Arriving at the College from a public high school in St. Paul, Sara Ray Stoelinga, AB’95, AM’01, PhD’04, was a tutor at Sue Duncan Children’s Center, working with Chicago Public Schools. “I considered myself to be from an urban area,” she remembers. “The public schools in St. Paul were of high quality. When I saw the contrast to some of the Chicago Public Schools, I was shocked.” She knew then that she wanted to dedicate her professional life to improving urban public schools.

Stoelinga earned a doctorate from the Department of Sociology, established a career in education reform, and this January published Examining Effective Teacher Leadership: A Case Study Approach (Teachers College Press, 2010). The book focuses on the preparation of instructional teacher leaders—former classroom teachers who mentor and support their colleagues. 

In Examining Effective Teacher Leadership, Stoelinga illuminates the teacher-leader role and the challenges often associated with it—convincing skeptical teachers that instructional support has value, balancing diverse duties, navigating complex school environments rife with internal politicking and strife. Coauthored with Melinda Mangin, an assistant professor of educational administration at Michigan State, the book is a resource for those who are preparing teacher leaders or for leadership studies more generally. It includes case studies gleaned from the authors’ fieldwork and theoretical lenses and activities to interpret those cases. The book follows on the heels of Effective Teacher Leadership: Using Research to Inform and Reform (Teachers College Press, 2008), an edited volume that takes a theoretical approach to examining the challenges and nuances of the instructional teacher-leader role.

Stoelinga has worked in education for 15 years. After graduating from the College, she “camped out on the doorstep” of the Center for School Improvement (a precursor of the Urban Education Institute) until she convinced the center founder and former Chicago education and sociology professor Tony Bryk to hire her as an intern. She eventually moved into a research assistant position at the Consortium on Chicago School Research. 

While continuing to work at the Consortium, Stoelinga began the sociology doctoral program in 1999. Her adviser was Charles Bidwell, AB’50, AM’53, PhD’56, the William Claude Reavis Professor Emeritus in Sociology and the College. “Charles is an amazing scholar who published a seminal work in sociology of education and received the Waller Award for distinguished scholarship,” she says. “But he also cares deeply about students and mentors faculty. It’s admirable and rare to have those scholarly and personal qualities in one individual.”

Also on Stoelinga’s dissertation committee was Richard Taub, the Paul Klapper Professor in the Social Sciences and then-chair of the Department of Comparative Human Development. “Like Charles, Richard has had a strong influence on me. Richard is very plugged into the practical and applied realities of complex urban environments. I benefitted deeply from looking at urban schools through his perspective. I was motivated by his relentless questioning, his push for consideration of possible interpretations of my data.”

Stoelinga’s dissertation examined the institutionalization of instructional teacher leadership at the school level through qualitative methods—interviewing, document and calendar analysis, shadowing—combined with quantitative network analysis, which gave her “a picture of social relationships within a school. It allowed me to analyze how central a given teacher leader was within the social fabric and then hypothesize about how those factors influenced the character and effectiveness of the role.” She discovered that how deeply teacher leaders penetrate into the school, and thus their influence on instructional improvement, depends on the extent to which the assumptions behind their position conform with a school’s goals and norms—for example, how willing teachers are to have their instructional practice observed and critiqued. She also found that teacher leadership is not a stand-alone reform: to be effective, teacher-leader roles must be integrated within a school’s broader instructional improvement efforts.

The third member of Stoelinga’s dissertation committee, Mark Smylie, a professor in educational policy studies at University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), introduced her to coauthor Melinda Mangin, who was also a graduate student at the time and shared Stoelinga’s research interests. The two clicked and they coedited the first book of the Effective Teacher Leadership series, and then it was on to the next: “As opposed to being a research volume, the second book includes instructional materials. We used case studies of teacher-leaders in real schools. We envisioned that the cases and teaching notes could be used in different contexts, such as in university courses for teacher leaders or in district professional development for educators already in a leadership role. The cases are also useful to study leadership or school reform efforts more generally” 

To test-drive the materials for Examining Effective Teacher Leadership, Mangin used them with a group of teacher leaders at Michigan State, and Stoelinga did the same while conducting professional development sessions with specialists and coaches in Chicago Public Schools. “We made a lot of changes based on those experiences,” says Stoelinga. “You think people are going to understand the nuances of a case. But then when they actually read and interpret the case, sometimes it just doesn’t translate the way you think it’s going to.”

After earning her doctorate in 2004, Stoelinga was an assistant research professor at UIC and conducted evaluation in Chicago Public Schools. She returned to the University in 2007 as a senior researcher at the Consortium. Last September, Stoelinga began a new position as the Urban Education Institute’s director of planning and program development. The institute, which includes applied research, urban teacher preparation, and the University Charter School, is led by Tim Knowles, the John Dewey UEI Director and Clinical Professor in the Committee on Education, whom Stoelinga describes as a visionary leader. 

“I am incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to span the work of the institute under his leadership. I believe the institute is contributing to improving urban schools, both locally and nationally.” In her job, Stoelinga leads research at the Consortium and teaches a foundations course for aspiring teachers in the Urban Teacher Education Program, along with broader responsibilities across the institute. She also advises undergraduate and graduate students on bachelor’s and master’s theses and teaches courses on education and urban communities in the human development department.

Now that Examining Effective Teacher Leadership has debuted, what does Stoelinga predict its impact will be? “I hope that this book, and the first one too, will deepen understandings of instructional teacher leadership and contribute to broader conversations about school reform. That’s the purpose of the books, and of all my work: to promote conversations and pathways to improve urban schools.”