Realizing the Potential of Teaching as Leadership

DRAFT IN PROCESS, FOR DISCUSSION

Realizing the Potential of

TEACHING AS LEADERSHIP Our teachers’ effectiveness—their ability to lead students to dramatic, demonstrable, life-changing growth—is the lynchpin of our quest to end educational inequity. Students must make dramatic academic and personal growth to open doors of opportunity that are too often closed, and we believe that corps members who successfully lead their students to such meaningful achievements are more likely to become life-long advocates and leaders for systemic change. As pleased as we are about the rise in significant gains rates and the evidence of our teachers’ competence in crucial skills (such as lesson-planning, use of data, etc.), we know that our mission requires that many more of our teachers put their children on a different trajectory, one that will lead students through immense challenges to success in college and life. We have developed a strong, but evolving, hypothesis about what success requires and looks like in our teachers’ difficult contexts—a framework we call Teaching As Leadership.

What Is a “Teaching As Leadership Classroom”? Conventional definitions of a good classroom usually revolve around the degree to which student behavior is well managed and students are engaging in classroom activities and learning. Teaching As Leadership classrooms go well beyond that vision of “good.” In Teaching As Leadership classrooms, we see students’ lives changing because of their academic achievement and personal growth. We experience in these classrooms, among both teachers and students, a sense of urgency and focus, a sense of collective purpose, and a dogged determination to defy what some call the “destiny of demographics.” We see classroom communities working incredibly hard to achieve a radical vision of success. We see students who grow to own their own progress and education, internalize an awareness of the relationship between hard work and success, and engage at high levels with rigorous and meaningful content. Students behave differently in

Realizing the Potential of Teaching As Leadership – DRAFT FOR DISCUSSION - 1 -

Teaching As Leadership classrooms because they believe and act on their new vision of success.

Such classrooms are distinguished by teachers who are relentlessly pursuing their vision of meaningfully altering the course of students’ lives, who have convinced students to adopt that vision as their own and to work hard to achieve it, and who lead students to dramatic progress through disciplined and purposeful planning and through nimble and effective implementation of those plans. In a word, we see leadership, driven by the teacher’s sense of inspiration from and responsibility for fulfilling their students’ potential.

In Teaching As Leadership classrooms, all the indicators of dramatic progress—the mindsets and actions of students, families and teachers alike —are aligned to maximize student growth.


The Academic Impact Model: A Chain of Influences That Leads to Student Success Many factors outside the locus of control of schools and teachers—including socio-economic factors, parental involvement, resource allocation, and federal and local policies—influence student motivation, progress, and success. Conventional wisdom has held that those external factors may be too much for students, schools, families and teachers to overcome, and that the achievement gap is therefore an intractable problem. Teaching As Leadership classrooms challenge that conventional wisdom. While these external challenges are very real, we’ve seen that extraordinary teachers can overcome them by going above and beyond conventional notions of the role of a teacher.i We generally describe the causal chain of influences in such a classroom as flowing from a teacher’s underlying mindsets, knowledge, and skills, to the teacher’s actions, to the students’ day-to-day actions to the ultimate outcomes for students. We loosely term this chain of influences the “Academic Impact Model,” and we have found that this model offers us all a clear and common way to organize and describe a range of factors that characterize a Teaching As Leadership classroom. This model is not intended to dismiss the all too real external influences on student learning, such as school environment and resource levels, health issues, community safety, institutional racism and lowered expectations for students in low-income communities, to name a few. In fact, our corps members must grapple with the nature of these influences as they work to overcome them in the short term and to better understand them as they ready themselves for the second part of our mission. However, with the teacher-driven focus of this model, we are deliberately choosing to follow our most effective teachers’ example of accepting responsibility for the failure or success of our students, whatever the contexts. Even in difficult contexts, our teachers are the most powerful short-term locus of influence in our efforts to have a transformational impact on the half-million students that we directly serve each year.

Academic Impact Model:

Student outcomes

Student actions

Teacher actions


This article is organized according to each element of the Academic Impact Model to describe Teaching As Leadership classrooms and raise critical questions. To elucidate the concepts with concrete examples – and because our most successful teachers are a tremendous source of knowledge – this paper will draw from the classroom experiences of four current corps members who have created outstanding Teaching As Leadership classrooms and who are the 2010 Sue Lehmann award winners. (Note: we orient to these examples not as idealized models of perfection nor as representations of the only “bar” that must be attained for us to value our corps members, but rather as useful illustrations of a vision of transformational student impact and teacher leadership that we can all be constantly striving towards.)



