ELL Teacher Leadership in Action: The SWEL Model

The School-Wide English Learning (SWEL) initiative is a groundbreaking teacher leadership model originally developed by a team of ELL researchers at Hamline University, including Dr. Michelle Benegas, Dr. Ann Mabbott, and Dr. Amy Stolpestad. The initiative, which started through a federal grant, is now run by TESOL International Association. It has evolved into a TESOL workshop series, offered in-person or online. A robust professional learning community has also developed around the project.

In addition, Dr. Benegas and her colleague Dr. Stolpestad have published a book about SWEL called Teacher Leadership for School-Wide English Learning. They are currently working on the second edition to be published in March, 2025. This article, based on an interview with Dr. Benegas, tells the story of how SWEL came to be and describes how it is empowering ELL educators across the country.

SWEL: The Origin Story

When Dr. Michelle Benegas was in the early years of her doctoral program, she noticed a familiar topic that kept coming up in her conversations with educators and legislators: many classroom teachers were not prepared to teach English language learners (ELLs). At the time, Minnesota had more refugees than any other state due to secondary migration, but very few educators were prepared to teach them.

Dr. Benegas, who is a former high school ESL teacher, began thinking deeply about how to increase all teachers' capacity to serve ELLs. She also reflected on the predominant model of professional development that is still widespread today: "sit and get" (also called "one and done"), where administrators hire someone from outside of the district to deliver professional development on a particular topic. "The joke in the field is that you must be from at least ninety miles away in order to be considered an expert," she says. "I laughed when I presented on this in the UK. The teachers knew exactly what I meant and said they call it 'jet in, jet out.'"

Dr. Benegas joined an effort to draft a comprehensive piece of ELL legislation, the Minnesota Learning English for Academic Proficiency and Success (LEAPS) Act, which required preservice teachers to "learn about research-based practices for ELs in teacher preparation coursework…and demonstrate professional development (PD) in the area of working with ELs in order to qualify for licensure renewal." (Benegas and Stolpestad, pg. x) The bill successfully passed, a groundbreaking and historic achievement — yet the implementation fell short of the bill's intent. Once the bill was enacted, Dr. Benegas notes, she started to hear disheartening news. "Minnesota teachers were asked only to write a reflective statement on their experience working with ELs — a paragraph about a time that they worked with a diverse student," she recalls. "That was it. That was all the blood, sweat and tears that we had put into having general education teachers learn more about multilingual learners. I was so disappointed."

Around the same time, the U.S. Department of Education put a call out for a new national professional development grant. Dr. Benegas' mentor, Dr. Mabbott, asked Dr. Benegas what she thought about applying. The odds of success were low — the grant had just a 14% acceptance rate. Dr. Benegas remembers saying, "Yes! Let's do it!" Despite the long odds, the team got the grant, even though they had been in competition with larger, more well-known research universities. Dr. Benegas says, "I actually found out on Facebook because one of our local legislators had a message congratulating us, and I went running down the hall of my office in my socks screaming, 'We got the grant!' And then I went back online and they had retracted the announcement because it wasn't supposed to be public yet!"

The goal of the grant, which was originally called English Learners in the Mainstream (ELM), was to empower ELL educators as teacher leaders — not only as a teacher of students, but as a teacher trainer as well. These were teachers who would continue in their instructional role. This was an important part of the program, says Dr. Benegas. The teachers were not moving into a new position as coaches or administrators. They had their feet firmly planted in the classroom, but they would step into a larger leadership role in their setting — one that could potentially also prove to be more cost-effective than hiring external consultants to lead training.

The team started recruiting teachers and Dr. Benegas remembers that the first cohort of about thirty teachers was thrilled to join the project. But she also notes that the ELM team made a big mistake the first year: not involving administrators in the conversation. She writes that the teachers were excited and inspired to take what they had learned back to their settings, but the administrators were not yet on board with this new model of distributed leadership. As a result, the teachers ran into many obstacles in putting their ideas into action. During year two, the team brought administrators into the fold. They began participating in the final day of training, alongside their building coaches, to strategically plan to implement the model in their schools.

