State Teacher Leadership Toolkit
Created By States, For States

State education agencies have a unique opportunity through the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) to access the funding and support needed to advance their approach to teacher leadership. The State Teacher Leadership Toolkit provides a playbook for states to develop a framework to guide the planning, design, implementation, and assessment of teacher leadership initiatives that increase pedagogical content expertise and student achievement.

Developed in collaboration with Leading Educators, the toolkit represents a synthesis of best practices and emerging models from Iowa, Massachusetts, and Tennessee, in addition to contributions from Connecticut, Delaware, Kentucky, Illinois, New Jersey, and South Carolina. With this guide, state and district leaders have the tools necessary to identify their teacher leadership goals, choose strategies to seed teacher leadership within their districts, and drive continuous improvement to reflect and build on their success.

This toolkit is follows Leading Educators’ 2014 report, Leading from the Front of the Classroom: A Roadmap for Teacher Leadership that Works, which presented school districts with a concrete strategy for maximizing the potential of highly effective teachers to help improve classroom instruction, transform school culture, and create bold, high-impact teacher leadership initiatives.