The Most Important Relationship in the District: Empowering Teachers as a Leadership Strategy

There is a particular kind of meeting I believe every superintendent should hold, and very few do.

The meeting I have in mind is small and recurring. There are a dozen or so teachers, an unstructured agenda, and a superintendent who has come to learn what the work actually looks like from the people doing it. During the pandemic, I held one of those meetings every two weeks.

I built the group in close collaboration with the president of the local teachers’ association. My one requirement was candor over comfort. I wanted a representative mix of grade levels and subject areas and a range of dispositions. Some of those teachers approached district leadership with genuine optimism. Others were skeptical of decisions we made at the central office level. I needed both. The optimists told me what was landing well. The skeptics told me what I could not afford to ignore.

Every two weeks, I brought draft plans to that group before we finalized them. I asked for direct feedback on decisions we had recently implemented and how those decisions were affecting their work and their professional well-being. I listened with the singular goal of improving plans before we committed to them.

That practice grew from a recognition that the people closest to students are the most valuable source of information a leader has. Failing to consistently access that information is a leadership failure, regardless of how strong the rest of your decision-making infrastructure is.

When the pandemic ended, we commissioned formal research to capture what educators across the district had learned. The Office of Strategic Initiatives, working with our Office of Research and Program Evaluation, conducted structured interviews with teachers, administrators, and support staff across all levels of the organization. Among the innovations teachers valued most were increased planning time, additional daily substitutes to reduce coverage burdens, and expanded flexibility in how we designed and delivered professional development. Secondary staff named Flex Fridays and professional development choices as meaningful changes to their professional lives. These were the conditions that allowed teachers to do their best work, and the ideas had come from educators responding to an unprecedented challenge, not from a strategic planning retreat.

Formalizing that learning through research meant the voices in those biweekly conversations shaped how the district understood sustainable, teacher-centered practice going forward. That is a different outcome than informing one superintendent’s decisions. It becomes part of how the institution thinks.

The Case for Working With Educator Associations, Not Around Them

There is a tendency in district leadership to regard the local teachers’ association as an obstacle to navigate rather than a partner to cultivate. That tendency is understandable in the abstract and counterproductive in practice.

The association president I worked with during that period understood the professional culture of our schools with a depth no organizational chart could capture. She was a connector. Asking her to help build that teacher group was a deliberate choice to access a perspective and a network I could not replicate through administrative channels. Her standing with teachers gave our conversations credibility my title alone could not provide.

Productive relationships with educator associations require a superintendent willing to share information before decisions are final, to acknowledge when implementation has created problems, and to treat teacher concerns as professional intelligence rather than organizational noise. When those conditions are present, associations become genuine partners. When they are absent, the adversarial dynamic that undermines so many reform efforts becomes close to inevitable.

The Structural Work of Empowerment

Empowering teachers requires building the conditions in which they can do their best work. That means staffing schools adequately, ensuring professional development is relevant rather than designed to satisfy a compliance requirement, and protecting instructional time from the accumulation of administrative demands that, individually modest in scope, collectively erode the conditions for genuine teaching and learning.

It also means giving teachers access to information about their students that they would otherwise spend considerable time and energy compiling themselves.

Teachers make dozens of consequential decisions every day, and the quality of those decisions depends in large part on what they know about the students in front of them. A teacher who understands that a student is navigating a significant stressor outside of school is better equipped to interpret that student’s behavior, calibrate expectations, and connect the student to support before a manageable situation becomes a crisis.

My team invested in a student information dashboard that consolidates relevant data about mental health risks and challenges outside of school that may affect a student’s behavior and performance in the classroom. The design requirement was accessibility. We wanted teachers to able to act on the information without searching for it, compiling it, or waiting for it to reach them through slower channels. That kind of data functions as a support mechanism, not a surveillance mechanism, and teachers deserve to understand it as one.

What Empowerment Actually Looks Like

The word empowerment carries meaning in direct proportion to the structures that back it up. In my experience, teachers feel genuinely empowered when three conditions are consistently present.

The first is that school leaders respect their professional judgment, which means involving teachers in decisions before those decisions are finalized. The teacher advisory group I built during the pandemic was an intelligence-gathering structure. It worked because the people in that room had information I could not get any other way.

The second is that teachers have access to the data and resources necessary to act on that judgment. A teacher tasked with differentiating instruction for 30 students, managing significant behavioral challenges, and doing both without timely information about those students’ circumstances is not facing a teaching problem. It’s a structural problem. Leaders need to focus on ensuring teachers have the data they need when they need it.

The third is that leaders design the systems around teachers to reduce friction. Every administrative requirement that pulls a teacher away from preparation, every data-entry task that could be automated, every approval process that could be streamlined represents an opportunity cost measured in instructional quality.

A Final Thought

The quality of decisions I made during the pandemic tracked the quality of the information informing them. Teachers were the most important source of that information. Relying on teachers as essential partners through consistent engagement, genuine collaboration with their associations, and the structural investment necessary to give them what they need, is a matter of institutional effectiveness, not leadership style.

The teachers in those biweekly meetings made their truth impossible to ignore. I was better able to make decisions that helped students because I built a structure that required me to hear our teachers’ truth.

 

Dr. Sean Bulson is a practitioner-scholar, professor of educational leadership, and the 2024 Maryland Superintendent of the Year. He served as superintendent of Harford County Public Schools from 2018 to 2026 and Wilson County Schools from 2011 to 2016. Subscribe for weekly posts on educational leadership, equity, and district transformation.