Learning from the masters: Shanghai’s teacher-expertise infusion system

Purpose: The urgency of improving the schools call for a distributed instructional leadership model where teachers are not just recipients of professional development, but also active leaders who are coaches and mentors for their peers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the teacher leadership development system in Shanghai, and identify pathways to constructing actionable models that develop and maximize instructional expertise. Design/methodology/approach: This is a qualitative study. Purposive sampling was conducted to select four teaching-study groups from a frame that included all certified “expert teachers” from a large Shanghai district with about 9,000 teachers. Grounded theory approaches were used to understand “what actually happens in the teachers’ world.” Participative observations (of lesson delivering and collaborative decoding), semi-structured interviews, teachers’ reflective journal entries, and video recording of group work and lessons were the main measures of data collection. Findings: Three key features of expertise infusion were identified: recognizing, differentiating, and labeling teacher expertise at multiple mastery levels; providing expert teachers with support and leadership responsibilities to lead practice-embedded and cross-school peer learning; and creating a roadmap for teachers to chart continuous learning pathways individually and build an enhanced content pedagogical knowledgebase collectively. Originality/value: Results from this study provide the impetus for further exploration in how Shanghai continuously share and improve good teaching systemically, which could be informative to US schools and districts in their effort of redesigning professional development that maximizes available expertise among teachers and stimulates teacher-led action research for student learning.