Over the last two decades, research has reached the conclusion that educator teamwork is necessary to ensure the achievement of school goals. No attempts, however, have been made to provide integrative evidence regarding its contribution to school effectiveness. To fill this void, the authors review two decades of professional team research in the context of schools. Specifically, the article has two objectives: (1) To review the existing conceptualizations of the terms 'team' and 'teamwork' in the school context; (2) To provide a systematic review of the impact of teamwork on school effectiveness. The systematic search resulted in 23 papers reporting three non-empirical and 20 empirical studies. The results of the review revealed a lack of agreement concerning the conceptualization of the terms 'team' and 'teamwork', which may affect comparability among studies. Furthermore, no comprehensive picture emerges regarding the consequences of teamwork for the individual teacher, the team, or the school as a whole. Indeed, studies refer to a wide range of variables within different contexts and configurations. This review contributes several important insights that may set the agenda for the next wave of research on teamwork in schools.

Theories of distributed leadership suggest that organizational learning and change results not from the efforts of a single individual, but rather from a network of people working within their broader systems. Team empowering leadership enhances human resources development of the organization to promote the sharing of knowledge that is necessary for change. In this study, we study transformational and distributed leadership team that have been linked to improving working conditions and students’ learning in high-needs schools. Specifically, we highlight a team-based intervention where positive organizational improvements were made to academically struggling schools, and then qualitatively examined the associated processes to understand what enabled the occurrence of those positive changes. We find that the team structure allowed for the clarification of expectations, enhancement of communication, and improvement of educator working conditions through professional development support and distribution of leadership responsibility, which ultimately resulted in improvement in school culture and performance.

Teacher Leadership Teams (TLTs) are cross-functional teams, and thus knowledge integration is central to their teaming. Importantly, the existing literature maintains that cross-functional teams apply the traverse or transcend approach differently to integrate divergent knowledge, but few studies have directly focused on it within the context of TLTs. Studies on leadership teams in schools have highlighted political and/or cultural perspectives and mainly stressed team/organizational conditions that might influence the TLT process of using two knowledge integration approaches. Therefore, our research analyzed how one TLT employed two knowledge integration approaches in consideration of team/organizational conditions. More specifically, we conducted qualitative research using the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory as an analytic lens. We identified that the TLT used traverse, transcend, and mixed approaches, and that its context influenced the team’s hybrid use by determining when the team utilized each approach. We believe that our findings contribute to revealing TLTs’ actual knowledge integration process by empirically examining one TLT’s use of knowledge integration approaches. Our findings also contribute to developing a more comprehensive framework to understand TLT knowledge integration by addressing existing research from political and cultural perspectives and suggesting further areas of focus (i.e., functional conditions) for future research.

This study proposes that special education teachers’ perceptions of psychological empowerment serve as a meaningful indicator of school administrators’ ethical leadership. The Perceptions of Ethical Leadership for Special Education (PELSE) survey instrument was developed to assess this construct, incorporating validated measures of procedural justice and psychological empowerment. Employing a quantitative observational methodology, the study examined responses from 488 special education teachers assigned to online teaching at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Internal consistency reliability for the PELSE was confirmed (α = .76). Findings are interpreted through a retrospective lens, highlighting how ethical leadership was perceived during a period when the U.S. Department of Education reinforced the mandate for continued compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act. The study presents the PELSE as a replicable tool with relevance for pre-service leadership preparation, in-service administrator reflection, and future empirical inquiry into ethical leadership within special education contexts.