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Becoming STEM Teacher Leaders: Stories and Strategies for Early-Career Teachers

Resources for STEM Teacher Leadership Development

Read our forthcoming book, Becoming STEM Teacher Leaders: Stories and Strategies from Early-Career Teachers (Routledge, 2027) to learn directly from early-career STEM teachers’ stories, and find out about the strategies they are using to become teacher leaders. Chapter 6 of the book recommends several resources for teacher leadership development. You can find links to each of these resources below.

Maintain an equity focus in leadership work:

  • Street Data (Safir & Dugan, 2021) presents a range of strategies for gathering eye-level, qualitative data from teachers, students, and families.
  • The Center for Leadership and Educational Equity (CLEE) offers a library of discussion protocols that can support conversations among teachers about equity issues in schools, including protocols for analyzing data.
  • Courageous Conversations About Race (Singleton, 2021) provides a framework and strategies to support educators to have difficult conversations about racial inequity, and to sustain conversations long enough to build collective understanding and/or shift individual perspectives.
  • Developed by the Justice in Schools project at Harvard, the Values in Teaching website offers tools and case-studies to help K–12 educators plan for and practice difficult conversations about equity and justice issues in schools.

Unpack how teacher leadership is influenced by identity:

  • Facing History and Ourselves is an organization that provides schools and teachers with resources and professional learning to combat bias. They offer several identity tools on their website that can help you unpack and articulate factors that influence your social identity (such as gender, race, sexuality, age, disability, and others):
  • The Power Flower, originally published in Educating for a Change (Arnold et al., 1991), has been adapted by other organizations. This tool can support you to explore how different aspects of identity intersect, and how you are positioned within social systems of power. This online version of the Power Flower is available from the Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository at the University of Central Florida.
  • The Wheel of Power and Privilege offers another representation of how different identities are related to cultures of power, and their relative privilege or marginalization. You can find multiple versions online, including this one by Sylvia Duckworth.
  • Zones of Comfort, Risk, and Danger: Constructing your Zone Map (CLEE, n.d.) prompts teachers to assess your own risk and/or privilege in taking different teacher leadership actions.

Prioritize sustainability and wellness:

Intentionally build community with other educators:

Find more stories about STEM teacher leadership:

Explore practitioner inquiry with your colleagues:

  • Inquiry as Stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) offers both a history of practitioner inquiry and a call to action for teachers to embrace inquiry and work for a more just educational system.
  • The Reflective Educator’s Guide to Practitioner Inquiry (5th ed.) (Dana et al., 2025) is a comprehensive guidebook complete with resources and exercises.
  • The Knowles Inquiry Modules (Brown, et al., 2025) are a self-paced, collaborative professional learning framework designed to help groups of teachers engage together in practitioner inquiry.
  • This Knowles webinar on Identifying Leverage Points for Change describes how teachers can explore their local contexts as systems to identify needs and opportunities for teacher leadership actions.

Find more communities of teacher leaders:

  • The Knowles Teaching Fellowship is a four-year program that supports early-career, high school mathematics and science teachers as they develop their teaching and leadership. Members of our community join a nationwide network of teacher leaders who collaborate in person and online.
  • Math for America offers multi-year fellowships for public school STEM teachers in New York City, who work together in community.
  • Teach Plus fellowships support teachers to advocate for better educational policy and instructional practices.
  • The National Writing Project (NWP) supports the teaching of writing, and supports teacher leaders and teacher-writers across subject areas.

References

Arnold, R., Burke, B., James, C., Martin, D., & Thomas, B. (1991). Educating for a change. Between the Lines.

Blythe, T., Allen, D., & Powell, B. S. (2015). Looking together at student work: A companion guide to assessing student learning (3rd ed.). Teachers College Press.

Brown, C., Monteiro, A., Fretz, M., State, S., DiMaria, S., & Hawthorne, S. (2025). Inquiry modules. Knowles Teacher Initiative. https://knowlesteachers.org/resource/inquiry-modules

CLEE: Center for Leadership & Educational Equity. (n.d.). Resource & Protocol Library. https://www.clee.org/resources/

CLEE: Center for Leadership & Educational Equity. (n.d.). Zones of comfort, risk, and danger: Constructing your zone map. https://www.clee.org/resources/zones-of-comfort-risk-and-danger-constructing-your-zone-map/

Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, S. L. (2009). Inquiry as stance: Practitioner research for the next generation. Teachers College Press.

Cleeves, J. (2023). Planning to stay: Burnout, demoralization, exploitation, and how to reclaim self-care, your classroom, and your life… anyway (2nd ed.). Learning Humans.

Dana, N. F., Yendol-Hoppey, D., & Rutten, L. (2025). The reflective educator’s guide to practitioner inquiry (5th ed.). Corwin.

Downey, C. J., Steffy, B. E., English, F. W., Frase, L. E., & Poston, W. K. (2004). The three-minute classroom walk-through: Changing school supervisory practice one teacher at a time. Corwin.

Duckworth, S. (2020, Oct 18). Wheel of power/privilege [Infographic]. Flickr. https://flic.kr/p/2jWxeGG.

Facing History and Ourselves. (n.d.) Identity Charts. https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/identity-charts-0

Grupe, M. (2018). Finding sustainability, joy, and connection in teaching through mindfulness and self-compassion. Kaleidoscope: Educator Voices and Perspectives, 4(2), 39–46. https://knowlesteachers.org/resource/finding-sustainability-joy-and-connection-in-teaching-through-mindfulness-and-self-compassion

Justice in Education. (2025, December 4). Values in Teaching. https://www.valuesinteaching.org/

Kanold, T. D., & Boogren, T. H. (2022). Educator wellness: A guide for sustaining physical, mental, emotional, and social well-being. Solution Tree Press.

Lin, J. & Perry, A. (2022). Should groups set their own norms? Maybe not. The Learning Professional, 43(1), 30-33. https://learningforward.org/journal/building-community-in-a-divided-world/should-groups-set-their-own-norms-maybe-not/

Mossgrove, J. (2025, November 28). Identifying leverage points for change: Using the activity systems framework to create equitable learning environments [Webinar]. Knowles Teacher Initiative. https://knowlesteachers.org/resource/identifying-leverage-points-for-change-using-the-activity-systems-framework-to-create-equitablelearning-environments

Safir, S. & Dugan, J. (2021). Street data: A next-generation model for equity, pedagogy, and school transformation. Corwin.

Santoro, D. A. (2018). Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the profession they love and how they can stay. Harvard Education Press.

Singleton, G. E. (2021). Courageous conversations about race: A field guide for achieving equity in schools (3rd ed.). Corwin.

Wilson, G. (2025). Empowering early career STEM teachers: Collaborative conversations for equitable practices. Knowles Teacher Initiative. https://knowlesteachers.org/resource/30336

Younes, M. (2024). The Power Flower: An inclusion and diversity activity. In deNoyelles, A., Bauer, S., & Wyatt, S. (Eds.), Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository. Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Center for Distributed Learning.