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Abstract
Addressing the unique biliteracy academic development needs of emergent bilingual learners is an increasingly prevalent challenge confronting many school district leaders in the United States. This article profiles how one lead instructional coach and her instructional improvement team colleagues working in a high diversity urban high school employed a design research methodological approach anchored in the design-based school improvement literature to: 1) investigate the underlying root causes of emergent bilingual students’ persistent learning deficiencies; and 2) develop and implement a design-based professional development intervention program for their campus’s secondary educators to address teachers’ pedagogical deficit thinking and refocus their team-centered instructional planning and classroom teaching practices. Literature-supported insights derived from an analysis of collective design-based instructional improvement efforts completed by change agent leaders in the urban high school case situation are presented and discussed within three areas: 1) addressing the unique academic development needs of emergent bilingual learners in high diversity school districts; 2) developing secondary teachers’ multilingual, cross-curricular instructional planning capacities through direct immersion in authentic data teaming; and 3) nurturing school-wide distributed leadership cultures of academic success for emergent bilingual learners in secondary campuses anchored in dual language instructional planning and professional learning community–embedded coaching teams. Finally, a set of design principles derived from the case study is presented that may be of practical use to school leaders interested in exploring innovative intervention solutions to persistent instructional improvement challenges associated with closing the achievement gaps for diverse learners in their urban school districts.