Math and Science Leadership Academy: Creating a Teacher-Led School for Diverse Learners

There is a lot of talk today about making our schools better and our teachers more effective. However, most policymakers focus on identifying and removing incompetent teachers rather than utilizing our most expert classroom practitioners to transform the teaching profession––one that students deserve. This is the story of the Math and Science Leadership Academy (MSLA) of Denver, Colorado––a teacher-led public school that trumps the conventional wisdom about how best to improve public education. While the idea of teacher-led schools isn’t unique, it “has gained currency as debates rage over the best ways to ensure that teachers can bring up student achievement.”1 Although there are no accurate accounts of how many teacher-led schools are operating today, more classroom experts are saying, “Hold us accountable. But let us do it our way.”2

In 2009, MSLA opened as a regular, open-admissions campus in the Denver Public Schools (DPS) for grades K-2, with the plan that the school would expand its enrollment by one grade each year as students progress. This year the school is serving 256 students through the third grade, virtually all on free or reduced lunch (and 70 percent as second language learners). Soon, MSLA will have a swath of student learning outcomes to add to growing evidence of its effectiveness as a community school. Maria Elena Aceves, the mother of a first-grader, noted that she chose the school for her son because he enjoys science, and because of the ways the teachers teach, he “feels like a leader.”

Our case study of MSLA shows how the school’s 20 teachers lead in order to engage students and families in a high-needs neighborhood. The case also reveals, counter to conventional wisdom, how a progressive local union can advance school reform and spark the creation of a successful school community.

There is a waiting list of parents who want to send their children to MSLA. They know their kids will learn and be safe. There is a waiting list of teachers who want to teach at MSLA––

MSLA builds communities of learners who collaborate to master new concepts and skills.

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including 200 applicants for some of its open teaching positions. MSLA teachers know they will work under the conditions that allow them to teach effectively. For them, the right working conditions, like those surfaced in a recent TeacherSolutions report, are what attracted them to teach in this high-needs school and what is behind their capacity to work successfully with students and their parents.3

In the mid-2000s, the idea for MSLA began to bubble up with Kim Ursetta, a kindergarten teacher who at the time was the president of the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association (DCTA). She broached the idea with the district and brought together a small group of teachers and administrators whom she thought might be interested in the potential of a teacher-led school. While many people came in and out of the initial discussions, four others stood out: Lori Nazareno, a veteran teacher who had two advanced certificates from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS); Linda Barker of the Colorado Education Association, who recently won a state honor for her excellence in leading teaching effectiveness reforms; Julie Variot, a veteran teacher who is now a first grade teacher at the school; and Lynne Lopez-Crowley, who was an administrator in a Denver suburban school district and is now the colead teacher at MSLA.

Nazareno, who had orchestrated an NBCT-led school reform movement while teaching in the Miami-Dade school system, emerged as the “point person” for the proposal that had to be approved by district officials and the school board. Soon she grew into a leader of teacher leaders––continuing to teach students regularly while advancing a unique brand of school transformation, inside and out of the school and district. In fact, Nazareno exemplifies what it means to be a teacherpreneur––teaching students regularly while serving as an innovative leader beyond the classroom. This bold concept, defined in TEACHING 2030, is a linchpin idea for how classroom experts will spread their pedagogical expertise and reform solutions to policymakers, practitioners, and the public.

Because several of MSLA’s founding teacher leaders held National Board certification, the school focused on more robust forms of student learning, not just quick fixes to raise standardized test scores in short order. National Board Certified Teachers (NBCTs) must demonstrate their teaching prowess on the basis of five core propositions––and have to show evidence as to how they analyze student work and assess and improve

their classroom practices. Currently, there are about 91,000 NBCTs nationwide––and only about 50 percent of those who seek certification eventually attain it. Due in large measure to the Colorado Education Association and the leadership of Linda Barker (Director of Teaching and Learning), the state’s teacher’s union has helped develop and identify almost 500 NBCTs, raised their visibility, and promoted their ability to lead school reforms.

Drawing on the National Board teaching and learning framework, the teacher leaders developed parallel learning propositions for their students––driving the school’s curricular focus on math, science, and technology. At MSLA students are expected to adhere

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to the following norms: (1) commit to their own learning and the learning of their classmates, (2) develop understanding of the core content and how to apply the core content in a real-world situation, (3) manage and monitor their learning, (4) think systematically about their education and learn from experience, (5) serve as members of learning communities, and (6) assume leadership responsibility to help ensure that all students are learning. For the teacher leaders, MSLA is where students learn and take control of their own learning – while having fun doing it. MSLA puts the joy back into learning for children and proves that teachers can teach a rigorous curriculum without creating rigor mortis in learning for students.