2010 Sue Lehmann Award Winners

Megan Brousseau teaches 9th grade Biology and Sign Language at the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. Under Megan’s leadership, every single one of her 9th grade Biology students passed the Living Environment Exam, granting them access to college scholarships and the Advanced Regents Diploma, and putting them on par in biology with students at the prestigious Bronx High School of Science. This summer, Megan will become a 2nd Lieutenant in the U.S. Army when she begins Medical School at the Uniformed Services University Military Medical School in Bethesda, Maryland.

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Julia King leads a 4th grade self-contained classroom at the West Gary Lighthouse Charter School in Gary, Indiana (part of the Chicago region). Last year, based on nationally-normed assessments, Julia’s students made average gains of 2.4 years in reading and 1.7 years in math, earning her the distinction of having facilitated the most reading growth in her charter school network of fourteen schools. Her classroom culture is based on civic engagement, global awareness and community building. Next year, Julia will continue her teaching career at D.C. Prep in Washington, D.C.

Meg Stewart, a 6th – 8th grade Special Education Resource instructor, teaches at Bret Harte Middle School in the Bay Area. The students she works with are challenged by an array of disabilities, from speech and language impairments to Asperger’s syndrome. Meg's absolute obsession with having her students succeed and become lifelong self-advocates is evident in how they present themselvtheir capabilities, and it is made manifest in their academic achievement. Last year, Meg's students demonstrated 1.89 years of reading growth on the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) and had a mastery level of 94% on prioritized standards. Meg is remaining in her same classroom nex

Maurice Thomas teaches 11th grade U.S. History in Atlanta at the School for Technology, Engineering, Math, and Science at Therrell. This year all of his students demonstrated proficiency on the Georgia State assessments (his “big goal”) and every single one of his juniors from last year were admitted to college (his “bigger goal”). College readiness infuses every aspect of Maurice’s teaching – from the critical thinking he fosters in his students to the students’ hard earned “diplomas” hanging on his classroom wall to the college and financial aid tracker he carries with him at all times. Maurice will be a Program Director in Atlanta this fall.

Student Outcomes In Teaching As Leadership Classrooms: Transformational Impact for Kids From our most successful Teaching As Leadership classrooms, students emerge on a different trajectory. While their future is not guaranteed and the challenges ahead remain steep, their hard work and growth have earned these students much greater chances of taking the next step on a path filled with opportunities for success in college and life. Children who would have been struggling readers through elementary school are now independent, critical readers, writers, and thinkers. Children who would have been in remedial math in junior high are now taking Algebra I and getting on track to take AP math courses in high school. Children who would have been at risk of dropping out of high school are able to choose whether and where to attend and succeed in college. Children from low-income communities who have had the benefit of excellent teachers and schools are able choose among career opportunities and to pursue and fulfill their interests and dreams in life, whatever those may be.

At year-end, 97% of Megan Brousseau’s students passed the rigorous Living Environment Regents exam on their first try (with her help, the final students passed several months later). Megan knew passing the Regents would set them up for success. “There are many nursing and health profession schools within the CUNY/SUNY network that require students to have achieved an 80% or better on the Living Environment Regents prior to enrollment, and numerous merit-based New York City scholarships, where the Regents scores are used to determine eligibility. Scoring above an 80% on the Living Environment Regents is a great way

The closest proxy for the magnitude of this type of impact is dramatic and measurable academic progress. Whatever opportunities our students choose to pursue in their lives, the bottom line is that academic achievement opens doors. Whatever burdens of poverty our students may face, academic achievement is a proven, universal currency of privilege that helps obtain access to and success in opportunity-broadening institutions and jobs. Quantifying learning is not always easy, especially on the most important and impactful realms of critical thinking, communicating, writing, and judgment, but Teaching As Leadership


teachers do facilitate—and can tangibly demonstrate—their students’ dramatic growth in such skills. For these teachers, the difficulty of accurately measuring higher-order thinking skills never rationalizes ignoring them. Moreover, we learn from our successful teachers and students that growth in specific qualities and dispositions is critical to attaining and maintaining a wholly new academic path. Particularly important for our students are an enduring sense of ownership over their own education and empowerment to advocate for their own learning in the future.

