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Benjamin Fenton, Chief Strategy Officer, New Leaders
Introduction_
States across the country have adopted more rigorous academic standards that require significant shifts in English language arts (ELA) instruction. The new standards ask teachers to place much greater focus on building a coherent body of knowledge through content-rich nonfiction; to ground reading, writing, and discussion in textual evidence; and to help students at all levels master complex, grade-level texts and academic language. Many educators have found these changes daunting, particularly when new assessments have outpaced curriculum and training.
At the same time, principals often lack the capacity-in time and sometimes in content-area expertise-to support teachers in making the leap to new standards. Teacher-leaders can play a critical role in addressing these challenges. They provide coaching and support to improve instruction across multiple classrooms and may include department or grade-level chairs, instructional coaches, or assistant principals. They can also guide teams of teachers in reviewing student data and designing standards-aligned curriculum and lesson plans and provide coaching and feedback to teachers as they work to help students tackle more challenging texts and analytical tasks. For teacher-leaders to effectively support their colleagues, however, they need training in adult and instructional leadership skills.
Even before the adoption of higher standards, improving student performance in reading and writing has proved notoriously difficult, in large measure due to the strong influence of out-of-school factors on language and literacy development. Time and again, we've seen schools serving high-need students achieve breakthrough math gains while making only incremental progress in ELA. This challenge only becomes more pronounced in middle and high schools, where many students arrive years behind grade level in literacy skills and where developmental and language barriers are particularly stubborn to overcome. Teachers need a strong grasp of curriculum and instruction and the ability to implement targeted interventions in their classrooms to move ELA achievement for such students. Yet often they lack the resources or training to implement such approaches.
In this article, we describe the experience of a teacher-leader at a New York City high school who successfully coached a team of ninth-grade English teachers to improve students' reading and writing achievement over the course of one year. The teacherleader was a participant in New Leaders' Emerging Leaders program,...