In line with those propositions, Nazareno expanded on the mission of the school as being focused on “get[ting] the most highly accomplished teachers, who really know how to teach, in front of the students who need them the most.” As she described it, most districts and schools have typically taken top-down approaches to improving schools:

A lot of people have taken a carrot-and-stick approach [to school improvement]. And unfortunately a lot of districts, particularly the two large districts I’ve been involved with, rather than addressing the question of what will bring the best teachers in, the question they seem to be trying to answer is how do we control what the teachers do. Ultimately it’s wound up with a scripted curriculum [because administrators don’t trust teachers to teach effectively].

The MSLA school development team understood that the highly effective teachers they wanted to attract would not only find those tightly controlled environments unnecessary to good classroom practice, but inimical to it. After all, a lack of flexibility can inhibit teachers’ ability to tailor instruction to individual students’ needs. Instead, Nazareno discusses how the team believed that by offering potential candidates greater flexibility, the school could better recruit those who were most effective and ready to lead:

Part of the hypothesis around the school was not mandating everything and trying to control everything – those types of conditions where you’re mandating and controlling everything are not the type of conditions where you attract someone who is very [effective in the classroom]. Someone who really is committed to students and learning. They manage and monitor learning. They reflect and adjust their instruction based on what the kids are learning or not learning at the time.

The team aimed to select teachers who were the best in their field––and to evaluate teachers on an ongoing basis. As a result, the team felt that it made sense to leverage that expertise by fully empowering the teachers as the sole group of decision-makers for MSLA––a strategy that Nazareno explains would help them retain these teachers over the long term, despite working in a high-needs community:

[We thought] if we go the opposite way––empower[ing] teachers––they're going to make the decisions. They're going to decide how we spend our money, how we structure the schedule, what programs and activities do we bring in…. And we [would] make all the decisions based on what’s best for the kids – not what the district wants, not what adults want, not what anybody else is saying. That’s the environment that will attract highly accomplished teachers.

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All too often, reformers, as exemplified in the recent Davis Guggenheim documentary, Waiting for Superman, fixate on the teacher as superhero. In doing so, they underestimate and devalue the reality and power of teachers working together to improve teaching and student learning. Most of today’s policy approaches to improve our public schools ignore how challenging teaching in the 21st century really is––and the extent to which teachers could share their expertise. To get the job done right, we need to figure out how schools should organize their teaching talent––building upon strengths and minimizing weaknesses. The teacher leaders of MSLA embrace accountability for themselves and each other.

As documented in the work of Anthony Bryk, Barbara Schneider, and others, trust is an integral component in building groups of professionals into collaborative teams that can advance student learning.4 Most of the teachers at MSLA noted that the school, which is led by classroom experts, had brought together very strong and different personalities and teaching styles in order to match their pedagogical expertise with the diverse students and families they serve.

From concept to campus: Planning, recruiting, and hiringDeveloping plans that embody the missionThe team’s conversations about their common vision, with resources provided by the union, led to an education plan to guide the curriculum. The school organizes instruction so all of the grade level teachers have time to plan together and analyze student progress––about four hours a week on average. But there is more. The teachers have developed an extended day plan to nurture optimal student contact time and also have included a service-learning component that connects academics to real-life applications that enhance the local community. The school serves a large percentage of second language learners––70 percent––and as a result, Nazareno and her colleagues have recruited teachers who know a great deal about English language acquisition and bilingual instruction. (This is a critical component too often ignored by teacher preparation programs, especially short-cut alternative ones.)

Their initial plan carefully spelled out the roles of the lead teachers, who would combine mentoring and some traditional administrative tasks (e.g., filing paperwork for the district, attending district meetings) with part-time teaching loads. It specified the program for student discipline that would be adopted school-wide, as agreed upon by the incoming staff. It emphasized the importance of parent and community relations, and described processes for student recruitment and enrollment, which would be on an open, space-available basis, drawing primarily from nearby neighborhoods. The district pushed hard for more specificity and, with some technical assistance, the MSLA founders put together a solid plan for staffing that included recruitment and evaluation processes led by teachers. In turn, teachers made sure that those hired had instructional skills that complemented those of their colleagues, and that all teachers were willing to engage in peer review and professional development programs that could facilitate excellence throughout the school. After DPS accepted the MSLA proposal, Nazareno was released from teaching to a new full-time job: she served as point person for getting the school off the ground, with just under eight months to do so.

