In July 2025, I co-facilitated our summer Teacher Institute for twelve educators. In the middle of three wonderful and intensive days of adult learning, I found myself surrounded instead by high school students, waiting with amused patience as I struggled with the Chipotle app. I owed them each a burrito because they had volunteered to spend their lunch hour with our educator participants, sharing their expertise with our eager adult learners.

Summers at WordPowered are full of young people. Our Teens in Print program team leads the Summer Journalism Institute, a six-week full-time program for high school students to write articles and create multimedia projects like a podcast, magazine, or video. For one of these weeks, our Collaborative Coaching team invites educators into this space for their own learning in our Teacher Institute, Empowering Writing Instruction.

Educators from across the Boston area come together to learn, discuss, and share ideas about authentic writing instruction that centers student voice and agency. More than just learning about it in theory, they also get to see it happening in real time, in the classrooms next door. Our participants observed lessons on writing hooks and on choosing topics for news research, chatted with students about what they were working on, and spent time in our own classroom space connecting what they observed to our framework and their own practice.

Throughout the year, our coaches partnered directly with school and program teams, including Melvin H. King Schools, Boston International and Newcomers Academy (BINcA), the St. Stephen’s Youth Program (SSYP), City Arts and Sciences Academy of Lynn, 826 Boston, and Everett High School — supporting administrators and educators, co-developing strategies, providing and practicing empowering literacy practices, and leading professional development series reaching entire departments. Partner feedback captured the impact of this work:

Melvin H. King Schools

• Focus: Increased leadership capacity, stronger coaching and observation practices, improved collaboration, and greater confidence in fostering equitable, high-quality reading, writing, and discussion instruction across the school.

Lowell Public Schools:

• Focus: Equitable grading practices and policies; supporting school-wide policy change

St. Stephen’s Youth Programs (SSYP)

• Focus: Strengthen staff capacity to build sustainable systems for data collection, evaluation, and continuous improvement to help SSYP use youth and family feedback to drive program decisions.

City Arts and Sciences Academy of Lynn

• Focus: Intensive, individualized coaching for two teachers (one a first-year educator and the other an experienced teacher transitioning into ELA and humanities instruction) through collaborative planning, classroom observation, and ongoing reflection.

826 Boston

• Focus: A year-long professional learning series that strengthened staff capacity to teach writing through equitable, student-centered practices on topics including empowering writing instruction, lesson design, neurodiversity, and AI literacy.

Everett High School

• Focus: Helping teachers across disciplines integrate high-impact literacy strategies into their instruction by building shared approaches to writing and reading across classrooms, educators strengthened students’ critical thinking and independent learning.