Teacher Leadership Styles and Responsive Classroom
According to the Responsive Classroom school of thought, there are four types of Teacher Leadership Styles. Autocratic leadership is reminiscent of the stereotypical drill sergeant, teaching students compliance through fear-based manipulation and coercion. Permissive leadership is more like a complete lack of leadership, with no creation or enforcement of structure or accountability for students. Flip-flop leadership bounces back and forth between permissive and autocratic, largely stemming from a lack of education or support for a teacher who tries to do what’s best for their students. The final leadership style, Responsive Classroom calls authoritative. It is a top-down management of the classroom, like the autocratic style, but focuses far more on relationship building and activating the internal motivation of students.
As far as effectiveness goes, authoritative teachers are the best way to go among these four options, and for many teachers and students, authoritative leadership is the best style possible. However, I do not agree that authoritative leadership is the only style of leadership that is capable of creating a positive and successful learning environment, nor do I believe that these four styles are the only leadership styles available.
If I were to define my own leadership style, I would classify it as cooperative, not authoritative. My students are not the recipients of my teaching, they are partners in their own learning and growth. Authoritative leaders, no matter how responsive, assume that they have ultimate authority in the classroom, but that simply isn’t true. The student always has the choice in how they want to respond to the situation, and while teachers have control over many things, they cannot control the behavior of their students, nor should they seek to. All they can do is set expectations for their students and respond in consistent, logical ways.
As a cooperative leader, I take ultimate responsibility for overseeing the structure, set-up, and procedure of learning in my classroom. Students take ultimate responsibility for their engagement and participation. Classroom rules are not edict I impose on them, but rather mutually agreed upon guidelines for creating a positive learning environment. I hold them accountable for following those rules, but if a rule isn’t working, my students must be involved in changing that rule. On the one hand, this requires careful negotiation at the beginning of the term and can often take up class time that would otherwise be spent on curriculum. However, doing so increases student buy-in, meaning they are more likely to follow the rules and less likely to resist the established consequences of those rules. Now, at the beginning of a term, I may insist on a particular rule being included, but as the term goes on, if my rules are harmful to the social, emotional, and academic success of my students, they have every right to demand a change. If I’m being fair and focused on respecting them as individuals, this almost never actually happens, as students who were initially resistant are shown the benefit of that rule.
As a cooperative teacher, my ultimate goal is student autonomy. I know I’ve been successful in teaching my students when my presence becomes superfluous. This is true in classroom management as well as academics. I’m an English teacher. If I’ve successfully taught students how to use commas, then they no longer need me to check their comma usage. If I’ve successfully taught them how to talk with their peers, then they no longer need me to monitor their language; they can monitor it themselves. I will always be the expert in my content matter and in education, at least as long as they are in my classroom, but that doesn’t mean I am the supreme authority of the learning that transpires there, nor am I the supreme authority in the classroom environment. When I assume complete authority over my classroom, then my students become disenfranchised, powerless to control the direction of their own improvement. Without student autonomy, there can be no learning. When I deprive my students of any choice except whether or not they participate in the learning, many will choose not to learn, because it is the only way they feel like they have control over their own lives.
Whatever the content of their curriculum, any middle or high school teacher’s primary goal should be to prepare their students for adulthood. The tricky part of that is we don’t know what their adulthood will look like. We don’t know if they will further their education or how much. We don’t know what kind of job they will have or what kind of social situation they will find themselves in. We can’t see the future, and even with clear evidence, it can be difficult to predict. What we can do is teach students how to be in charge of their own learning, so that whatever concrete skills and knowledge they need to be successful, if we haven’t taught it to them, they can teach it to themselves. However, we cannot teach students to teach themselves without giving them ample time to practice in a safe environment with a scaffolded process that gives them room to make mistakes and improve. Essentially, we are training students to take over our jobs. We must give them opportunities to be in charge of their own learning, or they will never learn how.
As a middle school teacher, I know my students have an increased need for respect, self-determination, and independence. While 6th graders need more scaffolding and support in having authority over their learning than, say, 9th graders, they still need some authority. And let me tell you, as a teacher who struggles with coming up with logical and respectful consequences for mis-behaviors, it is a relief to turn the question back on the student and say, “What do you think the consequence should be?” They almost always are more harsh on themselves than I would be, allowing me to be the good guy who reminds them the goal is growth, not punishment, but it also allows them to take responsibility for changing their behavior because they took part in determining the consequence and learn self-discipline in the process. Not because I had authority. Because we collaborated.
There are many things I love about Responsive Classroom, but their categorization of teacher leadership styles is not one of them. I encourage teachers who are unfamiliar with RC to learn about the methods and philosophies and take the training, if you can. I also encourage teachers who are familiar with RC to think critically about the different aspects, choosing for themselves which benefit their students and which do not. We must all practice learning and unlearning, have the humility to accept when someone else’s way is better, and have the self-respect to stick to our convictions, even when those we respect are telling us to take a different path.
