Achievement First

Abstract: The narratives revealed varied levels of support for teacher development across schools and different degrees of teacher autonomy for making instructional decisions. This chapter addresses what school leaders and teacher mentors can do to support teachers’ instructional capacities and help them grow as educators for social justice. School leaders can support teacher growth by prompting teachers’ self-reflection and working to foster teachers’ professional growth. Teacher mentors can model instructional practices, provide in-class coaching, ask teachers questions that prompt self-reflection, and raise teachers’ consciousness about social equity. Professional learning communities and teacher inquiry groups offer additional support for growth. Leslie Reich shares some insights from her own experiences working with school leaders in three different schools and how leaders can best support early career teachers.

Abstract: Since almost the beginning of my career, I have been happily steeped in Advanced Placement United States History. I began teaching the course in 2001, have served many times as a reader and table leader at the annual reading where exams are graded, and sat on the Test Development Committee from 2010 to 2013. I have been fortunate enough to be a member of multiple communities of APUSH teachers that have provided one of the most important elements of my own professional growth as a teacher and historian. Almost two years ago, I transitioned from a full-time teaching role at my small, urban Connecticut high school to an instructional leadership role. Now as an instructional leader, I coach teachers of both AP and college-prep level history courses individually and in professional development groups. Our school serves about 500 predominantly African American and Latino students who enter our school through the citywide public school lottery. We are unabashedly determined to make college graduation a reality for all of our students, approximately three-quarters of whom receive free or reduced lunch and almost all of whom will be the first in their families to graduate. We provide intense college-readiness instruction to students all four years they are with us, and we provide wraparound college success counseling to graduates and their families until they earn their bachelor’s degrees. AP is an important piece of the college readiness equation at our school. Like many veteran APUSH teachers, I admit that I at first approached the APUSH redesign with skepticism. I believed that the exam we already had tested knowledge that students of history should know, and that its writing tasks pushed teachers to center their courses on historical inquiry and the use of evidence. Having been both a student of history and a college-level history instructor, I could vouch for the alignment between these emphases and those of the college-level and professional historian. I believed that the exam helped students prepare for college. And, it is important to recognize, I had felt successful in and proud of my work with students using the old framework. Indeed, I did (and continue to) see AP in our school’s curriculum as a major component of broadening college access and preparing first-generation college students for success. As a first-generation college graduate myself, this places AP at the center of my own motivations for the work I do. A new exam challenged me in myriad ways. Despite my initial hesitation, in recent years I have become an ardent champion of the APUSH redesign.1 In this piece, I hope to present what I see as the challenges and the

Abstract: Leslie Reich taught ninth-grade English at a school in Los Angeles after participating in Teach for America’s Summer Institute. Leslie attributes her social justice leanings to growing up in a family that emphasized public service. As a new teacher, she recognized that she needed to first learn the intricacies of the community in which her students lived and began to pursue diversity and inclusiveness learning. She asked questions of her students and their families, engaged in dialogue with her colleagues, and read as much as she could on issues related to diversity, inclusiveness, and culturally sustaining pedagogy.

Abstract: The early career teachers in this book give advice to a new wave of hopeful teachers, starting with the need to reflect on what they need to learn and do to give students the best of themselves. This chapter addresses some of the key elements in the narratives, such as teachers’ strong investments in their own learning and working within the restrictions of school structures and policies that contrast with teachers’ ideas about sound teaching. The teachers speak in plain terms about the steps that are needed for future and early career teachers to grow professionally and enact social equity teaching practices, especially those who teach in historically unjust contexts. Their recommendations fall into four main categories: (1) creating and sustaining relationships, (2) maintaining high expectations, (3) seeing the truths of their contexts, and (4) taking care of oneself.