A student of Meg Stewart’s demonstrates self-advocacy and a conviction about her abilities video

Maurice Thomas’ students talk about how college fits into their future plans – and their teacher’s role in

In Teaching As Leadership classrooms, we see teachers and students embracing the inextricable link between academic achievement and the quest to instill in students certain values, dispositions, and life skills that will support students’ hard work and success over the long term—concepts like resilience, love of learning, respect for others, self-advocacy, and independence. Such qualities are most effectively developed through experience, in the pursuit of something difficult and valuable—namely, dramatic academic achievement. No amount of telling children to have those traits will create them. Students themselves must work hard, fail, work hard, and succeed. They must experience, not just be told, the value of hard work and self-advocacy. For teachers, academic achievement is the meaningful accomplishment through which we can build those qualities in their students. As one of the highly effective teachers we have worked with explained:

In a school where most students do not go to college and those who do generally attend a two-year vocational college, every single one of Maurice Thomas’ former US History students has been accepted to a four-year college next year. "Although I do not teach 12th grade, I continue to work with former students on college applications, scholarships, and SAT prep. Passing the social studies graduation test was something we proved we were able to do last year and many of my

I have found that a child’s self-perception and motivation are so intertwined with academic achievement, that it is nearly impossible to address either one exclusively. For students to make significant academic gains, they must internalize the desire to grow and develop the confidence to take academic risks. However, in order for students to develop that intrinsic motivation and self-confidence, they must experience some success with academics.


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Addressing possible misperceptions: Good performance on standardized tests without the rigorous, higher order learning students deserve and need for success does not reflect a great Teaching As Leadership classroom. Nor does “higher order learning” or “life skills” or “love of learning,” etc. in the absence of core academic progress that gets reflected in strong, measurable performance on rigorous assessments.

Student Actions In Teaching As Leadership Classrooms: Students on a Mission To Accomplish Meaningful Growth In order to attain the outcomes described above, students in Teaching As Leadership classrooms are thinking, behaving, and working differently from students in other classrooms, in two significant ways: they are living out a powerful culture of achievement, pursuing audacious goals with urgency and passion; and they are engaging in rigorous academic content and skills at high levels. Students Actively Living Out a Culture of Achievement In Teaching As Leadership classrooms, the culture is reflected in students who are far more than just compliant and respectful of the teachers’ rules and management systems. It even goes beyond students working hard and being interested in the class. In Teaching As Leadership classrooms, we see students who are goal-driven, passionate, joyful, urgent, and “on a mission” towards a destination that matters to them.



Among the tangible indicators of students actively contributing to a culture of achievement are: When asked what they are

working towards in this class, students articulate their goals in ways that reveal that the goals matter deeply to them.

When the teacher (or anyone) is talking, all of students are intently engaged.

The classroom has a sense of urgency, with students independently acting in ways that maximizing learning time.

When there is an unexpected break in a lesson (i.e., the teacher’s must attend to a note at the door), students keep themselves focused, using their time to keep moving toward the objective.

We see joy and positive energy and pride in the room—spontaneous high-fives, genuine caring and helping among students, smiles and excitement as students enter (and disappointment when interrupted or called to leave), deep love for and from the teacher.

Students Engaging Deeply with Rigorous Content and Skills at High Levels In Teaching As Leadership classrooms, students are doing far more than just taking in knowledge and understanding it clearly (though this matters and is important to happen). They are even doing more than successfully practicing skills and coming to the right answers (though this too is important). In Teaching As Leadership classrooms, students are also engaging at high levels with rigorous material, applying what they learn to important issues, questioning the material, and delving into the underlying concepts. They are thinking critically, generating their own ideas and making the material and skills their own. Among the tangible indicators of students engaging deeply with rigorous content and demanding skills are:

