Thinking about becoming a lead Teacher?

A few days ago, a teacher reached out to me to share her desire for leadership plus her intention to work in a school with high expectations for quality teaching and learning as this will help provide a high level of support and build up her confidence.

My advice to anyone considering being a Lead Teacher or a headteacher should be to just go for it.

From my experience, it can be daunting to leave full-time classroom teaching to take up a headship role, especially with the responsibility that comes with developing knowledge, skills and concepts for a whole school responsibility but all I can say is that it is worth it in the long run

I say this because too many teachers aren’t fulfilling their leadership potential at school. We should and can, do better.

There can be few things as rewarding as making a tangible difference in shaping the careers of newly qualified or aspiring teachers, inspiring and mentoring them to become the best they can be.

Below are three of the best reasons to get into being a Lead teacher or headship position, with experiences from some current head teachers:

1. An outlet for your creativity:

The need to engage and support all teachers in their development call upon a teacher to be creative in adapting and developing pedagogical knowledge and this involves a series of concrete steps – steps designed to create concrete processes and repeatable outcomes in your school. The opportunities for creating new and exciting processes are endless!

2. Develop your reflective practice:

To develop and successfully lead teachers, you need to take time to pull together evidence and ideas from observation, feedback, and progress reports from different data and evaluate these. By evaluating these, head teachers reflectively create improvements in teaching and learning and steadily work to solve needs and improve teacher competency.

3. In high demand:

One of the best parts of being a Lead teacher is having to work with a broad range of individuals from children to school administrators and also fill multiple roles possessing these skills makes it an advanced position and in high demand.

Conclusion of becoming a lead Teacher

While being a Lead teacher is never easy, the shortage will likely continue to exacerbate and nearly all schools need a Lead Teacher. Lead teachers make schools ten times more likely to improve their teachers’ abilities and students’ learning outcomes.

What advice would you give a teacher who is considering becoming a Lead Teacher?