‘Change based on what students say’: preparing teachers for a paradoxical model of leadership

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Abstract
This article discusses how a radical approach to teacher education encourages both pre‐service teachers and high school students to embrace a paradoxical model of leadership. A project that positions high school students as teachers and learners in an undergraduate secondary teacher certification course challenges pre‐service teachers to learn to teach by listening to high school students, and it challenges students to learn to speak and take action within their school lives. As participant reflections illustrate, this project enacts the paradoxical model it advocates: it contradicts received notions of leadership as hierarchical, top‐down, and synonymous with a single person—in this case, the teacher—in a position of authority; it challenges both pre‐service teachers and students to embrace the seeming internal contradiction of being at once followers and leaders; and it represents, on a larger scale, resistance to the current climate and predominant acceptance in the USA of federally mandated standards and scripted approaches to teaching and learning.