Maurice Thomas’ lessons require students to

understand, articulate the perspectives of and

critique different points of view within historical epochs. For instance, a unit on the Civil Wa

eyes of a slave master, and a lesson o

f Japanese internment

r had students assessing the situationthrough the

n World War II through the perspective o camps.“Alth h diffi lt thi l l f l i

Instead of having her students recite definitions

related to natural selection, Megan Brousseau

presented them with a forensic task. She described a fictitious animal that had just

sited at the Bronx Zoo, describing been depoits physical features in detail. Students had to

Julia King’s students speak with pride about helping their peers accomplish their goals video

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One of Julia King’s students describes how success is achieved bg taking many baby steps video

Julia King’s students individually and collectively demonstrate the power of “I can” video

Meg Stewart’s Special Education students provide detailed descriptions of their goals and how they go about

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Students are working on things that truly stretch their skills and thinking.

They are working on content, ideas, and skills that are comparable to what kids in the same grade in affluent communities are working on (even while the teacher is remediating prerequisites as needed).

When appropriate, students are delving into underlying concepts, critically thinking, and generating and applying new ideas. Time receiving and copying information, or practicing, repeating back, and finding the “right answers” is spent only when aligned with objectives and as a means to higher-order engagement.

Students are constantly revealing what they know, learning if and why they are right or wrong, and correcting their errors based on deeper understandings.

Some people doubt the existence of classrooms where students act this way. We, however, have seen many of them, and part of our charge is to paint a vivid picture of such classrooms both to guide our teachers’ approach and to change the national ideology of skepticism and low expectations facing our students.

Addressing possible misperceptions: Both categories of student actions (participating fully in an outstanding culture of achievement and engaging deeply with rigorous content and skills) are essential for students to attain transformational outcomes. A great Teaching As Leadership classroom is not one where students are engaging at high levels academically but are not personally taking ownership over a vision that they want to pursue for their own success. Similarly, it is not one where students are super-invested and “on a mission” but aren’t actually learning what they need to achieve dramatic growth.

Teacher Actions In Teaching As Leadership Classrooms: Six Principles for Leading Students To Life-Changing Growth Every time we study a dramatically effective classroom in our context, we find a teacher acting as a leader—a teacher who is rallying students and their families around an audacious vision of success. We find a teacher who is planning purposefully and executing effectively to make absolutely sure students reach that vision, even as the teacher him- or herself is constantly learning and improving. Without exception, these are teachers who define their role as doing whatever it takes—even if that


means expanding time and resources or pushing through challenging obstacles—to ensure their students’ success. These teachers are embodying the same leadership principles one finds in any successful leader in any challenging context. The framework of six common principles of teacher actions that we see in these successful classrooms is the most common way that we have talked about Teaching As Leadership. Our framework of is based on what our most effective teachers do: Set Big Goals Reflecting on where their students are performing at the beginning of the year and holding high expectations for their true potential, highly effective teachers develop an ambitious and inspiring vision of the meaningful, life-changing growth students will demonstrate by the end of the year. These classroom leaders set big goals informed by that vision—goals that when reached will make a meaningful impact on students’ academic trajectory and future opportunities, and goals significant enough to motivate students to work harder than ever before.

Meg Stewart rallied her students around the idea that they were going to double their learning this year, demonstrating at least two years of reading growth and 80% mastery of rigorous math standards


Invest Students and Influencers In Working Hard Highly effective classroom leaders invest students in working hard for extraordinary academic achievement. With the help of students’ families and other influencers, these teachers lead students to believe that through hard work, they can, want to, and will attain the vision of success the teacher has developed. Students in these classrooms work hard because they know it will make a real difference in their lives.

Julia King calls and texts parents out the day through

father s with updates on their children. As one ays, “She makes me feel like I’m in class

with my daughter!” Each week Julia sends home student work with Post-It’s for parents to make comments on; when they’re returned to

Meg Stewart uses a reading competition to motivate her students. video

Plan Purposefully Our most impactful classroom leaders always begin any endeavor—from lesson plans, to long-term plans, to classroom management plans—by asking “What result do I want” and “How will I know I’ve gotten it” before planning purposefully, mapping backward from that result to their starting point. These leaders are deeply objective-driven in their planning but are also consistently student-centered. Keeping “the end in mind,” they plan creative learning experiences that their kids love, that foster students owning learning and learning from each other, and that lead students to deeply engage with rigorous ideas and content.