The goal throughout this initial process was not to create plans that prescribed what could or could not be done by the teachers who would ultimately lead the school. Rather, the team hoped to offer enough structure that the school’s staff would be able to implement the vision of the initial team as well as the

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evolving vision of those who were eventually hired. As a result, MSLA is less about empowering teachers to make what typically are administrative decisions and more about drawing upon teacher leadership to define and to cultivate a professional culture that best serves students and their families. This distinction is important.

Moreover, the district and union were able not only to agree on the importance of taking a risk on a teacher-led school but also to jointly continue supporting the idea. This is an unusual element of the school’s development story. Had it not been for the contribution of both parties, the planning process might have been less comprehensive, less carefully considered, and less politically palatable to those on the other side of the bargaining table––and thus, less likely to bring the MSLA vision into being.

Housing the vision of MSLA and recruiting students and familiesOf course, schools are more than ideas and people. They are also physical spaces that house communities of learners and teachers. As is the case in most public schools, MSLA had little ability to select its building. Rishel Middle School, a traditionally organized DPS campus with a sizeable physical facility, had been experiencing a shrinking enrollment over a number of years. The district had slated Rishel to be dissolved over a three-year period, as each successive class of students graduated and moved on to high school. DPS placed a charter high school and MSLA in various wings of the empty buildings, with space arranged so that the three student bodies would have minimal contact as they went about their school days.

However, a school designed for older students required a fair amount of retrofitting to be appropriate as a space for younger children––from supplying carpeting to adjusting the heights of bathroom fixtures and water fountains. The district worked closely with MSLA to ensure that these updates were complete (working right up to the opening day of school). Meanwhile, the co-lead teachers, their consultant, and others ensured that the teachers themselves would have a great deal of input into additional decisions. For instance, teachers collectively determined the furniture they would order for classrooms in order to create a physical environment that would facilitate the kind of teaching and learning they hoped to nurture at MSLA.

The core planning group’s critical challenge, beyond staffing and space, was student recruitment. As a new school of choice, the doors could open only if sufficient numbers of students enrolled before the start of the 2009-10 school year. It was decided that instruction would be available in either English-language or in Spanish-language classrooms in each grade, though all teachers were required to have an ELA endorsement. On a year-by-year basis, parents would decide whether their children would be placed in English- or Spanish-speaking classrooms. These decisions were made in alignment with the school’s mission of partnership with student families and service to the surrounding predominantly Latino community. The faculty hoped to help neighboring families feel more comfortable with the school and thus more likely to enroll their children at MSLA.

The strategy worked. Ruth Ocon, who enrolled her son in MSLA’s first entering class, said:

My husband, who is [primarily] a Spanish speaker, likes it here because there are a lot of teachers that can speak his language, and he doesn't feel overwhelmed or embarrassed to speak to them when he needs something.

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While Ocon acknowledged that sending her son to a new school was a potential risk, she noted that it was a calculated one. For one thing, her whole family felt comfortable there, and she said, “I met with Lori [Nazareno] and some of the other teachers, and as a teacher myself, I could see they were really good teachers. So I didn’t worry.” Her son went on to thrive at MSLA, and through her work as a parent volunteer, Ocon became so convinced of the importance and success of MSLA’s model that she transferred to the school as a second-grade teacher in the school’s second year.

Despite the fact that the MSLA model was designed to be welcoming to area families, the predominantly-Anglo staff still had to spread the word in a community in which they were essentially outsiders. In early 2009, Nazareno enlisted the help of Paula Gomez, the secretary at her former school, to lead outreach to the community. As Gomez explained, the Latino parents tended to trust her because she was the only main office staff member who shared their language and could help translate conversations with teachers and administrators, explain school rules and forms, and even assist with non-school related documents. Gomez was an indispensable part of the recruitment process, eventually becoming MSLA’s office administrator and a de facto community liaison.

With time running out––and the district threatening to postpone MSLA’s launch for another year––Gomez and Nazareno began an intensive recruiting process. Because they are respectively native Spanish-speaking and English-speaking, they divided the work in terms of who might best communicate with the families of rising K-2 students. They made phone calls, visited homes and churches, and went to each of the Head Start programs within a three-mile radius. The numbers grew slowly. However, their progress in hitting those monthly recruitment targets helped them to convince the district to go ahead with opening the school in fall 2009.

