The ARSI Resource Collaborative Coordinators, District Liaisons, and Regional Teacher Partners: Support Structures for Teacher Leadership

INTRODUCTION: The mission of ARSI was to build a long-term capacity for improving mathematics and science education in the rural communities it served. The most critical piece of this capacity was creating a network of educators—what we think of as an “improvement community.” In turn, supportive structures and contexts for teacher leadership were deliberately created at the university, school district, and teacher-leader levels of the system.

This report provides snapshots of three important support structures or roles designed to support the ARSI Teacher Partners, who served as the foundation of improvement community ARSI hoped to grow. First, we describe the ARSI Resource Collaborative Coordinators (RCCs); second, the ARSI District Liaisons (DLs); and finally, the ARSI Regional Teacher Partners (RTPs). We discuss how these roles contributed to leadership capacity building at the regional and school system levels, supporting and connecting the Teacher Partners.

THE ARSI RESOURCE COLLABORATIVE COORDINATORS, DISTRICT LIAISONS, AND REGIONAL TEACHER PARTNERS: SUPPORT STRUCTURES FOR TEACHER LEADERSHIP

The mission of the Appalachian Rural Systemic Initiative (ARSI) was to build a long-term capacity that would improve the educational structures of the rural communities it served. ARSI sought to do more than provide direct services to districts, such as a short-term project could accomplish. Rather, ARSI aimed to build the foundations for an improvement infrastructure for mathematics and science education in Appalachia. The most critical piece of this foundation was creating a network of people—what we think of as an improvement community—who together could learn about improving mathematics and science and support each other in their local endeavors.

The major strategy ARSI used to create improvement communities across Appalachia was to identify, embrace and educate individual teachers, who became ARSI Teacher Partners in the target districts. Rural communities, especially those in the Appalachian mountains and “hollers,” are close-knit, understandably suspicious of outsiders coming in to “make things better.” Therefore, the rationale was that local, or indigenous, leadership for improvement would be far more effective and lasting than imported expertise. The key then to local improvement was local leadership.

ARSI also recognized that teacher leadership did not simply occur through individual anointment. Rather, teacher leadership developed most effectively over time within a broad social and professional context, where long-term supports and resources for leading teachers were embedded and connected. Based on this thinking ARSI actively sought structures and strategies that would serve the growth of indigenous teacher leadership both individually and collectively. Supportive contexts for teacher leadership were deliberately created at the university, school district, and teacher-leader levels of the system to both serve as mechanisms or structures for supporting the broader, overall ARSI improvement community, as well as to nurture the individual teacher leaders and their district level improvement efforts.

This report provides snapshots of three important support structures or roles designed to support the Teacher Partners. First, we describe the ARSI Resource Collaborative Coordinators (RCCs); second, the ARSI District Liaisons (DLs); and finally, the ARSI Regional Teacher Partners (RTPs). We discuss how these roles contributed to leadership at the regional and school system levels, supporting, connecting and developing the Teacher Partners. And we also discuss how the people who served in these roles developed their own knowledge, skills, and ability to provide “leadership for leadership.”

The ARSI Regional Collaboratives, the Resource Collaborative Coordinators, and the Regional Collaborative Meetings

The Five Regional Collaboratives

Early in the life of the initiative, ARSI realized that it needed to decentralize the project across the states and regions it aimed to serve. Hence, it created regional collaboratives, or collections of districts that met the criteria for receiving the services of ARSI. Each of the Collaboratives was deliberately housed in a university. The rationale for the university home was that it would promote both better connections between the work of the project and higher education, and better access to resources available only in the university setting.

There were five RSI Collaboratives: Tennessee, housed at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville; Ohio, housed at Ohio University; West Virginia, housed at Marshall University; Virginia, housed at the University of Virginia at Wise; and Kentucky, housed at the University of Kentucky. The Tennessee and the Virginia collaboratives also included some districts from Kentucky, due to the large number of Kentucky districts that qualified. The Tennessee collaborative included the North Carolina districts.

The regional collaboratives became the professional base of support for the ARSI Teacher Partners, serving as the location for their ongoing professional development, as well as the source of encouragement for their work in their local districts. The Collaboratives served as important “nodes,” central to the structure and dynamics of the ARSI network, and critical to the development of the ARSI improvement community.

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