Transforming Instructional Leadership
Every school has a story. These case studies spotlight the transformational journeys of instructional leaders and teams who partnered with Sarah to bring clarity, focus, and renewed energy to their professional learning.
The results? More confident educators and thriving students.
Case Studies from the Field
4 Case Studies from Instructional Leaders in Action
“I wholeheartedly and without reservation recommend Confianza to other districts and educators. Confianza’s mission is embodied in Sarah’s expertise, individualized approach and passionate commitment to developing the capacity and expertise of everyone involved. Her guidance is truly invaluable.”
Presented by Becky Bueno, MLL Coordinator
case studY: Paul cuffee school, providence, RI
Sarah, it goes without saying, your guidance has continued to make a difference in how I work and learn alongside teachers, families and school leaders. Gracias!!"
Sarah and her team took a collaborative and integrated approach to provide a variety of professional development opportunities, including one-on-one and two-on-one coaching, professional learning communities, book studies and insight workshops. These initiatives offered valuable opportunities to gain awareness of best practices and effective strategies that positively impact multilingual learners at all levels.
What made this partnership particularly valuable and effective was the individualized attention Sarah and her team devoted to tailoring their approach, ensuring that the goals we set as a team were carefully developed and implemented.
The high-quality, hands-on methods used by Sarah and her team resulted in a significant increase in the skills, dispositions, and knowledge of both students and teachers. The most notable impact was the way teachers who participated in the program shifted their practices toward a learner-centered and reflective approach. This transformation fostered an environment of open, honest collaboration where risk-taking was encouraged and diverse ideas and experiences were valued.
"From my first session with Sarah, I could tell that she shared my passion for professional development as a tool for growing educator practice and ultimately improving student outcomes.
Presented by Anabel Schmelz, Principal
Most notably, our kids are thriving. We've seen visible growth in our MLL students in reading & math. We've seen our MLL students happily participating in whole class discussions and activities as we've scaffolded the activities to ensure their success."
After my initial consultation, I was eager to bring Confianza's expertise to our school community. They truly listened and understood the needs of our educators and students. They crafted a proposal that echoed our school's needs: leader and teacher development in Tier 1 instruction that engages all students, especially our multilingual learners.
Over the summer, our leader team enrolled in the Language Lens Academy—a digital resource that expanded our leader toolkit—from the Domain Analysis Coaching Tool to Paraphrasing Partners (add any other resource we used!). Throughout our Language Lens for Content Classrooms Book Club and referring to the Language Lens Academy, my leader team was ready to empower teachers to improve Tier 1 instruction.
Sarah and her team then facilitated a full-day PD session with our whole staff, which revolved around the central ideas uncovered in our book club. They shared incredible resources with our staff and modeled what it looked like to be an excellent teacher for language learners.
In the Fall, they checked in with us often to see how implementation was going. They supported us in facilitating leader walkthroughs and further teacher professional development to continue our work with the Language Lens. We have since enrolled more teachers in the Language Lens Academy. With many of our staff members participating in the program, we are building a shared vocabulary and expertise in how we support our language learners.
As our students thrive, we celebrate our teachers and leaders for all the progress we've made in the last two years. We are so thankful for Confianza's support. They truly listened to and nurtured our vision and empowered us to make meaningful changes for our students.
case studY: growing up green, new york CITy, NY
Presented by Jenn Noorjanian and the ELE Coaching Team
case studY: Milford Public Schools, MA
"We now have an effective coaching structure we can bring to each school year...Confianza has propelled us forward. Although we might sometimes feel the headwind‒ the challenges of public education ‒ opposing us, we now have the tools and the systems to coach each other along the way."
Eight Milford English Learner department leaders log onto Zoom monthly for an hour of professional learning. How effective can 10 hours across 10 school months be? Can a collective 10 hours of professional team learning and coaching advance leadership knowledge and shift individual practices to impact student learning and growth significantly? It may sound like an unattainable task. Yet, a team of English learner education (ELE) leaders diligently sought to learn from one another’s expertise. They were guided by Confianza experts, resulting in a gradual adaptive change within the EL department leadership, which was accelerated due to the ELE leaders’ passion for learning and their coaching of one another. Ten hours of tapping into each team member's expertise, observing the leadership in their colleagues’ building contexts, and co-coaching each other through the systems of the department’s roles and responsibilities has built an ELE leadership team that appreciates one another, calls on each other in times of needed trusted assistance, builds horizontal and vertical cohesion and alignment of processes at the district level, and creates a culture of collaboration and high expectations of shared responsibility. Ten hours.
Milford Public Schools has benefited from Sarah’s leadership for multiple years. Sarah believes in practical professional development that ensures that the teachers and coaches she trains have what they need to apply new learnings into practice (Ottow, 2023). As we approached the school year 2023-2024, we hoped Confianza could facilitate coaching among and between our ELE leaders. We acknowledged that deeper collaboration among the leadership team would set ourselves, our teachers, and our students up for more success (Ottow, 2023).