Before the year began, Julia King organized the objectives into units and ordered them logically across the year so that the skills built on each other and the school’s calendar was taken into account. For each week’s unit plan, Julia looks at the objectives for that unit, then writes five assessment questions

Execute Effectively Strong classroom leaders take every action, large and small, because it contributes to the goal of student learning and success. They view effective execution as wise adjustments to, more than loyalty to, strong plans. For the sake of their students, these teachers master the elemental tasks of teaching, consistently monitoring student progress and adjusting course in light of changing realities around them.

According to Megan Brousseau’s PD: he “From thandshake greeting at the door when

you first enter the room to the high five you receive

on the way out, Megan is consistent and clear with her rules, procedures, and lessons. Her kids know what to expect from her and are excited on a daily basis by what she has in

Continuously Increase Effectiveness


Meg Stewart routinely videotapes her morning classes and reviews the footage that day, critiquing her instruction and tweaking lesson

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Reflecting constantly on the pace of student progress toward their goals, our most impactful classroom leaders continually seek to improve their own effectiveness, changing and evolving their methods to maximize student learning and growth. Working Relentlessly Drawing outrage and energy from the high stakes for their students, exceptional classroom leaders assume personal responsibility for dramatic student learning, even when it means going far beyond traditional expectations. These teachers work relentlessly, and think and act creatively, to navigate and overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, to increase the time and resources available for student learning, and to sustain their efforts over time

Because he is veritably obsessed with his students’ college trajectory, Maurice Thomas has made it his personal mission to do everything humanly possible to help them get on this path. He offers tutoring during lunch hour and after school every day except for Tuesday which is reserved for faculty

As you know, we have articulated these Teaching As Leadership ideas in a more granular form on the Teaching As Leadership rubric and in a more illustrative form with the Teaching As Leadership Online Navigator (TALON)—both available at www.teachingasleadsership.org. (To see additional concrete examples of how Meg, Julie, Maurice, and Megan illustrate these principles in practice, see the Appendix.)

Addressing potential misconceptions: While all of our highly successful teachers embody these general principles of leadership, the ways in which those approaches manifest vary dramatically. We have Teaching As Leadership classrooms that, reflecting the teacher’s personality, are loud, boisterous, and dramatic. We have other Teaching As Leadership classrooms that are serene but intense. And everything in between – there is no single archetype that defines a Teaching As Leadership classroom or a Teaching As Leadership teacher. Among the many factors that influence the varied styles and feel of Teaching As Leadership classrooms are: the age of the students; the subject matter; the broader school context; the teachers’ personality, strengths, and leadership style; and the unique interests and dispositions of the students. The diversity of ways in which teachers can embody the six common principles of Teaching As Leadership is enormous, fascinating, and an asset to our collective efforts.


Teacher Mindsets in Teaching As Leadership Classrooms: Driving Vision, High Expectations, Internal Locus of Control A teacher’s ability to embody Teaching As Leadership actions is directly influenced by what the teacher knows, believes, and is able to do. Since it would be impractical to try to describe all those elements of knowledge, skills, and mindsets in a document like this, we will focus on a small but key subset of mindsets that are particularly distinguishing of teachers in Teaching As Leadership classrooms across all placement contexts.

Megan Brousseau refused to accept that her students did not have the potential to succeed on the Regents exam. In previous years, only select students could sit for the Regents, but she insisted all her students do so because (a) she believed strongly in their potential to succeed and (b) she knew that the exam would open doors for them. Megan says “I was able to hug them at the end of the year and say, ‘Look what you did! You defied the odds Only 52% of the students in

(1) Unwaveringly high expectations, born of a driving vision

for educational equity. Our most effective teachers have more than a vague notion that their children will earn life-changing opportunities, and they do far more than set a goal and post it to the wall. These teachers see clearly, in their mind’s eye, an essential future that they are determined to create, which gives their students the opportunities they deserve. This vision is the foundation of the big goal they set at the start of the year, but it is bigger than the goal itself. It is what wakes them up every morning, fuels their fire and allows them to work relentlessly. It is what enables them to invest their students in what the big goal represents. It is what focuses everything about their planning, execution, and continual improvement. Most importantly, it is what causes them to hold uncompromising, high expectations – both academic and behavioral. Their expectations ask no less of their students than what is asked of students in more affluent communities. As one Program Director recently put it, there is a “vicious undertow” of forces that constantly tempt teachers (and staff) to lower their expectations. When extraordinary leaders of Teaching As Leadership classrooms encounter such forces, they redouble their efforts to uphold high expectations.