Teacher Recruitment and SelectionBy February 2009, MSLA had posted its positions for teachers in kindergarten through second grade through the DPS human resources office––but that was where the similarity to traditional hiring processes ended. Initially, the four-person development team was responsible for selecting teachers. As teachers were hired, they too became part of a collective process of interviewing and evaluating prospective colleagues. This is quite different from traditional hiring systems that rely on central office administrators to screen recruits, with principals making unilateral decisions without the involvement of teaching faculty. Researchers have long documented the salubrious effects of teachers having an integral role in selecting those with whom they teach, raising the likelihood that a new recruit fits well within a school, department, or team.5

MSLA sought well-prepared teachers who are willing to commit to teaching in a high-needs school – and not just for a few years. MSLA needed bright, high-energy individuals who also were experienced in working with

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MSLA partners with families in a predominantly Latino community.

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the students and families they served. MSLA leaders determined that new teachers needed to be of the community as well as to know it. They were all “self-starters” and possessed “the ability to talk about and use data and evidence about student learning.” Some had three years’ experience, others almost 30. Some were career-switchers; others had been teaching since they graduated from college. But all of them were prepared in so-called “traditional” university-based education schools, not in short-cut alternative certification programs. They were selected, as Nazareno noted, because they had a “range of experience and expertise, with some bringing new ideas from their recent preparation while others were bringing lessons learned from their teaching over time.” And in contrast to conventional wisdom, Nazareno pointed out that those who were recently minted by education schools were “very well prepared to teach at MSLA.”

MSLA’s hiring process had three operational elements: a written online application, an interview with the growing peer committee, and a follow-up classroom observation to demonstrate that applicants met or exceeded high standards for teaching effectiveness. Even the online application was unique to MSLA in that it included short essay questions, built upon the National Board principles, that asked applicants to write about their conception of what a teacher-led school might be like and to address the core propositions of the school with respect to their own professional practice. Based on teachers’ responses, as well as their experience and recommendations, candidates were contacted to interview for positions.

Typically, interviews are used to assess the dispositions and strengths of each of the applicants, and determine whether they are a good fit for a given school. To some degree, that was true of the process at MSLA, as the hiring committee needed to ensure that candidates were highly effective teachers, able to lead beyond their individual classrooms, who held similar values regarding teaching and learning. However, the development team and their consultant agreed that a successful teacher-led school “could not have teachers that were clones of one another.” Rather, they needed to have varying styles of teaching and leadership, and diverse skills and strengths, in the service of a common mission. But most importantly, they sought to hire teachers who possessed both the skill and will to collaborate with one another and the students and families they served.

The value of capitalizing on diverse strengths had already proven to be more than just a good theory. The two co-lead teachers, Nazareno and Lopez-Crowley, already had a track record of making strengths-based leadership work during the school development process. Nazareno’s “big picture” perspective had helped

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MSLA selects teachers with diverse strengths and experiences.

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keep the team’s work closely aligned with their original vision and infused with a systems approach to planning, while Lopez-Crowley’s talent for attending to detail aided in the implementation of big ideas. While the interview and observation process considered individual teachers’ knowledge, dispositions, and assets, it also was designed to analyze how their strengths complemented those of other staff members. In this way, the school could have more and more diverse skills and tools at its disposal. This approach also built in an incentive for collaboration: by working with peers, teachers had the opportunity to access new and outside-the-box expertise and ideas, as well as to spread their own knowledge and to share their workload with their colleagues.

The teachers of MSLA believe that the school’s recruitment and hiring process is unique within DPS and in many of the prior districts in which they worked. Bold teacher leadership and a results-focused collaborative culture were the attractors for teachers recruited to MSLA. In addition, the performance-based hiring process gave them a chance to show what they knew and could do about teaching and learning. It also gave the new recruits the opportunity to see what the school was “about” and what its teacher leaders really valued.

