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The purpose of this paper is to explore how school principals influenced or controlled leadership coaches working with assistant principals in urban secondary schools.

This longitudinal qualitative case study drew upon semi-structured interviews and program documents obtained from participants in a university-based leadership coaching program across three academic years. The study included 22 total participants, including ten assistant principals, nine leadership coaches, and three program staff.

A thematic analysis of the data produced three themes. First, principals controlled coaches’ work with assistant principals both directly and indirectly. Second, the extent of principal control influenced how coaches developed a confidential relationship with the assistant principals and what strategies they used to preserve the confidential nature of the coaching relationship. Third, the focus of the coaching support evolved in response to the assignment of responsibilities and duties to the assistant principals, which were largely outside the assistant principal and leadership coach’s control. The absence of alignment between coaching priorities and leadership responsibilities frustrated coaches.

The findings from this study make two significant empirical contributions to the literature. First, the study provides critical new insights about the extent to which politics generated by principals and administrative teams may influence the work of leadership coaches. Second, the study contributes to the sparse literature about leadership coaching for assistant principals, particularly those working in secondary school settings in the USA.

In this chapter, I trace instances of meaning-making through fragments of two interviews. Using restorying and the construction of parallel stories to interpret resonances across the participants' stories and my own stories of experience, I draw strong personal connections with elements of each semi-structured interview. In a revisitation of the narrative threads of identity, community, and change, the image of Black women as literacy educators who co-construct meaning in and out of the classroom is rendered.

Following the mass closing of US schools during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020, the authors noted an increase in discourse among literacy teachers and literacy coaches on social media platforms. Over a period of 9 months, the authors followed the interactions and work of social media scholars on the Twitter platform. In reflecting on Craig's (1995; Craig, Curtis, Kelly, Martindell, & Perez, 2020) illustrative pillars of knowledge communities and Brock's work on black cyberculture, we use narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990) to: (1) explore the elements of social media scholarship and (2) reflect on how active engagement in social media scholarship aids in the development of online knowledge communities that amplify and sustain the work of black womxn scholars.

Purpose – To identify effective literacy instructional strategies and methods based on assessment. Also, to provide information on literacy experts that teachers may seek advice from as they work with striving readers.

Approach – A review of literature and the research on teaching striving readers were examined.

Practical implications – Reading is an important determining factor in efficacious learning and overall literacy; students must possess the necessary literacy skills to become successful and productive citizens in an information age. Throughout the chapter, a striving reader is presented while offering the reader an authentic example of a striving reader. The strategies, methods, and experts offer best practices; these will enhance the student(s) literacy skills.

Originality/value of paper – Educators utilizing the information provided in this chapter will be enhanced in their ability to effectively teach their students.

Successful implementation of Response to Intervention frameworks in schools requires general and special education teachers to have well-integrated knowledge bases for providing instruction and intervention in reading and behavior. Implementation-focused approaches to changing teacher behavior, favored traditionally in special education, however, are unlikely to help teachers acquire such knowledge. In this chapter, we discuss the knowledge and practice that defines expert teachers in reading and behavior and how such expertise might be achieved through practice-focused approaches to initial teacher education and professional development.

The purpose of this work is to describe the current sociopolitical context and complex consequences surrounding elementary literacy education in one Midwestern US state and consider how power works through language.

Using qualitative methods and critical discourse analysis as a theory and method, surveys and interview data from teachers, administrators and parents, policy documents and other artifacts were analyzed and described to explain the sociopolitical climate.

Using Fairclough (2015) and Gee’s (2015) tools, the authors identified the discourses of deficiency, efficiency and gatekeeping in the data. Foucault’s ideas about governmentality and regimes of truth are used to explain the ways teachers took up the policies and resisted them.

The authors argue that a new testing regime is on the move, and more unity and critique by elementary and secondary teachers and administrators will be important for restoring and sustaining quality literacy instruction and decision-making in all classrooms.

Continued research is needed to understand how particular reading assessments exacerbate and perpetuate the ranking and sorting in schools and the loss and struggle children face when they are denied literacy experiences that validate their lives outside of school and give meaning and purpose to reading in school.

As the reality for secondary education language arts teachers begins to shift to a more restrictive curriculum, a loss of academic freedom and frequent testing, the authors see an opportunity for new professional alliances to form in support of a complex theory of literacy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how school leaders use high-stakes teacher evaluation to improve and, if necessary, remove low-performing teachers in their schools. It explores how cognitive, relational and organizational factors play a role in shaping the way school leaders implement teacher evaluation.

Using a database of in-depth interviews with 17 principals and assistant principals, this study uses cross-case comparisons to examine one district’s efforts to improve the performance of low-performing teachers through evaluation.

School leaders’ framing of teacher performance and their efforts to improve instruction reveal the cognitive, relational and organizational aspects of working with low-performing teachers and, if necessary, pursuing removal. Notably, this study found that cognitive and relational factors were important in school leaders’ teacher improvement efforts, but organizational factors were most salient when attempting to remove teachers.

Because evaluating and developing teachers has become such an important aspect of school leaders’ day to day work, this study suggests that school leaders could benefit from more assistance from district personnel and that preparation programs should build in opportunities for aspiring leaders to learn more about their role as evaluators.

The success or failure of teacher evaluation systems largely hinges on school leaders, yet there is scant research on how school leaders make decisions to develop and remove low-performing teachers. This study sheds light on the central role school leaders play in implementing high-stakes teacher evaluation.

The purpose of this study was to identify if and how K–6 teachers perceive that their literacy instructional coaches influence their writing teaching.

The authors employed a parallel convergent mixed-methods design with survey data. The authors used thematic analysis to identify patterns within short-answer responses.

K–6 teachers receive little literacy coaching specific to writing. However, when they do receive coaching, they believe it benefits their writing instruction. Sustained coaching through the coaching cycle, frequent collaborations, and support with writing instructional resources and strategies were reported as the most influential writing coaching practices.

Sample size was a limitation to this study. Of the 66 participants, 41 (62%) completed the entire survey.

This research provides coaches with valuable insights about coaching practices that teachers find to be the most effective in influencing their writing instruction. The increase in teachers' competence in writing instruction due to coaching provides evidence to administrators and stakeholders that coaching in writing is an area in need of attention.

This study adds to research specific to the coaching of writing within the K–6 context, which currently is sparse.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an account of the coaching element that was included in an existing graduate literacy course and to describe the responses of experienced and less‐experienced teachers as they began to add collaborative peer coaching to their teaching identities.

Data collected included teachers’ coaching logs and written reflections on the coaching experience, and field notes taken by a professor. Data were analysed qualitatively through open coding. Initially, the authors read data individually and coded them by what they perceived to be the teachers’ coaching moves. Separately, they developed lists of codes and then reviewed coding lists to work through idiosyncratic data, collapse codes, align their language.

The authors identified three overarching and multi‐faceted moves that the coaching teachers made as they worked with partner teachers. They found that the teachers: used restraint; focused on partner teacher's needs; and provided opportunities for classroom observations and demonstrations.

Due to budget cuts, district coaching initiatives are being down‐sized. With fewer literacy coaches available, the authors believe that classroom teachers would benefit from learning about how to support each another as peer coaches.

Teachers’ coaching moves, along with the curricular conversations engendered by them, created a culture of learning based on reflection and dialogue between coaching and partner teachers.

Very few studies have been conducted on peer coaching or have addressed the process by which teachers enrolled in graduate programs learned how to engage in collaborative peer coaching.