Wrapping Up

In the urgency to ensure they cover curriculum standards, teachers sometimes forget they are a part of the story and development of every student’s future. As they work with students every day, educators need reminders that what they do right now matters. We have seen firsthand how what they do right now affects students’ formative development in ways that significantly impact cognitive and behavioral patterns and habits. So, as they work on ensuring students acquire grade-level literacy skills, it’s important to recognize how the many problems and obstacles teachers face will challenge them. Remember, every challenge is a stepping-stone for change, and every day, teachers build a pathway for each student’s future. Stay inspired—even when things feel challenging—believe that every day can make a positive impact. Be careful not to give in to the discouraging issues and challenges you will confront. They are real, and they are difficult to overcome. But, as we begin this book on leadership, you must recognize that every challenge is an opportunity.

CHAPTER 1

Confronting the Challenges of Leading Literacy

The purpose of this series is to assert a singular, unified commitment: every teacher is a literacy teacher. This goal (and the title of our series) stems from three factors that you—as a leader in your school—likely already know: (1) students often struggle with reading and writing (Hussar et al., 2020); (2) gaps in reading and writing skills are often amplified among students from poverty (Jensen, 2019); and (3) many content-area teachers at the secondary level have little or no background in how to teach reading and writing skills. These factors represent long-standing concerns in education and present genuine challenges for leaders as they seek to reinvent how they support teacher teams’ collaborative practices and instruction to profoundly affect student acquisition of high-level literacy skills.

We know from experience that changes leaders institute to address these issues will be difficult. Any teacher who has taken on the work to implement the PLC process and culture knows change is hard. But what all who have undertaken this journey also know is change is necessary to overcome inequities of learning and ensure learning for all. Before you begin using this book to inform your approach to leading the charge for literacy improvement in your school, it is important that we be upfront about some of the challenges we’ve confronted in our work to implement instructional changes and literacy strategies across a variety of academic disciplines. Some of these challenges we didn’t expect, and they required creative approaches to sustain successful change. Some challenges connected more directly with long-standing mindsets teachers have about teaching and learning, and, as such, we did anticipate them. Because they involved breaking with wellestablished conventions, such known challenges required leading with purpose and