Teacher Leaders Need Places to Learn, Too

Teacher leaders spend a lot of time creating learning for other people.

Instructional coaches facilitate conversations. Lead mentors support novices. Department chairs coordinate colleagues. PLC facilitators help teams examine evidence. Curriculum leaders organize improvement work. Administrators create professional learning structures.

But there is a question schools do not always ask: Where do the teacher leaders go to learn?

That question became urgent for five educators as they moved from classroom teaching and mentoring into instructional coaching and other formal leadership roles (Butler et al., 2025). They had already completed mentor training. They were motivated. They had strong classroom experience. What worried them was what would happen after the training ended.

They knew the real work would begin when they entered schools, encountered resistant colleagues, negotiated administrator expectations, tried to build coaching relationships, and discovered that the neat models introduced in professional learning did not always fit the conditions in front of them.

They did not need another one-time training. They needed somewhere to bring what happened next.

The Problem Begins After the Workshop

Professional development often ends at precisely the point when professional learning becomes most complicated.

A training can introduce a coaching cycle, demonstrate questioning strategies, provide observation tools, or clarify a model. Those experiences matter. But the training cannot anticipate every teacher, administrator, policy, schedule, relationship, or organizational tension a new coach will encounter.

The five educators in this group experienced that gap quickly.

Some received limited support from their school divisions. Others encountered training that conflicted with the collaborative, inquiry-oriented coaching approach they were trying to enact. Expectations from administrators did not always match their understanding of the coaching role. In some buildings, teachers were skeptical of being coached by colleagues they still viewed primarily as fellow teachers. Coaching responsibilities competed with administrative tasks.

The problem was not that the participants had forgotten the training. The problem was that practice had become more complicated than the training could be.

That distinction matters. When new teacher leaders struggle after formal professional development, the conclusion is often that they need another workshop. Sometimes what they need instead is a place to interpret practice with people who understand the work.

A Space Where Practice Becomes the Curriculum

The group created that space through a self-study community of practice.

They met virtually every other week across the school year. Their members worked in different schools, grade levels, disciplines, and school divisions. Because the community crossed institutional boundaries, no single school agenda controlled the conversation.

They began by sharing educational autobiographies. That gave the group a way to understand the experiences, beliefs, and turning points each person carried into leadership. They wrote reflections about tensions they encountered. They shared professional documents. They revisited resources from earlier coaching training when those resources became useful. Midway through the year, they added a book study focused on coaching conversations.

But the community was not organized around completing a curriculum. Their practice was the curriculum.

A difficult conversation with a teacher became the agenda. An administrator pulling a coach toward unrelated duties became the agenda. Uncertainty about when to move forward in a coaching cycle became the agenda. A policy that contradicted what someone believed about good coaching became the agenda. A successful interaction became the agenda too.

The flexibility mattered because the participants were not all experiencing the same problem at the same time. A useful developmental space had to meet them where the work was actually unfolding.

Support Was Not Enough

It would be easy to describe the community simply as a support group. The participants certainly supported one another. They celebrated successes, reassured one another, and created enough trust for members to admit uncertainty.

But support alone does not explain what happened. The group also challenged practice.

Members questioned whether they were being sufficiently open with the teachers they coached. They examined whether district expectations aligned with their beliefs about coaching. They compared approaches. They questioned timelines. They borrowed one another's strategies. They returned to previous conversations after trying something new.

In other words, the community was not valuable because everyone agreed. It was valuable because people had somewhere to make their professional reasoning visible.

That is a different kind of professional learning.

When teacher leaders work alone, their interpretations can harden quickly. A difficult teacher becomes "resistant." An administrator becomes "unsupportive." A coaching strategy becomes "the way we do it." A schedule becomes nonnegotiable.

Community creates another possibility: What if someone else sees this differently? That question can interrupt certainty without undermining confidence.

The Community Helped Them Stay in the Role

One of the most revealing comments came from Simone, who described how building administrators could pull instructional coaches toward other tasks until they began losing their coaching identity.

That is a familiar organizational problem. Schools often create teacher leadership roles and then fill them with whatever work is most immediately needed. A coach becomes a testing coordinator, substitute, materials manager, scheduler, interventionist, or administrative helper.

Some of that work may be necessary. But when everything becomes the coach's job, coaching itself can disappear.

The community helped participants recalibrate. They returned repeatedly to questions such as: What is coaching for? What kind of relationship are we trying to build? What are we responsible for? Are we actually helping teachers learn, or are we simply completing tasks around them?

One participant described the space as helping the group remember their "why." That function may be one of the most important roles a professional community can play for teacher leaders.

It is not simply a place to solve problems. It is a place to preserve professional purpose while working inside systems that constantly generate competing demands.

Learning Traveled Back into Schools

The conversations did not remain inside the group.

Participants carried ideas back into their schools. They changed how they talked with administrators. They established more regular communication about teacher development. They adapted feedback strategies shared by colleagues. They became more intentional about relationship-building and listening. They clarified the meaning of coaching when school leaders bundled the role with other responsibilities.

Over time, their leadership expanded. Members later became a lead instructional coach, a division-level coordinator and trainer of instructional coaches, a lead mentor, a division-wide professional learning leader, and a principal. Others expanded mentoring responsibilities for beginning teachers.

Those trajectories should not be read as proof that joining a community automatically produces promotion.

The more important point is that leadership development continued after the formal training ended. The participants had somewhere to examine what leadership meant as they enacted it.

That matters because professional roles are learned in motion. A new title does not freeze the learning process. If anything, the title creates new questions that could not have been fully understood beforehand.

What Schools Can Build

Schools and districts do not have to replicate this exact community to learn from it.

The details should vary. Some groups may meet inside one district. Others may intentionally cross school or organizational boundaries. Some may use formal protocols. Others may remain relatively open. Some may engage in self-study research. Others may simply use collaborative inquiry to improve practice.

What matters is the underlying developmental logic.

Teacher leaders need regular access to people who understand the work. They need permission to bring unfinished practice rather than polished success stories. They need conversations focused on genuine problems rather than another stream of announcements. They need enough trust to admit uncertainty and enough challenge to question their assumptions. They need opportunities to try something, return, and ask what they learned. And they need professional learning that can change as their responsibilities change.

Those conditions are difficult to create in one-off workshops because they depend on time, relationships, return, and continuity.

The People Facilitating Learning Are Still Learners

We often treat instructional coaches, mentors, and teacher leaders as if the moment they accept responsibility for professional learning, they have crossed from learner to provider. That is a mistake.

The people facilitating learning are still learning the practice of facilitation. The people coaching teachers are still learning how to coach. The people mentoring novices are still learning how to mentor. The people leading improvement are still learning how leadership works in their particular settings.

If schools want teacher leadership to become more than a title or set of additional duties, they have to build places where that learning can continue.

The question should not only be, "What training did our teacher leaders complete?" A better question is: "Where will they go with the problems that the training could not possibly anticipate?"

For this group, the answer was a community in which practice itself became something they could examine together.

Teacher leaders spend their days creating learning spaces for everyone else. They deserve one too.