(2) “It’s up to me as the leader to make it happen” – strong self-conception as leader, with internal locus of control. Leaders of outstanding TAL classrooms see their role as the leader responsible for rallying, empowering, and enabling their students to achieve ambitious goals. They understand the key pillars leadership, believe in their importance, and therefore draw upon them continually. They come into their role assuming that they are responsible and accountable for their students’ success or failure, whatever the contextual challenges. (This does not mean that they avoid partnering with others – just the opposite. They actively seek to partner with parents, colleagues, and others wherever possible, but they view it as their responsibility to develop and strengthen these relationships.) When they encounter setbacks, they focus their attention on what they can control, how they can improve, and how to expand their sphere of influence to overcome obstacles. They are constantly asking themselves, “What can I be doing to overcome this challenge?”

Addressing potential misconceptions: Calling out this handful of mindsets is not meant to suggest that there are not many other important foundational concepts, skills and mindsets for teachers to master. For example, we know that core instructional skills and content pedagogical knowledge are absolutely critical, as are the “diversity, community, and achievement competencies,” among many underlying factors.

Conclusion: Why Teaching As Leadership Matters So Much In Our Context The Significance of Teaching As Leadership For Our Impact on Students Our confidence in the Teaching As Leadership model comes, first and foremost, from our confidence in its source—successful teachers in our contexts. While there are many theories in the world about what makes effective teaching (and we of course want to benefit from those), the central source of our knowledge comes from those who have proven success is possible in our context.


Many traditional notions of good teaching tend to treat classroom management, instructional strategies and content knowledge as the most central concepts of teaching. Our approach, which accounts for the importance of these factors but puts much stronger emphasis on the central frame of teacher as leader who rallies and enables students to achieve an ambitious aim, has grown out of the difficult realities our students face: Our students typically start the year far behind and facing a

number of extra burdens in their lives. The school systems in which we work often lack the extra resources necessary to address students’ needs. In our context, it is incumbent on the teacher to do whatever it takes, to work relentlessly, and to meet the extra needs students have despite the weaknesses of the system; an approach that has proven to produce more-than-average gains is essential.

Students in our communities live under a constant barrage of

societal stereotypes, biases, and low expectations which can lead them to internalize the idea that they aren’t smart and can’t become smart. Nurturing students’ high expectations for themselves and convincing them that they can get smart through hard work is thus critical.

Students in our classrooms are too often disenfranchised from

their own education. They have, for understandable reasons, come to question the value of working hard in school (e.g., they may have repeatedly experienced failure, they may see little evidence that doing well in school translates to college/jobs since their schools’ curriculum isn’t as rigorous as it needs to be, etc.). Similarly, our students’ families may be more likely to feel alienated, judged, or unwelcomed by institutions that have traditionally failed the community. These realities place a special premium on the meaningfulness and relevance of the classroom’s big goals to students’ lives and aspirations, on a teacher’s work to shift students’ perspectives to see the value of those goals in their lives, and on a teacher’s engagement with students and their families.

Finally, in our context, where we support new teachers taking on enormous challenges, a special focus on the drivers of excellence and urgency (i.e., vision, investment, relentlessness), in addition to fundamental instructional skills needed to teach, seems to be a particularly effective way to accelerate new teachers’ ability to have significant impact.