For instance, Zach Rupp, the school’s half-time music teacher, is very involved in the Denver Classroom Teachers’ Association (DCTA)––and in that capacity was tangentially involved in some of the initial planning meetings to discuss the concept for MSLA. He also is now part of the New Millennium Initiative (NMI) – an effort launched by the Center for Teaching Quality to cultivate a new generation of teachers who are prepared and supported to lead policy and pedagogical reforms. Both he and Stephanie McCandless, the school’s art teacher, are passionate about integrated education, and were asked in their applications and interviews to speak to their view of integrating the arts with math and science––an unusual connection with core academic subjects that they welcomed. McCandless was also a career changer, and the hiring process reassured her that she would find the collaboration and support she felt she would need to be successful in her first full year in the classroom. Other teachers were impressed that members of the hiring committee came to see them teach at their home schools, noting how the “walk the walk” approach to confirming teaching effectiveness connected to the propositions of the school, and was unlike other teaching auditions in which candidates are asked to teach children they do not know in an artificial environment.

But perhaps most importantly, the hiring process affirmed the development team’s belief that the best teachers are those who are able––and who crave opportunities––to lead in their classrooms and at the school level. Second grade teacher Bernadette Lopez’s journey adds a powerful insight into how the teacher recruitment and hiring process at MSLA was made successful by the teacher-led nature of the school. Lopez had successfully taught in Denver previously. But after growing frustrated by work under administrators who seemed more focused on procedures than on the best interests of students, she had moved away to pursue opportunities outside of education:

I certainly didn’t want to put myself in a situation where I didn’t think I’d be successful if the administration was anti-union or if they really didn’t want teachers who stood up and spoke for the children and said what they felt was best for the kids.

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The opportunities to teach and lead in a new way, in a mission-driven environment built upon the school’s core propositions and around teaching and learning, brought Lopez to MSLA. Hers was not the only story of how teacher leadership could retain strong educators, but offered evidence that the school’s emphasis on empowering teachers was key for staffing a successful high-needs school.

Teacher LeadershipThe school has evolved in its initial two years, refining approaches to curriculum and instruction, scheduling, and even teacher leadership. However, what has not changed is that the culture, heart, and integrity of the school centers around teachers being leaders and decision-makers based on their professional expertise and distinct knowledge of specific needs of students and their families.

According to the teachers themselves, there were some challenges at the beginning of the first school year. The school has had an open door policy to those interested in its model and is certainly in public view because of its union affiliation as well as the fact that it is a uniquely teacher-led school. While the staff generally views this transparency as positive, they had to set norms and expectations for themselves, for parents, and for students about how to handle frequent visitors without interrupting the flow of instruction within classrooms. Another factor that the staff suggested they might not have fully anticipated was that the students were coming from different schools with varying academic experiences and discipline systems. Also, at the time MSLA opened, the teachers did not know one another well enough to be sure of their particular roles in this environment of collaboration and joint leadership––and they did not want to make unnecessary missteps in building their collegial relationships. As a result, both students and teachers were actively feeling their way through their initial year––what one teacher described as “building our plane while flying it”––with every decision about that internal school culture being observed and subject to scrutiny. Second grade teacher Suzanne Curtis explained that the school had to go through an initial “calming down period” after its high-stakes opening. And it was high stakes. As Nazareno reflected, “It’s all on us. If we don’t get the results, you can’t go back and say the principal didn’t let me.”

The importance of leadership for effective teachers and teachingWe have noted that while the foundation of MSLA is what is best for children, it is also quite apparent that the unique features, the draw for teachers, and possibly what should be the draw for education, is that MSLA is a teacher-led school with no single administrator running the show. In our discussions of hiring, as well as the school’s beginning, teachers emphasized that they came to MSLA because it is a teacher-led school. They also spoke about what that means to them both philosophically and practically. When Ursetta spoke with us about the teachers treating one another as professionals, her colleague Tara Thompson expanded on the concept:

We’re all leaders. We get to choose what the climate is like. There’s no one telling us. So we get to create our world and that’s really powerful. And I think that more people can create the world that they live in but they don’t know how. And we have the opportunity to do that and that’s pretty profound.

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Second grade teacher Lopez spoke about the importance of the role of teachers as experts who offer leadership both instructionally and in a broader sense within a successful school:

What I’ve always believed in is that teachers are carrying the expertise because they are working day-by-day with the children, hour by hour, day after day. In the past I’ve rarely seen an administrator come in and spend time in the classroom and then go to an evaluation piece where they can actually give you suggestions and something new for you to try. [Something] you could actually take back and try in the classroom and give feedback and really know how to teach and improve teacher effectiveness, which is really where we are going. And I never really had that happen. My experience has been when I’ve talked to my colleagues they’ve said, ‘Oh, I did this.’ They were the ones that were sitting with the information that I could try things in new ways with the children. So that has been the most valuable thing for me.

