From District Priority to Classroom Reality: Glencliff High School's Approach to Academic Discourse

At Glencliff High School in Nashville, teachers face a daily challenge: how do you help students who are struggling in English without inadvertently limiting their language development?

For teachers at schools with large multilingual populations, the instinct to switch to a student's home language is natural—especially when a confused student needs immediate support. But at what cost?

"A lot of those kids can go all day long speaking Spanish," explains Carolyn Andrews, Assistant Principal. "Teachers will speak Spanish to them if the kid is saying they don't understand or won't do the work."

The school's WIDA assessment data confirmed what administrators suspected: speaking scores were lagging. But knowing the problem and solving it are two different things.

The Measurement Gap

For three years, Glencliff has focused on building academic conversations across all classrooms—a priority that aligns with Metro Nashville's district-wide instructional focus. Executive Principal Clint Wilson saw a critical gap.

When asked what kind of professional development the district is providing around academic conversations, Wilson sees an opportunity: "At the school level, we don't have much in terms of district-provided support on this. And measurement is the missing piece—when you prioritize something, you need a tool to track progress."

Without measurement, improvement remained aspirational. Teachers like one veteran Spanish instructor were skeptical when Glencliff introduced TeachFX as an AI-powered tool to help coach teachers on classroom discourse. This teacher, who once struggled with technology, resisted for nearly two years.

Then he tried it. Now he actively brings TeachFX data into planning meetings.

Changing Behavior Through Self-Awareness

The real breakthrough came with Glencliff's EL teachers. Two instructors, both among the school's top TeachFX users, discovered patterns in their own instruction they hadn't recognized.

The data created accountability without judgment—teachers comparing themselves to their own goals, not administrator expectations. And the approach is spreading. Across the school, teachers have increased their use of opportunities to respond by 35% and open-ended questions by 89% since adopting TeachFX. Average student talk time has climbed from 30% to 39%. Now even more teachers are leveraging the data to reflect on great teaching practices that benefit everyone in their classrooms, not just ML students.

The District Opportunity

The focus on academic discourse appears to be paying off. Glencliff saw growth in Tennessee's Value-Added Assessment System (TVAAS) scores across nearly every subject area last year. Wilson is careful not to attribute that to any single initiative—"there's so many different things going into teachers," he notes—but the combination of curriculum alignment, instructional focus, and measurement tools like TeachFX is creating measurable progress.

Metro Nashville has invested in new math, science, and ELA curricula explicitly designed around student discourse. "TeachFX fits beautifully within that," Andrews observes. "This is already the curriculum we're requiring you to use. There's already spots for academic conversations—here's a tool to support how that's going."

Yet only a handful of Nashville schools have adopted TeachFX, each funding it independently from school budgets.

Wilson's message to district leaders is straightforward:

At Glencliff High School, that outcome is already taking shape—one classroom conversation at a time.