By: David Mendez, TMC Deputy Director
As a new school year begins, schools are once again investing time and resources in professional learning, coaching, and other supports that strengthen educators’ ability to serve students with disabilities and multilingual learners.
But one question matters beyond the first training or workshop: What helps strong inclusive practices actually last?
For me, and for TMC, that question has increasingly shifted the conversation from supporting individual educators to building the internal capacity schools need to sustain strong practice over time.
Leadership Starts with Staying Close to Students
My experience as a classroom teacher has shaped how I think about education leadership. Teaching gave me the opportunity to be close to students every day—something I believe can easily be lost as school leaders move further from the classroom and prioritize school-wide systems.
Recently, our team was thinking about how we could better understand what our partner schools and districts actually need from us. We realized that much of the information we were gathering came from school and district leaders, teachers, and staff, while we weren’t consistently asking students how they were experiencing inclusion and instruction.
That was an important reminder for me: leadership cannot become so focused on systems that we lose sight of the students those systems are meant to serve.
The strongest leaders I’ve worked with are willing to roll up their sleeves and “get after it” with their staff. They are willing to sit down during kindergarten circle time and continue building relationships with students. Strong leaders join a co-planning meeting between special education and general education staff, modeling a lesson for a teacher working through differentiation, or stepping into a classroom during a challenging behavioral moment to observe, support, and debrief with the educator afterward.
Instructional coaching needs to be a priority for leaders. And if we expect leaders to coach and develop their teams well, they need support and coaching themselves.
Why School Leaders Matter
School leaders shape many of the conditions that allow strong practice to last. They influence whether educators have time to collaborate, whether coaching becomes part of everyday professional learning, and whether inclusive practice becomes embedded school-wide rather than dependent on individual educators.
This thinking is also shaping TMC’s evolving approach. We are placing greater emphasis on building leaders’ coaching capacity while continuing to provide training, resources, and targeted support to classroom educators and paraeducators.
The goal is not to move support away from teaching staff but to strengthen capacity within schools while continuing to provide the support both teachers and leaders need.
Inclusion Is Not Another Initiative
Part of strong leadership is recognizing that inclusion does not need to become another standalone priority competing for staff attention. Inclusive practices are good teaching practices.
In our work with schools, we’ve seen leaders embed inclusion into the instruction, systems, and culture they are already working to strengthen.
That is where leadership matters. Leaders set expectations for how educators collaborate, how instructional practice is supported, and how schools respond when students and staff need something different. When inclusion becomes part of those everyday decisions, it becomes part of how a school operates rather than something separate from its day-to-day work.
What Sustainable Capacity Looks Like
At TMC, our goal is to support leaders and educators in creating the systems, practices, and mindsets that foster academic growth, belonging, and opportunity for students who are furthest from educational justice. Building that capacity takes more than a single training or coaching session. It requires strong instructional leadership, collaboration among educators and staff and support that responds to what each school actually needs.
This work cannot be done in isolation. Strong practice lasts when educators and leaders have time to collaborate, people to learn alongside, and coaching that meets them where they are. That is true for teachers, and it is just as true for the leaders who support them.
At TMC, we are committed to walking alongside educators to support them in building the systems and mindsets that allow strong inclusive practice to last.