Structuring Teacher LeadershipMany research studies have suggested that collaboration among teachers doesn’t just happen but has to be structured by setting aside time and other resources to encourage its success. The same is true of teacher leadership, as the story of MSLA shows. In the initial school proposal, the founders laid out a plan for teacher committees, collaboration time, curriculum (including service learning), peer evaluation and student discipline––each of which was designed explicitly as a support for the goals of the school.

Each teacher at MSLA is a member of either the School Leadership or Curriculum committee and two of the following: 1) Climate and Culture, (2) Professional Development, (3) Data, and (4) Peer Evaluation. In addition, all teachers serve as peer evaluators in some capacity. In 2010-11, the team added a new committee charged with Parent Involvement. Each committee is responsible for making recommendations to the full faculty on issues that are addressed at the committee level. Communication comes via email and informal collaboration on a day-to-day basis and most importantly during Wednesday afternoon faculty meetings.

Faculty meetings are designed to inform teachers and also to bring wider circles of teachers into decision-making processes, so that no one committee is ever siloed. Faculty meetings at MSLA are not informational sessions but highly structured problem-solving venues. The meetings begin with brief introductions by the lead teachers followed by presentations from different committees, usually one committee each week. For example, the Climate and Culture Committee might bring a discipline issue before the whole group, such as how to address particular ongoing challenges with student behavior or how to work with parents to implement similar approaches at home and at school. This type of conversation would

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At MSLA, teachers are treated as the experts they are – and make important decisions about the

running of the school.

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be facilitated by Tara Thompson, who referred, half jokingly, to Conscious Discipline as her “bible” and is the resident expert in this model.

However, we note that as teachers work harder and harder, it appears that there is less time to meet and collaborate formally on important issues––a challenge that MSLA is working to meet. Yet every teacher we met with acknowledged the expertise of their colleagues, and that they help and rely on one another a great deal on an informal collaborative basis that helps address immediate needs. Besides the two co-lead teachers, for instance, Ursetta is acknowledged as a veteran teacher, who in addition to being an exemplary NBCT brings a great deal of knowledge and experience regarding the union and the district. Teachers look to Rupp for both his expertise of integrated learning and his understanding of technology. Conversations with the teachers revealed agreement on how some basic elements of these types of collaborative decision-making processes not only made their work more inclusive and comprehensive, but also continuously built the groundwork of trust that makes collaborative leadership possible. Below are comments faculty shared regarding this process:

“We always have an opportunity to talk in these meetings and be heard.”“We really do work to be collaborative and have everybody’s voice brought to the table before we come to decisions.”“It is a safe environment and what you say matters.”“My role can be as big or as little as I want it to be. There are definitely people who feel more comfort-able taking things on and then people who don’t – and that’s okay.”“People are at different places in their leadership and work and we honor that.”

According to all of the teachers we interviewed, decisions are usually made by consensus. However, one or two times, issues have needed to come to a vote. The most intense example of this came at the beginning of the second year when a loss in school enrollment meant the budget had to be cut. Through a school committee, and after intense and very difficult discussion, faculty voted not to keep a half-time physical education instructor and the person who had been hired was informed the position had been eliminated. What is important here is that this was a decision made by the staff, not by an administrator. It is also important to note that teachers always referred to their decision-making protocol as a work-in-progress. The thoughts and voices of the teachers provide a more human portrait of teacher leadership at MSLA.

Co-lead teachers and external leadership rolesOf course, the co-lead teachers maintain the lion’s share of the responsibility for relations with the district, responding as administrators might to the required paperwork and other traditional management functions. Still, their colleagues saw them as teachers first, and emphasized that their leadership grew out of the classroom practice in which they were still engaged every day. Paty Gonzalez Holt spoke about Nazareno’s role this way:

I think the fact that she is teaching every day is a huge difference because she understands what we’re going through. She’s teaching, she’s planning, she knows the kids. She teaches the service learning projects as well. So she knows every single kid just as intimately as we do. It’s not just that principal

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where they don’t know kids’ names or reading level or whether they are struggling. She really knows the kids and their academic level and which kids we’re concerned about and which have potential for being leaders. So she really understands them as we do as teachers. So that is a big piece that we are a teacher-led school.

