In New York City Public Schools, providing a pathway to leadership has proven to be a powerful teacher retention tool. Districtwide, teacher leaders are 94 percent more likely to stay in their school than similar teachers who don’t hold leadership roles. At the recent Deeper Learning NY conference (DLNY) hosted by Ulster BOCES, we shared New York’s strategic approach to teacher leadership, called Teacher Career Pathways (TCP), with leaders representing a wide array of districts from around the country. Our session was a half-day Deep Dive, so we had the time to move from ideas to action at the conference itself. After we laid out the structure of TCP, we discussed how each district could take the teacher leadership model we shared and activate it in keeping with the conference’s theme of “Leading for Deeper Learning.” Here are some of the key points of the conversation.
Building a Districtwide Team of Instructional Leaders
In 2013, the New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers collaborated on the launch of a TCP pilot with 299 teacher leaders in 78 schools across the city. For the 2023-24 school year, principals have selected 1,270 teachers from 580 schools to serve in one of three teacher leadership roles: Model Teachers, Peer Collaborative Teachers, and Master Teachers.
In order to be eligible for any of these teacher leader roles, candidates must:
● Be a current, full-time NYCDOE educators with at least one class of record;
● Be tenured teachers; and
● Have an Advance overall rating of “Highly Effective,” “Effective,” or “Satisfactory.”
Once they have been selected and staffed by their school leader, teacher leaders serve as change agents in their school communities by partnering with their colleagues and administration in five areas of instructional leadership:
1) Lab Classrooms provide a setting for teacher leaders to experiment with strategies that align with their school’s instructional focus, as well as a place to host peer visits and instructional debriefings. As they coordinate cycles of intervisitations among colleagues, teachers reflect on instructional practices and their impact on student learning.
2) 1:1 Peer Coaching cultivates a trusting relationship among peers. Teacher leaders participate in non-evaluative classroom visits, and collaborate with peers and school leaders in goal-setting and development of next steps that lead to building reflection-oriented structures for learning.
3) Facilitation of Professional Collaboration includes leading meetings with colleagues and school leaders, co-creating community agreements, goals, and processes of collaboration, and leveraging the strengths of collaborators.
4) Strategic Design for Adult Learning uses adult learning theory as a framework for seeking to understand colleagues’ interests, needs, and strengths. Teacher leaders collaborate with colleagues and school leaders to set goals, design learning opportunities, and monitor impact.
5) Leadership Conversations empower teacher leaders to co-design their role with school leaders and colleagues by engaging in strategic conversations about their leadership duties and responsibilities. As they collaborate in identifying and refining an instructional Problem of Practice, teacher leaders amplify the perspective of colleagues and students.
These five areas provide a strong theoretical foundation for TCP, but as we discussed at DLNY, translating them into action in the classroom requires teacher leaders to embrace what we call our “essential understandings.” At the conference, we focused on three of these.
How Essential Understandings Activate Teacher Leadership
Teacher Career Pathways encourages teacher leaders to take on a leadership approach that focuses on serving others by amplifying the voices of the students, educators, and the communities they serve. Rather than prioritizing personal ambitions or goals, this approach emphasizes the leader's role in fostering the growth, well-being, and empowerment of others. It involves active listening, empathy, and stewardship to create a collaborative and supportive environment, ultimately aiming to develop a more effective, ethical, and humane organizational culture.
To that end, teacher leaders can support school leaders in surfacing, refining, and articulating their vision and goals for the community at large. Teacher leaders play an essential role in facilitating continuous communication between stakeholders that will lead to improved coherence and community evolution.
A second essential understanding, learning by doing, is a powerful way to activate the experimentation that goes on in laboratory classrooms. Teacher leaders also learn the work by doing it alongside others. Our approach asks our school-based collaborators to experience the same conditions, processes, and tasks that we ask them to simultaneously lead. The goal here is not to have every teacher do exactly what they saw a teacher leader do in their lab classroom, but rather for them to think about a particular activity through their own classroom lens and then apply it in a way that is relevant for their specific class.
An essential understanding that activates our approach to 1:1 peer coaching is facilitative coaching, an approach that emphasizes collaborative and reflective conversations that are non-evaluative.
At DLNY, keynote speaker Chris Emdin compared effective coaching to “cultivating your garden,” which is absolutely essential to retaining teachers and developing teacher leaders. We believe that when educators have opportunities to lead beyond their individual classrooms, they become powerful levers of change in their school communities.
About the authors
Michael Murphy is the director of implementation of teacher leadership for the New York City Public Schools. He can be reached at mmurphy10@schools.nyc.gov.
Abraham Ovalles is a teacher leadership coach for the New York Department of Education. He can be reached at aovalles@schools.nyc.gov.
