By the ELE Coordinators/Leadership Team, Milford Public Schools, Milford, MA 

Learning is not attained by chance; it must be sought for with ardor and diligence. - Abigail Adams

If you can trust the process with me, let the journey begin! - Sarah Ottow 

Eight Milford English Learner department leaders log onto Zoom monthly for an hour of professional learning. How effective can 10 hours across 10 school months be? Can a collective 10 hours of professional team learning and coaching advance leadership knowledge and shift individual practices to impact student learning and growth significantly? It may sound like an unattainable task. Yet, a team of English learner education (ELE) leaders diligently sought to learn from one another’s expertise. They were guided by Confianza experts, resulting in a gradual adaptive change within the EL department leadership, which was accelerated due to the ELE leaders’ passion for learning and their coaching of one another. Ten hours of tapping into each team member's expertise, observing the leadership in their colleagues’ building contexts, and co-coaching each other through the systems of the department’s roles and responsibilities has built an ELE leadership team that appreciates one another, calls on each other in times of needed trusted assistance, builds horizontal and vertical cohesion and alignment of processes at the district level, and creates a culture of collaboration and high expectations of shared responsibility. Ten hours. 

Milford Public Schools has benefited from Sarah’s leadership for multiple years. Sarah believes in practical professional development that ensures that the teachers and coaches she trains have what they need to apply new learnings into practice (Ottow, 2023). As we approached the school year 2023-2024, we hoped Confianza could facilitate coaching among and between our ELE leaders. We acknowledged that deeper collaboration among the leadership team would set ourselves, our teachers, and our students up for more success (Ottow, 2023). 

Our ELE leader team realized that to be effective instructional coaches with our staff and within our schools, we had to practice coaching and being coached by each other. Vertically aligning these processes and procedures within the district would strengthen our team. As a team, we asked Sarah to reinforce our communities of practice so that we could continuously learn together through an inquiry-based lens (Ottow, 2023). From there, Sarah mapped out a scope of monthly topics for the ELE leaders, including processes and procedures for monitoring students on an English Learner Success Plan, Progress Monitoring Procedures, ACCESS Procedures, Curriculum Development, and supporting English Learners with Disabilities. These topics are relevant for most, if not all, English Learners in grades PreK-12. 

Sarah paired our ELE team members to coach one another on the above-mentioned topics. The coaching included site visits to each other’s respective schools, co-coaching meetings, and coaching debriefs within our Confianza consult. We remained with the same ELE team member for the first half of the school year to build relationships and provide for ongoing discussions and coaching. Throughout this time, Sarah encouraged us to discuss what was already working at our schools and reflect on the next steps for growth (Ottow, 2023). 

Discussing a topic with an ELE team member working in a different school in the district allowed the EL Coordinators to vertically align certain procedures, shift our perspectives at times, and make connections between schools, especially when students transition from one school to the next. With Sarah and her team's support close at hand, we discovered that professional development is more than an event; it is a habit of mind that helps build knowledge and capacity among our leadership, coaches, and teaching teams (Ottow, 2023). In addition, coaching one another has strengthened our skill set as instructional coaches during observations and debriefs. 

And so - what can a collective 10 hours accomplish? Under the careful guidance and expertise of Sarah and the Confianza team, it accomplished much more than we expected at the beginning of our work together. Not only did we continue our extended project of vertical alignment of policies and programming through our PreK-12 program, but we also gained a deeper appreciation for colleagues’ work. We coached each other through areas of struggle and, at times, commiserated when our struggles mirrored each other’s. We continued to build a mutual responsibility for our students’ educational journeys by planning for grade-level hand-offs and communicating our shared knowledge of students as they progress through our school system. By coaching and being coached by ELE leaders at different schools, we learned about grade-level practices we weren’t familiar with, building our capacity for future opportunities as district-wide ELE leaders. We now have an effective coaching structure we can bring to each school year. Moving forward, we plan to continue the work with topics pertinent to each school year. Confianza has propelled us forward. Although we might sometimes feel the headwind‒ the challenges of public education ‒ opposing us, we now have the tools and the systems to coach each other along the way. 

More from this Team:

The Language We Use to Talk about Students

Reference:

Ottow, S. (2023). The language lens for content classrooms. A guidebook for K-12 teachers, coaches, and leaders (2nd ed.). Confianza LLC.