In this blog post Mills Teacher Scholar Executive Director Carrie Wilson describes how teacher leaders build their instructional leadership capacity at the Teacher Scholar Leader Network sessions, a cross-district network of  teacher scholar leaders from partner sites. Each of these teacher leaders is facilitating, or co-facilitating with Mills Teacher Scholar staff, a cross-grade inquiry group at their site. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in October, twenty Bay Area teacher scholar leaders are seated in a large circle with their heads cocked, leaning into the center of the room. They are on their second listening of an audio recording of third graders in a bilingual classroom discussing what they know about the sun and the moon. These are veteran teacher scholars who, after just a single listening, can skillfully pull out nuances of what each child contributes in the partner conversation. They note the student’s knowledge of the symbolism of color, the informal register that allows for the expression of unformed ideas, the way the conversation begins as a narrative and shifts to expository talk, and the students’ ability to connect personal experiences with scientific concepts. As the teacher leaders share what they notice after the first listening, Mills Teacher Scholars staff documents what the teachers gleaned from the data. The documentation quickly reaches two pages, but is only the first step of the process. As they sit in the circle and listen to the audio data for a second time, the teacher leaders are not simply listening to learn about students, but they are listening with the intention of learning how to lead their colleagues to listen to data in a similar way. The questions that guide their work in the Mills Teacher Scholars Leader Network are: How, as teacher leaders, can we use data to help our colleagues to more deeply understand the learning goals they have for their students and also understand how individual students think in relation to each goal? What is involved in leading adults’ learning about their students’ learning?

We are excited to announce that the October publication of Educational Leadership magazine features Mills Teacher Scholars as an example of a program that leverages teacher leadership in our schools.

At our veteran school sites, Rosa Parks, New Highland and Roosevelt, teacher scholars are engaged in collecting focal student data for each other.

We are grateful to the private foundations and public school districts that fund our work to make schools vibrant learning places for teachers so that they, in turn, may provide improved learning opportunities for...