This paper contributes to method development in educational leadership research. The focus is on a visual method and the inclusion of visual material in data collection and analysis. Core concepts in this paper are educational leadership, power and authority. The method was used in face-to-face interviews in a research project that studied the steering and governing in, and of, Swedish schools. The method enhances verbal narratives when informants reason and motivate their understandings of positions, relations and hierarchies within the organisations. We found that using visual material encouraged informants to reason and problematise formalised leader positions, their relations and the hierarchies that appear. The method helps to visualise the informants’ understandings of the power distribution within the organisation depending on whether positions are described as distant or close, horizontal or vertical. The method made the informants take a stand on complex matters, reflect, and gain insights about their organisations. It provided us, as researchers, with rich data material. By making subjective understandings visual, implicit assumptions were made explicit. This could challenge the knowledge on existing leadership and power norms within educational organisations, and most likely in other forms of organisations as well.

International research has highlighted teacher leadership as a means to improve teaching and learning by distributing instructional (learning-centered) leadership to teacher leaders. Simultaneously, there has been an increase and alteration of teacher leaders in schools. One example is the 'first teacher' position in Sweden implemented in 2013. The article builds on an inductive, empirical study made in four Swedish schools. I conducted 34 semi-structured interviews with teachers, first teachers, assistant principals, and principals to explore how different school actors understand first teacher leadership and how this enables and constrains the construction of teacher leadership for teaching and learning. In the analysis, I concluded that the participants understand first-teacher leadership as horizontal and facilitative. Their understanding, built on egalitarian and autonomous norms, collides with the intensions of a changed role to improve teaching and learning. The result implies a hidden first-teacher function. In the article, I argue teacher leadership, as a concept, has been forgotten in Swedish research literature and schools, even though Sweden has had teacher leaders for decades. Increased exploration of first-teacher leadership in Swedish schools can contribute to a more visualised and nuanced understanding of teacher leadership and its impact on teaching and learning.

Teacher leaders who lead peers in professional learning communities (PLCs) are an increasing phenomenon in school organisations in several parts of the world today. However, the knowledge of how they lead professional learning is sparse. The purpose of this article is to create deeper understandings of teacher leadership in PLCs. It is based on data acquired through an empirical study with so-called 'first teachers' in three Swedish schools during 2021 and 2022. The article providesin-depth descriptions of explicit and tacit teacher leadership practices in PLCs. According to the results, the first teachers in the study led their peers by securing structure and relevance, building a supportive, sharing, and reflective community, and encouraging the use of new teaching methods. They tacitly negotiated their leadership in relation to previous experiences in teaching, leadership and professional development, explicit and tacit boundaries within teacher communities of practices, and their own understandings of their professional identity. The article contributes with important insights into how these negotiations made them build safe and inspiring learning cultures, but also restrained them to challenge their peers’ current understandings of teaching. The results highlight the need to illuminate and understand both explicit and tacit teacher leadership practices when developing and improving teacher leadership for professional learning in schools.  

Teacher leaders are increasingly leading learning conversations in professional learning communities (PLCs) in schools in several parts of the world today, but there is little empirical knowledge of teacher leadership in PLC conversations. Thus, this article aims to enhance such knowledge, particularly the development of teacher leadership in PLC conversations. Empirical data were acquired in a study of three Swedish PLCs and consisted of six video observations and 24 interviews with teachers and teacher leaders (hereafter 'first teachers'). The study particularly addressed how professional learning and teaching improvement was encouraged in teacher-led PLC conversations, what tended to be missing, and how the conversations influenced the teaching practices of participating teachers (self-reportedly). The results indicate that the teaching practices did not change in depth if the first teachers focused on acknowledging and sharing PLC conversations about concrete teaching methods. Instead, there seems to be a need for informed teacher leaders who consciously and systematically analyse and support teachers' learning processes, and foster a habit of inquiry among their peers. It is suggested that this should include challenging norms and understandings about what it means to be a learning teacher and requirements to improve teaching practices in the long run.