The Significance of Teaching As Leadership For Our Teachers – and Our Movement We believe that teachers who lead students whom they love—students dismissed by many as unable to overcome the challenges of poverty—to life-altering growth and learning will more likely become life-long advocates for and leaders in the cause of educational inequity. These teachers tend to have an unshakable belief in the high potential of their students and will not settle for systems that under-serve them. These teachers, by their success in the classroom, have developed a level of credibility as well as the habits of effective leaders that will increase their influence throughout their careers. To be clear, we are not suggesting that teachers who are not constantly striving to build Teaching As Leadership classrooms cannot be extraordinary leaders in our movement – of course, many have been and continue to be – and it is incumbent upon us to help all corps members maximize their potential as leaders in our movement. Rather, we are most confident that teachers who achieve that level of effectiveness will take from their experience the leadership habits, mindsets and lessons that fuel transformational leadership over time. At the same time, we must remember that the work of our corps members over their two years – no matter how outstanding their classrooms and short-term results – is insufficient relative to our broader vision of closing the achievement gap. We know that an ultimate solution to educational inequity cannot depend on finding and developing hundreds of thousands of exceptional individuals who can bring this level of Teaching As Leadership and hard work to their classrooms. These highly successful teachers are contributing heroic efforts to compensate for students’ extra challenges and for a system currently unprepared to address those challenges. In addition, their impact over a year’s time, no matter how dramatic, may not fully overcome the myriad of systemic disadvantages their students have faced and will continue to face in subsequent years. To make their work—and our progress toward solving education inequity – sustainable and more systemic, we need strong vision-setting leaders in significant leadership positions in every sector – as principals, district leaders and administrators, school board members, policy makers and advisors, business leaders, social entrepreneurs, etc. Moreover, to change society’s low expectations that can so quickly erode the impact in a students’ life of even the most powerful Teaching As


Leadership classroom, we must have strong, credible advocates for kids who will shift the prevailing ideology of what’s possible and exert pressure from outside the education system. While the theory of Teaching As Leadership has derived from observing the most common patterns across corps members who have led their students to extraordinary short-term impact, our corps members must simultaneously grapple with their understanding of the achievement gap more broadly and of promising solutions – in part to inform and motivate their short-term visions and efforts to build great Teaching As Leadership classrooms, but also to fuel their future leadership paths towards eradicating the underlying causes of educational inequity.


APPENDIX

2010 Sue Lehmann Award Winners: Illustrations of Teaching As Leadership Principles

Setting Big Goals Maurice Thomas posts signs on his wall that say “Big

goal: 80% class mastery. Bigger goal: All of us will go to college. The lucky ones will attend Wisconsin!! [his alma mater]” Because he takes his big goal seriously, he prepares his students for the ACT and SAT, goes on college visits, influenced the entire 11th grade schedules to double up on English and Math, and has town hall meetings with families on Friday mornings to talk about financial aid processes.

Meg Stewart sets ambitious, differentiated,

individualized goals for her Special Education students, but her overarching goal for her students is to improve 2 grade levels in reading (as measured by the DRA) and to develop students’ self-advocacy as students with special skills and needs.

Investing Students and Their Families in Working Hard to Achieve the Big Goals

At the very outset of the year, Julia King demonstrated to

her students what hard work, patience and self-discipline look like. Employing the Stanford University “marshmallow study”, Julia put a marshmallow on each student’s desk, promising to give them another if they could make it through 15 minutes without eating it. Needless to say, few students were successful. Afterwards, according to Julia, “I explained the study to them and the importance of showing self-discipline and taking baby steps toward a big goal – even if it’s difficult. We now use the saying, ‘Don’t eat the marshmallow’ as a reminder to show self-discipline. Each student has a laminated card that says, ‘Don’t eat the marshmallow’ and they show it to each other or themselves when they need a reminder to be patient and stay focused.”

A student of Julia King’s describes the marshmallow experiment – and what it means video



Maurice Thomas motivates his students by clearly associating academic success in the here and now with college readiness. One of his classroom walls is papered over with “diplomas”, each one correlating to a student’s level of mastery. Students demonstrating 80% mastery of standards receive a Bachelor's Degree. Those with 90% a Master's Degree. Finally, for the ambitious few, 95% will earn a PhD.

Maurice Thomas describes his wall of diplomas. video

Planning Purposefully

Megan Brousseau invests considerable time in understanding

the NYC Regents exam, which is reflected in unerringly backwards-planned units and lessons, which now form the basis of the New York region’s Math/Science Student Achievement Tool Kit. According to her PD, “[Megan’s] lessons are always purposeful – there is not one minute that is wasted in her classroom because of the amount of material that needs to be covered and the scores her students are working hard to achieve. When you enter her classroom, her students exhibit a sense of urgency in the amount of material they need to learn from the focus they exhibit to the investment they show in her activities. At the same time though, her demeanor and that of her students in class is one of confidence and excitement rather than cram and panic. Her students know that if they follow Ms. Brousseau’s plans, they will succeed.”

