that all 24