If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

-John Quincy Adams

The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders and continually develops them.

-John Maxwell

My hope is that my students remember me as the teacher who expects them to expect themselves to lead.

-Taura Simmons

This year, in an effort to improve student outcomes for newcomers, I have given attention to helping them not only with integrating into the classroom, but in integrating into the fabric of our school culture. Usually, this is something that I work on at a later point with developing language learners. However, I feel that by focusing on this at the onset of the newcomer experience, students will engage at a deeper level than just academics. My hope has to build a stronger sense of self-efficacy and promote students' self-advocacy skills earlier so that students take responsibility for their middle years education earlier. This has had the impact of improving student outcomes and achievement as evidenced by increased and improved quality of collegiate interactions among students with their peers, and increased and improved self-advocacy and outreach. For example, a hispanic student outpaced his literacy goals by half a year as evidenced by his i-Ready MoY and EoY performance and an Arabic student improved her literacy skills by accelerating her oral language skills through a comprehensive phonics practice and self-advocated interactions with the teacher. Students consider themselves COUGARS instead of remaining on the outskirts for their middle school years and it has improved the quality of their student-teacher and student-peer interactions.

I have organized a PLT of ESL teachers --NorthEast Regional Dynamic Learning Team -- who synergize regularly, collaborating to improve teacher instruction and assessment, increase student academic English language acquisition, and to decrease the academic gap between ELs and their native-speaking peers. Our team is recognized by the District, which seeks our expertise and input regularly when they need teacher input or leadership. Our members, including myself, are called upon to facilitate PD, mentor peers, and as a model for other PLTs. The Department administration uses our PLT as a think tank when they need to understand and gauge teachers' needs in the field. Most of us is also involved in the District curriculum overhaul as writers or pilot teachers. We collaborate using Google apps for Education and through email, group chat, WhatsApp, and Twitter as necessary to achieve our goals. We have been adaptive to the changes necessitated in this -hopefully coming to a close - day and age of CoVid-19 and have switched our meeting platform from Zoom to Google Meet. We house shared information within a team folder in Google Drive and a team-maintained Google Classroom and have expanded our presence to Twitter with the #ESL_DynamicLearning.