Distributed Leadership in Schools with “Emergent Bilingual Leadership Teams” for Collaborative Decision Making

The case study presented in this chapter comes from a project called the City University of New York–New York State Initiative for Emergent Bilinguals (CUNY–NYSIEB), a project involving 66 schools across the state. All of the participating schools were required to form an “Emergent Bilingual Leadership Team” (EBLT), a school-based leadership group comprising the school principal, other key administrators, bilingual and English as a new language (ENL) teachers, general education teachers, skill and content specialists, special education teachers, and parents/families of emergent bilinguals. The first case presented in this chapter is an elementary school in Queens serving a very diverse student population in an ENL program, and the second is a middle school in the Bronx where most emergent bilinguals are Latinxs and speakers of Spanish. In both schools, EBLT teachers studied the schools’ services to emergent bilinguals, created a plan to improve their instruction and programs, and worked on the plan’s implementation. This chapter describes how the EBLTs in both schools proved to be transformative.