Nazareno’s self-portrait was similar in its focus on a student-centered, practice-based leadership role:

First of all I teach two hours every day. Most often I describe my role as being that I know all of the decisions that need to get made and I make sure they get made. We describe ourselves rather than being top down or triangular in shape as more circular, and in the circle are all the decisions that need to be made. So my part of that circle is working toward all student issues – discipline and curriculum. Lynne’s [the co-lead teacher] part of that is all the operational – budget, scheduling…. The teachers’ is the classroom teaching and decision-making and peer review team. So none of those things is more important than anything else; it’s just part of all of the stuff that needs to get done.

Perhaps what’s most striking in these descriptions is the similarity. In CTQ’s other research we find huge differences among teachers and principals in their respective perceptions of teaching and learning conditions. For example, in a large school district, we found in our most recent survey that only 54 percent of the teachers believed they were centrally involved in decision-making about educational issues in their schools. But over 85 percent of the principals reported that teachers were “centrally involved.” On virtually every survey item, there was a 30-40 percent gap in teacher and administrator views on a wide range of working conditions.6

However, at MSLA, the co-lead teachers and their other colleagues are very much in sync about their roles and clear about how each of them contributes to the school’s mission. The co-lead teachers have made particular efforts, however, not to be the only ones seen as formal leaders of MSLA. As part of being a teacher-led school, not only do the teachers participate in all of the decisions, big and small, they also participate in district activities that are usually only the responsibility of an administrator. When there are district principal, assistant principal, math supervisor, or literacy supervisor meetings, the teachers take turns participating. When another teacher attended a literacy supervisor meeting, she was asked who the school’s literacy facilitator was. Her reply was, “We don’t have [assigned] facilitators; we are all facilitators.” Teachers seem to find this difficulty in explaining the model to others amusing and a bit frustrating, but it does speak to the challenges inherent in working with educators who are apt to reify the leadership lines between teachers and administrators.

Accountability in a teacher-led environmentEvaluation and accountability are often understood to be the central role that administrators and policy leaders play. Administrators, who often work with school board members, state education agency heads, policy analysts, researchers, and politicians in crafting accountability frameworks, are then charged with supervising and assessing teachers. MSLA teachers are often asked by visitors and others external to the

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school about how their peer assistance and review system works, and how they can be truly accountable for their teaching in the absence of a principal to act as evaluator. The teachers speak about the importance of collaboration and trust with those who evaluate. Critically important for teachers is to have someone who really is deeply steeped in teaching and learning to assess their practice. Peer review is led by NBCTs – who have extensive experience in analyzing data and student work samples as well as videorecorded lessons. For the most part, traditionally-placed principals – who either lack skill or time (or both) – have not passed muster on this score. Teachers and those who evaluate them must really know classroom context and understand the relationship between what is seen during an observation and what takes place before and after a lesson. One teacher said:

I feel I know what is expected of me because we are all accountable to each other. I feel that the leadership that I get is with my peer group and our evaluation groups where we go to each other’s rooms and evaluate what each other is doing. Before we do that, we set goals and tell each other ‘this is what I think I need to develop – what I want you to watch for.’ So it’s very structured and very helpful.

The work of MSLA to promote peer review is now bolstered by a new study, released recently, that points to how teachers, compared to administrators, are far more thorough and tough-minded in evaluating their colleagues.7

And the way teachers assess one another has a salubrious effect on how students are evaluated as well. Each of the teachers spoke about modeling both collaboration and leadership for their students as well as their own collaboration. Rupp spoke specifically about working with the second grade teachers integrating music with social studies, language, and science. He also spoke about modeling and nurturing student responsibility as stewards of their school. On the same issue, Lopez made a direct connection to how a teacher-led school differs from a traditional school:

You don’t get teacher leaders when it’s top down – they can never rise to the top. You’re in that kind of framework as a teacher and then it reinvents itself in the classroom with your students. The bottom kids can never rise to the top.

However, she felt that the shared accountability at MSLA––not just for being effective but also for becoming more so––helped to develop more leadership and professionalism among teachers, and more student responsibility for their own learning as well.

Making Teacher Leadership WorthwhileWe can assuredly state that children, parents, and teachers are involved in and excited about the school. All of the teachers are quite clear that MSLA’s founding has been a huge professional investment and challenge, but are equally certain that their investment as teacher leaders makes for a better learning culture for students and for themselves as professionals. In that context, this case study offers proof that the energies and resources put into developing the school and structuring it carefully have been worthwhile, in an effort to

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605 W Main Street : Suite 207 : Carrboro NC 27510 TEACHINGQUALITY.ORG

turn around what teaching and learning can mean for all members of a school community. Lopez’s reflections illustrate the power of this work-in-progress:

I’m definitely putting in a lot more time here but it doesn’t feel like that because I think that when you are treated like a professional and what you do is valued––truly, truly valued, what you do on an everyday basis – it doesn’t feel like work. We are all working toward the same goal. We’re all working together. We’re all being supportive of one another. I know all of her kids’ names and she knows all of my kids’ names. They know who I am and I’m just as respected as their teacher is.

