After six years of teaching high school science, I moved to a middle school teaching position and a year later stepped into the role of department lead. In my new science department, most of us were inexperienced in one way or another — one of my colleagues had only taught remotely, one was new to public school, one was new to teaching science, and I was still new to middle school. I had the most experience teaching to the NGSS standards, but I was still unsure how to lead my new department. I wanted to bring our team together to support each other.

I had previously taught at a charter school, where our network leaders provided strong direction to site-based leaders by creating clear priorities and even setting meeting agendas. Moving to a larger district without a focus for science or professional learning, I needed help organizing my department meetings across the school year to build toward a common goal. I needed help leveling up my role as a teacher leader.

At every stage of my teaching career, I’d never had a hard time finding high quality professional development (PD) to support my classroom teaching. But it wasn’t as easy to find PD for my role as a teacher leader. How could I learn the skills to be a good department lead? What spaces are there for teachers to collaborate around improving their leadership practice? The answer for me was finding a leadership coach through the Knowles Teacher Initiative.

Setting a team direction

My Knowles coach, Sarah, is an experienced high school biology teacher who designs and leads professional learning for teachers. She’s coached new teachers before, and she was excited to focus our coaching relationship on my leadership practice.

I wanted my science team to feel like we were doing something important and meaningful together, so I started by interviewing each teacher in my department to understand their priorities for our science teaching. The overall theme was that my team wanted to provide students with more hands-on, inquiry-driven science experiences to help students see that science class was relevant and important to them.

At the start of the year I worked with Sarah to build a professional learning arc for my department — like a unit plan for adult learning that would focus our team’s collaboration across the year. We started by crafting a high-level goal to meet the learning needs of the team. We framed this goal as growing our students’ perceptions of themselves as doers of science. Then we broke that goal into individual objectives for each month of the year, so that the monthly objectives could build together toward our overall goal.

Structuring department meeting time

Once Sarah and I developed a professional learning arc, we then zoomed into my facilitation of department meetings. I wanted to be sure I was structuring our monthly meetings so that team members felt heard, safe, and included. I worked with Sarah to create a short feedback form that would provide data at the end of each meeting to help me reflect and plan next steps. Key question on that feedback form included: Did we meet the meeting objective? Was this a good use of our time? What should we do next time? What else do you want me to know?

For the most part, team members responded that our meetings were a good use of time, but they also suggested new directions and reminded me of logistics we needed to address at each unique point in the school year — from the end of a marking period to field trip planning. I was able to build on what was working while letting go of things that weren’t, all while incorporating new directions people wanted to go in. My team knew I was carefully analyzing their responses and incorporating them into future meeting agendas, which led to a growing sense of trust. As a result of my decision to take time outside of our meetings to create thoughtfully designed meeting agendas that responded to team needs, my team seemed more willing to approach meetings as productive and worthwhile.

Over time and with Sarah’s continued support, my department has achieved some amazing accomplishments together:

• Creating common assessments for each grade level aligned to NGSS
• Collecting and analyzing student assessment data to identify our instructional strengths and weaknesses
• Co-constructing plans for vertical alignment in how we teach the NGSS Science and Engineering Practices
• Organizing a science field trip at each grade level
• Taking turns leading demonstrations for each other, analyzing the underlying phenomena, and reflecting on how to use demos to spark student wonder.

While it’s not common at my school for teachers of the same course to plan together, it’s a practice we maintain in our department. Within each course, the curriculum is aligned so that if a 6th grader is moved from one colleague’s class to mine, the content will be the same. Our team’s sense of togetherness was further strengthened when we all attended the California Association of Science Teachers (CASE) conference in November 2024.

Having a coach in my corner

Sarah has been my leadership coach for two years now, and we’re about to start our third year. Together we have found a sustainable flow to our coaching relationship, meeting about once or twice per month. We meet during my prep period before a monthly department meeting to plan the agenda, then again after the department meeting to review feedback and plan next steps. Sarah helps me analyze data and turn the feedback into new opportunities for my team.

For me, Sarah served as someone from outside my school context who could provide a fresh lens. This new perspective also allows me to be honest, let my guard down, and reveal insecurities about how I am feeling about my role. She is always understanding of my mental state and meets me where I am. I sometimes come to our meetings exhausted after a day of teaching, and it’s a relief to have a collaborator when I’m already fried. Usually, Sarah lets me come to my own conclusions as we review data and plan next steps. But, if I get really stuck, she’ll offer her perspective and experience, other resources she knows about, or help me brainstorm on the spot. She listens carefully and uses my stories and meeting data to learn about my colleagues and offer advice on how to meet their needs.

Each time I meet with Sarah, it gets easier and easier to plan responsively for my department. Some of the key ideas that have guided my work as a department lead are:

• Developing a structure, but also a willingness to hold it loosely
• Responding to and differentiating for team members’ learning needs and interests
• Recognizing that everyone is an expert at something, giving everyone opportunity to bring their expertise

Focusing my professional learning on my teacher leadership is an intellectually stimulating puzzle that keeps me in the classroom and in my school. I hope that frustrated teacher leaders might consider finding a mentor or coach as a thought partner to support them in what can be emotionally exhausting work. Sometimes, looking at negative meeting feedback is demoralizing, but it’s a lot easier when you have a coach in your corner who can shine a new light on it, and see it as an opportunity to grow and improve your leadership practice.