Sign inMy profileSign outJoin the CommunitySign inMy profileSign outJoin the CommunityA collection of practical tools to help teacher educators diagnose persistent problems, create movement, and build shared leadership capacity using Complexity Leadership Theory.
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Teacher education problems are rarely just people problems. A fragmented clinical model, an unresolved curriculum disagreement, a stalled redesign, or an overburdened program coordinator may look like separate concerns. Often, however, they reflect deeper system conditions: missing knowledge, disconnected expertise, inaction, concentrated responsibility, avoided conflict, or the absence of spaces where people can actually think and design together.
This workbook turns the six Problems of Practice and the three leadership functions described by Yendol-Hoppey and Butler (2026) into practical tools for teacher educators who want to improve their programs, partnerships, courses, clinical experiences, and professional learning contexts. It is designed for use by formal leaders and by people who lead through expertise, relationships, and influence.
The cycle is intentionally recursive. After acting, return to noticing—improvement develops through interaction, experimentation, feedback, and adaptation rather than a single linear solution.
| Problem | What it looks like |
|---|---|
| Knowledge Base | A lack of shared language, preparation, or conceptual tools for teacher education. |
| Teacher Education Expertise | The needed knowledge spans pedagogy, curriculum, clinical practice, policy, adult learning, partnerships, and systems—and is rarely held by one person. |
| Inaction | The system recognizes persistent problems but does not convert concern into sustained movement. |
| Responsibility | Complex leadership work is concentrated in a few roles rather than distributed across the people who shape teacher learning. |
| Conflict Avoidance | Important tensions are suppressed or softened in ways that protect surface harmony but stall learning and improvement. |
| Absence of Adaptive Spaces | People lack sustained structures where they can co-design, test, question, and refine new practices together. |
| Function | What it does |
|---|---|
| Entrepreneurial | Spot tensions, question assumptions, reframe stagnation, and seed possibilities. |
| Enabling | Create the relational conditions and adaptive spaces where people can learn, disagree, design, and act together. |
| Operational | Embed promising improvements into structures, roles, resources, policies, routines, and expectations so that change lasts. |
Complexity means there may be no single solution. It does not mean there is nothing you can do. The purpose of this toolkit is to help teacher educators notice more carefully, name persistent conditions, locate expertise and influence, select leadership moves, and create enough movement to learn what should happen next.
After an experiment, the workbook asks: What changed? What did not change? What surprised us? What did we learn about the problem, and about the system? Whose leadership emerged? What now needs entrepreneurial, enabling, or operational leadership? What is our next move?