ABSTRACT
Meeting the educational needs of emergent bilingual students requires that school principals bring educators with expertise in bilingual education and language learning into the school's leadership structure. This chapter describes a distributed leadership structure that CUNY-NYSIEB (City University of New York-New York State Initiative on Emergent Bilinguals) schools put in place called the “Emergent Bilingual Leadership Team” (EBLT), offering teachers who work directly with emergent bilinguals the ability to lead schoolwide improvement efforts for servicing these students. It begins by contextualizing the importance of distributed leadership in schools and describes how CUNY-NYSIEB worked with the newly formed EBLTs in participating schools. We then present an example of a CUNY-NYSIEB school whose EBLT members, primarily teachers and students, guided changes in the school's programming and instruction, and thereby improved relationships with students and families. The chapter ends with a reflection on the important role of school principals in enacting distributed leadership and includes resources for schools interested in creating EBLTs in support of their emergent bilingual students.