Julia King’s classroom culture and strong management is a direct result of her planning. Before the school year began, Julia developed a set of clear rules and fair, logical consequences. The rules and consequences were broad enough to govern the entire class and allow her to have the flexibility to match the consequences to a specific child’s behavior or to a specific situation. She tracks both positive and negative behaviors with a color card chart. She also creates detailed procedures for activities, jobs, and transitions to allow more time for learning and minimize misbehaviors. Everything is visible to students, so they know what and how they are doing at any given time.

Executing Effectively




Meg Stewart’s students move about the classroom like an expertly choreographed dance company. Her students are masters of the “perfect transition” and in fact are rewarded as such; if students can move from one station to another in under 15 seconds, they receive transition points that are tracked on the board. To catalyze the swift movement of her students, Meg introduces the transition by lowering her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, erupting in a staccato “Go!” to unleash the action.

Meg Stewart and her students demonstrate the “perfect transition.” video

In order to assess how much of the daily lesson her

students have mastered, Megan Brousseau adheres to a daily ritual of “Rapid Fire,” a 3-5 minute exercise to end the class. She pulls a student’s name out of a basket; the student must stand up, listen to the question, and answer without using his/her notes.

Julia King taps into a wide range of strategies to ensure

that her students are engaged and focused. Her ability to “mix it up” – employing name dropping, eye contact, gesturing, cold calling, and chanting – keeps students focused on the material and enables her to keep her pulse on which students need extra help with comprehending the information. Julia also devises ways to bring the learning to life, for example by having her students dramatically act out vocabulary words.

Continuously Improving Effectiveness Maurice Thomas approaches continuous improvement not just

in tactical terms but in a holistic fashion – he reflects on what his students truly need and makes adjustments to help them get there. According to Maurice, “Last year, I was obsessed with 80% mastery. It was the magic number. My intentions were right but my methods were wrong. I fixated on the social studies graduation test and in some ways lost focus of the bigger picture, which is ensuring that my students go to college.” This realization caused Maurice to make a significant mid-course correction; he now makes college readiness the heart of his teaching practice, and he works with students (and former students) on everything from preparing for the SAT to helping them with their college financial aid forms.




Working Relentlessly Megan Brousseau goes to great lengths to help her students

achieve their learning objectives: “If any of my students did poorly on a test, I did not want them to just give up, throw the test away, and think they were a failure, so I invented test and quiz corrections parties.” The parties – complete with snacks and music -- take place after school on Wednesdays, when Megan and her students collectively correct tests and quizzes. “Test/Quiz correction parties were usually one of the best times of the week. I had so many students come last year that I had to recruit some of my best students to help me tutor everyone after school!"

Meg Stewart possesses an amazing internal locus of control;

she makes change happen. During her first year teaching Special Education in a resource capacity, she grew concerned about the sub-optimal schedule, knowing that her students needed more time with her to get on grade level. Consequently, she set out to restructure the school’s Special Education department. “After many drafts, much contemplation, solicited advice, and rethinking IEP legal stipulations, I formulated a more effective overall structure. Once my ultimate vision was in place, I held multiple meetings with my school’s principal, administrative assistants, scheduling counselor, department chairs, and general educators before presenting the new plan to our entire staff.” The plan was ultimately adopted, and Meg now co-teaches two inclusion math classes, provides push-in services, pulls students out when necessary, and teaches a reading intervention course—all changes that significantly increased the time she spends with her students building their skills.

i A large body of longitudinal evidence supports the centrality of the teacher in predicting student achievement. In their seminal study for the University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center (1996), William L. Sanders and June C. Rivers found that “differences in student achievement of 50 percentile points were observed as a result of [quality of] teacher sequence after only three years.” Likewise, from the recent New York Times Magazine article “Building a Better Teacher” (4/2/10): “Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist, found that while the top 5 percent of teachers were able to impart a year and a half’s worth of learning to students in one school year, as judged by standardized tests, the weakest 5 percent advanced their students only half a year of material each year.”

Realizing the Potential of Teaching as Leadership

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