Leading When No One Is Really in Charge

Teacher education has a leadership problem, but it is probably not the one we usually think about. The problem is not simply that we need better department chairs, stronger program coordinators, or more visionary deans. In fact, some of the most important leadership in teacher education happens far from formal leadership positions.

It happens when a methods instructor notices that coursework and clinical experiences are pulling candidates in different directions. It happens when a mentor teacher challenges a university supervisor to reconsider an expectation that makes little sense in the classroom. It happens when a faculty member asks why everyone keeps complaining about the same program problem but no one changes it. It happens when a school partner, clinical coordinator, doctoral student, or teacher educator creates a space where people who rarely talk to one another finally begin solving a problem together.

All of these people may be leading teacher education. That matters because teacher education is not a simple organization. It is a web of people, institutions, policies, practices, histories, relationships, and competing priorities. Teacher candidates learn across university classrooms and P–12 schools. Faculty answer to departments and colleges. Schools answer to districts and states. Programs respond to accreditation, licensure, enrollment pressures, staffing realities, and partnerships. Everyone may agree that improvement is needed while disagreeing about what should change, who should change it, and who has the authority to act.

Trying to lead that kind of system as though someone simply needs to make a decision and tell everyone else what to do rarely works. That is where complexity leadership offers a useful way of thinking.

Leadership is not a person

Complexity Leadership Theory asks us to move away from the image of the heroic leader at the top of an organization. Instead, leadership is understood as something that happens through interactions among people, ideas, structures, and opportunities (Uhl-Bien et al., 2007; Uhl-Bien & Arena, 2017).

For teacher education, that shift is significant. A teacher education leader can certainly be a dean or department chair. But leadership may also come from a program coordinator, clinical faculty member, mentor teacher, partnership director, doctoral student, or someone whose influence comes from expertise and relationships rather than title. Our chapter defines teacher education leaders broadly as people who support the development and improvement of teacher learning experiences across coursework, curriculum, clinical practice, faculty development, partnerships, and related work.

The practical question therefore changes. Instead of asking: Who is in charge? we begin asking: Where does leadership need to happen?

Three kinds of leadership

Complexity leadership gives us three useful ways to answer that question.

The first is entrepreneurial leadership. This is the person who notices that something is not working and refuses to accept the problem as simply "the way things are." Perhaps candidates repeatedly say their university coursework does not connect to what they encounter in schools. Perhaps mentor teachers and faculty have different ideas about good teaching. Perhaps everyone knows that an assessment is not useful, but it remains in place because it has always been there. Entrepreneurial leadership begins by naming the tension and asking: What might be possible instead?

The second is enabling leadership. Having an idea is not enough. Someone has to create the conditions in which people can work on it together. That might mean bringing faculty, mentor teachers, supervisors, and school leaders into the same conversation. It might mean creating a design team, working group, professional learning community, or other space where people can test possibilities rather than defend existing territory. These are what complexity leadership calls adaptive spaces – places where people with different knowledge and perspectives can think, experiment, disagree, and learn together.

The third is operational leadership. This is what keeps a promising idea from disappearing six months later. Someone has to change the schedule. Someone has to allocate resources. Someone has to revise the handbook, redesign the assessment, establish the partnership agreement, change staffing expectations, or place the new practice into the program's normal routines. Entrepreneurial leadership asks, What could we do differently? Enabling leadership asks, How can we work on this together? Operational leadership asks, How do we make the improvement stick? Real change usually requires all three.

Why good ideas keep dying

This helps explain something painfully familiar in teacher education: programs often generate good ideas that never become durable change. A faculty member pilots an excellent approach in one course. A clinical partnership thrives because two people happen to work well together. A grant supports an innovative initiative. A charismatic program coordinator holds everything together.

Then someone leaves. Funding ends. Workloads change. The committee stops meeting. And the innovation slowly disappears. This is not necessarily because the original idea failed. The idea may never have moved from entrepreneurial leadership into enabling and operational leadership. It remained someone's project rather than becoming part of the system.

Six problems that keep appearing

In our work on teacher education leadership (Butler & Yendol-Hoppey, 2026; Yendol-Hoppey & Butler, 2026), we identified six recurring problems that help explain why improvement so often stalls: problems of knowledge, expertise, inaction, responsibility, conflict avoidance, and the absence of adaptive spaces. They are easy to recognize in everyday practice.

Sometimes we ask people to lead teacher education without ever preparing them to understand the work. Sometimes no one person – or even one department – has all the expertise needed to solve a problem. Sometimes everyone agrees that something is wrong, but the system remains motionless. Sometimes responsibility falls almost entirely on one coordinator or chair. Sometimes people value collegiality so much that they avoid naming what is actually wrong. And sometimes everyone is so busy moving from meeting to meeting that there is literally no place to think together.

That last problem may be more consequential than it sounds. One leader in our work described it simply: there was "no space to think together" (Yendol-Hoppey & Butler, 2026). Without structures that allow people to design, question, test, and revise together, innovation stays fragmented. Adaptive spaces – design teams, inquiry groups, cross-role planning forums – give ideas somewhere to develop.

Conflict is not necessarily evidence that leadership has failed

One of the more uncomfortable implications of complexity leadership is that disagreement can be useful.

Teacher education contains real tensions: theory and practice; university and school priorities; autonomy and program coherence; innovation and compliance; individual expertise and collective responsibility.

We sometimes treat these tensions as problems to suppress. Meetings remain polite. Difficult questions are postponed. Everyone leaves frustrated but agreeable.

Complexity leadership introduces the idea of creative abrasion: productive engagement with different perspectives. The goal is not conflict for its own sake. Nor does it mean tolerating harmful behavior. It means creating enough trust and structure that disagreement can help people see assumptions, weaknesses, and possibilities that agreement would leave hidden. When held productively, tension can become a source of learning rather than paralysis.

You may already be leading

Perhaps the most useful implication is that leadership in teacher education does not begin when someone gives you a title.

If you notice a persistent problem and help people see it differently, you may be exercising entrepreneurial leadership. If you connect people who need to learn with one another, you may be exercising enabling leadership. If you help turn a promising practice into an enduring structure, you may be exercising operational leadership.

And sometimes leadership means following someone else's expertise, making room for another person to lead, or using whatever influence you possess to help a collective effort succeed.

The point is not that everyone should be in charge. The point is that complex systems cannot depend upon a single person being in charge of everything.

A different question for teacher education

Perhaps we should therefore stop asking only: Who are our teacher education leaders? and ask instead: Have we built a system in which leadership can emerge where it is needed?

Do people have permission to identify problems? Are school and university educators genuinely able to contribute expertise? Do we have spaces where people can think together? Can disagreement surface without destroying relationships? Can promising ideas move from experiments into structures? Is responsibility distributed broadly enough that improvement survives when one person leaves?

Complexity leadership does not give us a formula for fixing teacher education. It offers something more useful: a way to understand why change is difficult and where we might act. The future of teacher education will not be built by finding one exceptional leader with all the answers. It will be built by developing systems in which people across roles can notice problems, create possibilities, learn together, and turn what works into something that lasts. That is leadership too.