A Special Listen: The Power of Coaching Teachers
BEING Trans
Lemonada Media
3.4 • 716 Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2025
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Great teaching changes lives, but even the best teachers need support. In this episode, we highlight a bright spot in New York City Public Schools where students achieved remarkable gains in reading proficiency. To uncover what led to these results, host Gloria Riviera speaks with Teaching Lab CEO Sarah Johnson and explores how investing in teachers can transform classrooms, boost student learning, and create a ripple effect of success. You’ll also hear from a New York City teacher and his teaching coach about what coaching looks like in practice – and the tangible impact it has in the classroom.
This episode is created in partnership with Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies.
Learn more about Teaching Lab at teachinglab.org.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, it's me, Steve Burns, and I'm so glad you're here because you and I go way back, right? |
| 0:06.6 | Yeah. And look at us now. Like, we're all grown up. We've got this new podcast where we talk about all this grown-up stuff. |
| 0:12.5 | And there's special guests like Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Nye, but for the most part, it's about you. |
| 0:19.9 | I mean, it's always been about you. |
| 0:21.9 | From Lemonada Media, alive with Steve Burns is coming September 17th, |
| 0:25.6 | wherever you get your podcasts, or you can watch every episode on YouTube. |
| 0:33.3 | Lemonada. |
| 0:33.8 | Yeah. This last year. This past year, something really extraordinary happened in New York City schools. |
| 0:58.4 | As a result of a beautiful citywide initiative called NYC Reeds, the whole city |
| 1:03.8 | improved by 7.2 percentage points in literacy on the standardized state assessments, and in teaching |
| 1:10.2 | lab schools, we saw a 10.2% |
| 1:13.0 | improvement. And three percentage points, that difference is a significant difference. That's Sarah |
| 1:19.4 | Johnson, CEO of Teaching Lab. Sarah has worked closely with New York City public schools on literacy. |
| 1:27.2 | That 10 percentage point jump is a big deal. |
| 1:31.0 | Progress in past years was tiny in comparison. |
| 1:34.3 | And actually, the year prior, Sarah says, reading outcomes had actually declined. |
| 1:39.4 | NYC Reads incorporates a new curriculum and intensive teacher coaching. That coaching is key. |
| 1:47.2 | Without evidence-based coaching, you do not see those improvements. We engage in this do whatever |
| 1:51.9 | it takes approach, where we're looking at data, we're looking at the curriculum, we're supporting |
| 1:55.5 | teachers to practice, and we're supporting them to figure out what to do the next day, sometimes the next hour that they're teaching. |
| 2:04.2 | So what we say at Teaching Lab is you've got to believe in the whole teacher if you really want to believe in the whole student. |
| 2:10.5 | One of the biggest factors influencing how well students do in school is their teacher. |
... |
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