Veteran Teachers Continue to Benefit From Teacher Leadership

By Sarah Phillips, Master Teacher, Perry Township Schools, Indiana

Sarah Phillips is a NIET 2024 Fellow and Master Teacher from Abraham Lincoln Elementary at Perry Township Schools in Indianapolis, Indiana. As a teacher leader for over 12 years, Phillips has supported veteran teachers, new teachers, and those becoming teachers. Read more about her selection as an NIET Fellow here.

“I have no idea what to do. This isn’t working.”

The veteran teacher at Abraham Lincoln Elementary shook her head and uttered with a defeated tone, grading her students’ most recent math unit tests. After 27 years of teaching, she thought she had seen it all - but this year posed a new challenge, and she was at her wit’s end. Her class was made up of students who immigrated from three different countries, many of whom had limited English, leading to challenges with language, learning, and for the teacher, effective instruction.

Abraham Lincoln, in Perry Township, Indianapolis, IN, is a school that has been accustomed to teaching students from various backgrounds, cultures, and countries. Currently, there are at least 19 different native languages spoken by students who attend school daily, contributing to 40% of the total enrollment being students who are learning English.

As a seasoned third-grade instructor, this teacher had already tried to implement effective strategies, including regrouping students with a partner teacher, collaborating with special services, and working closely with a tutor interpreter. All the actions within her control had been addressed. Yet, the students were struggling to show their math skills during the assessment.

As her master teacher, a leadership role within the National Institute for Excellence in Teaching (NIET) TAP System, I felt the emotions behind this teacher’s statements. She showed me the student work, lack of mastery, and lack of evidence of math thinking students showed on the unit assessment. Despite her many years as an effective educator, she was in need of resources to best address the students' needs. Her struggle to meet students' varied needs is the reflection of a larger message in our profession: Every teacher needs support - even veteran teachers like her. NIET’s structure for implementing teacher leadership is the optimal way to provide that support.

Veteran teachers are often overlooked as a group of professionals who appear to not need as much support from teacher leaders. They may be perceived as already having a depth of instructional strategies to draw from, but that doesn’t work when veteran teachers are faced with the challenge of such a high-need group of students.

The next steps became clear: We needed to support each other, collaborate, and empower our teachers to take action and lean into the process. To do this, we launched an intensive, three-week coaching cycle to reach these goals.

Charting A Course Through Observation

When beginning a coaching cycle, the teacher leader needs a clear understanding of how instruction is progressing and how students are reacting in real time. An informal observation provides the opportunity for a trained teacher leader to analyze student results from teacher actions in a supportive way. As I entered into the coaching cycle, I wanted to uncover the positive teacher actions that were making a difference for students and witness the learning in the moment so that I could clearly see the students’ difficulties with the lesson. When listening to the defeated feelings of this teacher, I knew she needed to hear about all the positive actions she had been using. To create an impactful coaching cycle, we had to value the impactful work that had been done up until this point and chart a course of action to best support the students.

The class was comprised of students from at least three different countries, students receiving special education services and students receiving language learner services. Additionally, there were students in the class who lacked consistent attendance in school. While the teacher had a multitude of strategies in her toolkit, they were not working for these groups of learners.

I started by observing the veteran teacher’s full math lesson, focusing on teacher actions that made an impact on student results, and how we could best support students to improve learning outcomes. During that time, we both witnessed students who lacked engagement with math as soon as the lesson was less interactive. We noticed that some students demonstrated negative behaviors at the onset of independent work time. We watched how language needs were supported in the classroom and took note of the students who were meeting expectations for the lesson and those whose behaviors caused difficulties for themselves and others.

After observing the math lesson, the teacher and I were able to create action steps to address the needs of the students:

How were we going to support student engagement during instruction? How could we leverage best practices in language acquisition and communicate lessons and ideas among students with different language needs?

This was our next step in the coaching cycle: paving the road for progress in her classroom.

Coaching With Intention

After our observation, we met again to develop a plan to address the desired student outcomes in the upcoming math lessons. We determined the success criteria for these lessons and began adding images to the success criteria charts for each math skill. Next, we decided to utilize hand signals to support the language spoken. Utilizing hand signals for when the teacher is talking and students are listening, and then using a different signal with hands out to invite students to repeat the words helped provide students clarity around their role as learners. In addition, we refined a process that created more immediate opportunities for students to receive feedback on their work, leveraging the tutor interpreter to help create a sustainable feedback process.

Through digestible success criteria that we shared with students in the form of pictures, using body language to support learning for those with language barriers, and providing feedback opportunities, the teacher was able to provide a comprehensive support system within her lessons for her entire class. It helped her narrow in on the focus of the math lesson while providing students opportunities for extension when they were ready.

The students began showing progress toward mastery during each lesson. Three of the students who had immigrated in particular, began showing more math thinking in their daily work. Because of this, we were able to identify the specific thinking step that needed to be redirected and provide specific feedback to push those students to mastery. One student who demonstrated negative behaviors during our initial observation began participating in class more appropriately by repeating vocabulary words when the teacher used hand signals, just one example of an individual achievement that contributed to a larger, positive shift in the classroom. Through this intentional coaching, we turned frustration into success and triumph.

The Power of Leadership at Every Level

The amount of knowledge this veteran teacher brought to the coaching process made our focus on student outcomes seamless. Her openness to coaching and passion for her students motivated her to implement and refine past teacher actions to best support her students. Teacher leadership can help make breakthroughs for even the most experienced teachers. This intensive coaching plan included actions that the teacher had been using, yet gave her a refined purpose that was tied to individual students who showed they needed assistance in the initial observation.

The relationship between this teacher and her students blossomed throughout the intensive three-week coaching cycle. The teacher’s frustrations began to dissolve. She shared, “The support from my master teacher allowed me to reflect, adapt, and enhance my classroom instruction, making a significant difference in my students’ growth in math.” Throughout the rest of the school year, the students’ assessment results improved. Moments of struggle happened at times, but the veteran teacher relied on teacher leadership to help brainstorm solutions. Students grew. The teacher grew. And I grew as a teacher leader. This experience helped all of us to become better than we were before having it.

When a teacher steps into a leadership role, they take on decision-making that affects students in the entire school. These decisions bring a weight with them to make the next right move. NIET supports teacher leaders by providing structures and thought partners to make the best decisions with schools to increase student achievement while supporting teachers.

Teacher leaders have a unique opportunity to foster a growth culture that supports both new and veteran teachers alike, where insights can be shared and leaders can cultivate effective instructional practice. Just as I found with this teacher, veteran teachers can further their skills by embracing new strategies when they are supported through teacher leadership. Experienced educators can benefit just as much from individualized coaching and teacher leadership to help them adapt to new student challenges and needs. When they continue to grow as professionals, positive student outcomes will follow.