This piece from Olivia Eastwood embodies the spirit of our work with the Goyen Literacy Fellowship and Teachers Teach Teachers. This is what our work is all about: teachers learning from other teachers, tinkering and refining the work in their own classrooms, and then helping their colleagues make similar shifts.

It’s easy to dismiss this model as “not scalable” (and to be sure it’s not particularly efficient or glamourous). But, at least in my experience, relational organizing and teacher leaders (like Olivia) are more likely to drive durable, sustaining instructional change than mandates from on high.