Obviously every day I was accountable to myself as a teacher, accountable to my students and their parents. But I also felt I was only accountable to my administrator like one day out of the year. But here I’m accountable to my team all the time because my team is going to get my students next year. Even though you know that at other schools, you don’t feel that same team network. So even though I knew that before, this year it means so much more. And I know I’m accountable to my Peer Assistance Review team because they’re coming in and they’re watching me and saying, ‘Is she actually listening to what we're saying?’ I want to make sure that I’m valuing their time and valuing what they’re giving to me to help me grow as a teacher.

MSLA represents a seismic shift in how policymakers, practitioners, and the public think about improving schools as well as the teaching profession. When teachers have been expected to lead, it has been at the purview of administrators––not to incubate new ideas and take teacherpreneurial action. For most of teaching’s past, teachers have been expected to play very narrow classroom roles, leaving leadership to the administrators––many of whom have not taught students in a long time, if at all. But as teaching and learning become more complex and challenging in the years ahead, MSLA can serve as bedrock for how to organize and utilize classroom experts in creating innovative solutions to local educational problems. We have learned that most school districts are not well designed to utilize teacher leadership as MSLA has begun to do. And often district leaders and policymakers conceive of teaching and administrative roles in dichotomous ways, as opposed to thinking differently about teachers and what they could contribute outside their classrooms if they had more time, space, and even reward. We know that other models, perhaps ones in which school business managers team up with teacher leaders like Nazareno and her colleagues, have merit and should be explored. We know that teachers, especially younger ones like those in our New Millennium Initiative, are seeking more hybrid roles as they consider whether to

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At MSLA, teacher leadership is matched by the expectation that students also

demonstrate leadership.

605 W Main Street : Suite 207 : Carrboro NC 27510 TEACHINGQUALITY.ORG

stay in the profession.

Still, many questions are left unanswered––one is related to the sustainability of the teacher-led model that MSLA has created within the confines of its local district policies. Another is related to the long-term student achievement benefits, which can only be calculated after a few more years of operation. But there are other important issues as well: Will district administrators support taking this model to scale? Will teacher education programs and unions begin to shift their attention to preparing teachers to create and lead their own schools? Will policy leaders support blurring the lines of distinction between those who teach in schools and those who lead them?

At the Center for Teaching Quality––where we are cultivating a new generation of teacher leadership opportunities for 21st-century teaching and learning––we will stay tuned. Policymakers, practitioners, and the public across the nation should as well.

This case study is accompanied by a two and a half minute video highlighting MSLA.

Published by the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), September 2011.

Endnotes1 Khadaroo, S. T. (2010, September 1). School teachers in charge? Why some schools are forgoing principals. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved at

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0901/School-teachers-in-charge-Why-some-schools-are-forgoing-principals

2 Khadaroo, S. T. (2010, September 1). School teachers in charge? Why some schools are forgoing principals. Christian Science Monitor. Retrieved at http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0901/School-teachers-in-charge-Why-some-schools-are-forgoing-principals

3 Daughtrey, A. & the TeacherSolutions Teacher Working Conditions Team. (2010, November). Transforming school conditions: Building bridges to the education system that students and teachers deserve. Hillsborough, NC: Center for Teaching Quality. Retrieved at http://www.teachingquality.org/sites/default/files/TS_TWC_Report.pdf

4 Bryk, A. & Schneider, B. L. (2002). Trust in schools: A core resource for improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

5 Wise, A., Darling-Hammond, L., and Berry, B. (1985). Teacher selection: From recruitment to retention. Washington DC: RAND Corporation.

6 Berry, B., Daughtrey, A., Robinson, J. & Wieder, A. (2011). Teaching and learning conditions 2010. Hillsborough, NC: Center for Teaching Quality.

7 Humphrey, D. C., Koppich, J. E., Bland, J. A. & Bosetti, K. R. (2011). Peer review: Getting serious about teacher evaluation. Menlo Park, CA: SRI International.

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