Sarah paired our ELE team members to coach one another...The coaching included site visits to each other’s respective schools, co-coaching meetings, and coaching debriefs within our Confianza consult. We remained with the same ELE team member for the first half of the school year to build relationships and provide for ongoing discussions and coaching. Throughout this time, Sarah encouraged us to discuss what was already working at our schools and reflect on the next steps for growth (Ottow, 2023).
Discussing a topic with an ELE team member working in a different school in the district allowed the EL Coordinators to vertically align certain procedures, shift our perspectives at times, and make connections between schools, especially when students transition from one school to the next. With Sarah and her team's support close at hand, we discovered that professional development is more than an event; it is a habit of mind that helps build knowledge and capacity among our leadership, coaches, and teaching teams (Ottow, 2023). In addition, coaching one another has strengthened our skill set as instructional coaches during observations and debriefs.
And so—what can a collective 10 hours accomplish? Under the careful guidance and expertise of Sarah and the Confianza team, it accomplished much more than we expected at the beginning of our work together. Not only did we continue our extended project of vertical alignment of policies and programming through our PreK-12 program, but we also gained a deeper appreciation for colleagues’ work. We coached each other through areas of struggle and, at times, commiserated when our struggles mirrored each other’s. We continued to build a mutual responsibility for our students’ educational journeys by planning for grade-level hand-offs and communicating our shared knowledge of students as they progress through our school system. By coaching and being coached by ELE leaders at different schools, we learned about grade-level practices we weren’t familiar with, building our capacity for future opportunities as district-wide ELE leaders.
"The biggest value is that our teachers are having the same conversation now, not only within the elementary school but across the school."
Presented by Alina Guzganu, EAL Coordinator and Courtney Hughes, PYP Coordinator
The feedback you gave us as a consultant in your post-visit report was by far the most thorough and helpful feedback I’ve ever received from any consultant. Each person's next steps were so clear. I knew exactly what my next steps were as a coordinator based on our work together."
There are many values of working with Sarah and Confianza. You’ve really helped us to create some common language and some common goals around language objectives, which tends to get— I don’t know why—left up to everybody’s own idea of what it is. So having this real concrete tool for lesson planning that we can use, and having teachers discuss and think about the language that we’re asking kids to use has been really powerful for us as a school.
I like the fact that we could have open communication about the good, the bad, and the ugly, and you always had resources at hand. You always did things so naturally and were so knowledgeable, able to support conversations across many domains, many languages, and many subject areas. All the teachers felt like you were a specialist in their own domain, and that was very valuable to me.
In terms of results that we've seen since our work in October, I would say teachers are using the tool that you've created for us. We've even added to it or changed it a little bit to fit our needs with your support. The fact that grades one to five—every grade level—is now using this tool and becoming more comfortable with it is a huge result for us. In terms of coaching and teaching, our classroom teachers are starting to look at our EAL specialists more in the coaching role, and our EAL specialists are starting to feel empowered by that, leading meetings and really taking on that leadership position we want them to take on. Those are two big results that we're happy with.
I think people are now more open to conversations related to language objectives, and we all speak the same language. This has led to an increased awareness of how we teach and how we do things. I also love the fact that we actually unpacked an idea, tried to look at it from different angles, and got the most out of it. It was really helpful to have these language planning tools and use them across the curriculum.
It surprised me that you could work with the early learning center, then the elementary school, and then move to the secondary school all in one week. That was surprising. I had a special moment when I understood that there are all kinds of resources out there, but you really have to be able to synthesize, dissect, and select the kind of information that best meets your needs. That’s why we need a consultant—there are all kinds of resources out there, easily accessible, but it’s not that easy to make the right choice.
Something else that surprised me was the openness and willingness of our teachers to share where they are with you, and how you were able to have different resources available because every grade level had a different idea of what they wanted to do. It was very customized, and there was always a resource at the tip of your hat. You would say, "Oh, let me show you this," or "Let's look at this," or "Let's try this together," and that was so cool to see. I think we were hungry for that.
Another thing that surprised me was that one grade level in particular asked you to come in and then asked all of us to come in and watch a lesson they had co-planned together, asking us to give feedback. That was a big step, and it was really great.
I think people should know that whatever you have to offer is not a fixed program—it’s fluid and customized to meet specific needs. That’s very special. It’s not like you have a program that you come in and promote as the only way to be successful. Instead, we’re trying to understand what we’re doing well, what we need to address, and how to make improvements with your guidance.
You took the time to get to know us as a school, and your approach was very kind and caring. That led to people opening up about what we need.
case studY: american international school of bucharest, romania
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Meet Sarah b. ottow,
founder of Confianza
I’ve worked with thousands of leaders, teachers and coaches across the country and globe, helping them bridge the gap between research-based strategies and real-world application. My work goes beyond theory—it's about actionable, high-impact learning experiences that help educators lead with clarity and create engaging, learner-centered classrooms and professional learning culture.
I believe that lasting change comes from within and my mission is to equip leaders and all educators with the knowledge, tools and confidence to make that change happen.
With 25+ years in education and leadership coaching, I help schools and districts build confidence, strengthen leadership and create lasting change for students.
More About My Experience
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