From there the project grew over the six-year grant period, and when the grant ended, Dr. Benegas and the team looked for another home for ELM. Eventually they landed at TESOL, who had published the book that Dr. Benegas had now co-written with Dr. Stolpestad. TESOL and the team renamed the project to SWEL (School-Wide English Learning). Through the SWEL program, Dr. Benegas and her colleagues have now trained numerous educators and administrators around the country and world both through virtual and in-person sessions on topics that include contextual language instruction, offering professional development (with sample PD plans in the book), coaching, collaboration with administrators, and adult learning.

SWEL's Impact

Dr. Benegas says that their project has demonstrated that working with a site-based expert who has training and support can move the needle and change instruction, and they now have the data to prove it. Teachers who have participated in SWEL say that the training has improved co-teaching relationships and outcomes, and it has lifted morale. Dr. Benegas reports that among participants she has met (and more broadly in her research), many ELL educators are discouraged and thinking of leaving the profession because their role is misunderstood. Teachers shared experiences of being tasked by co-teachers with photocopying lesson plans, tutoring, or taking on other tasks because their colleagues or supervisors didn't understand their expertise. In addition, during the pandemic, Dr. Benegas and the team found that educators who had completed the training continued to be more focused on language instruction during remote and virtual instruction and were not pulled in as many other directions.

Dr. Benegas and her co-author, Dr. Stolpestad, believe that one reason this kind of empowerment is so transformative is that teaching is an egalitarian profession, in which teachers do not position themselves as knowing more than a colleague. This is in part due to the ways in which teachers have had to "band together" to advocate for themselves. Yet, they suggest, one result of this mindset can be that teachers are hesitant to share their expertise or even take on the role of "expert." Dr. Benegas remembers addressing a group of SWEL participants and telling them that they are the ELL experts in the building. She recalls, "A teacher raised her hand and she said, 'I'm not Steven Krashen. I'm not an expert. I'm really uncomfortable with that term.' And another person stood up and said, 'If you aren't the expert, who is?'"

In general, says Dr. Benegas, each educator's journey on the road to teacher leadership is different. However, she has seen two common experiences among the educators who take the SWEL training:

1. The teacher is new to the field: In this case, they accept that leadership is part of the job that they are still learning about. This group tends to embrace the role and do amazing things with their careers.
2. The teacher is already a teacher leader: In this case, they tend to show huge appreciation that we have a name for the work that they are already doing. They feel validated by the title (SWEL Coach) and formal recognition of their leadership.

At the same time, Dr. Benegas cautions that this model does not work everywhere. She encourages SWEL participants to seek out environments where their expertise is recognized, valued, and harnessed — even if it means a change. While she acknowledges it can be hard for educators to leave the settings and students they know and care about so deeply, there are students to serve in a wide variety of settings. She has observed that teachers who aren't respected often burn out more quickly and experience greater rates of frustration. "It's better for the kids and it's better for the field if you find a place where you are respected for your expertise," she says. "The places where this model does not work are hierarchical leadership spaces. Teacher leadership is dependent on distributed leadership or shared leadership."

What has been especially profound, according to Dr. Benegas, is that this work has ended up being a teacher empowerment movement and a female empowerment movement. She reports that SWEL participants have a new sense of agency and purpose. Colleagues may ask for their advice; administrators may ask for their input in choosing new materials or planning a family night. Districts have also asked the SWEL team to help them draft job descriptions to ensure that leadership responsibilities are included. SWEL participants have gotten their doctorate, written books, and are moving into leadership roles. And one participant has written legislation to make the Minnesota state driver's license exam more linguistically appropriate.

"When you get a ballroom of 150 teachers together who have been de-professionalized, teachers show up really eager to be recognized for their expertise — especially if their role is not understood." she says. "They perk up and start to dream. It strengthens their professional identity. That's been such an unexpected, lovely side effect of this work."