Gladstone Elementary School

At the start of every partnership, the Instruction Partners team conducts classroom walkthroughs to gather a baseline understanding of the current state of instruction at a school. Initial walkthroughs at Gladstone Elementary revealed that instruction was not aligned to the rigor of the state standards. 

In order to improve daily instruction, Gladstone teachers needed a content-specific vision of what excellent instruction looks like in practice. Given the school’s limited leadership capacity, it was critical that Principal Carter had the content knowledge required to provide a clear vision and actionable feedback for her teachers. 

The first step toward building this vision was deepening Ms. Carter’s content knowledge through the lens of the Instructional Practice Guides (IPGs), subject-specific observation and coaching tools that describe the content, teacher actions, and student engagement indicative of excellent teaching and learning. In addition to helping leaders understand what to look for while observing a classroom, the IPGs also serve as coaching guides for providing actionable feedback to teachers.

The Instruction Partners team led side-by-side classroom observations and coaching sessions with Ms. Carter to build her understanding of each indicator on the math and ELA IPGs. The team then transferred this knowledge to the Gladstone teachers through professional learning opportunities, including training on the new instructional vision. 

The vision training was grounded in three key components:

1. Emphasizing the importance of equity in instruction
2. Deepening knowledge of grade-level standards and research-based best practices in ELA and math instruction
3. Understanding the interlocking aspects of the instructional core: Rigorous content, effective teaching, and student engagement

After establishing a better understanding of what standards-aligned and equitable instruction looks like in practice, Ms. Carter and the Gladstone teachers made the decision to adopt high-quality ELA and math curricula in the spring of 2019.

The Instruction Partners team used guidance and tools from its Curriculum Support Guide to help Gladstone educators select and adopt new curricula at the start of the 2019–20 school year. 

With high-quality materials in place, Instruction Partners worked alongside Ms. Carter to build professional learning structures that would help teachers effectively plan and deliver great lessons with the new curricula. Support included:

• Delivering upfront training on the new curricula 
• Modeling lessons 
• Establishing grade-level collaborative planning routines, including unit internalization and lesson preparation 
• Developing classroom observation and feedback cycles 

This progress was temporarily halted when COVID-19 closed schools in March 2020, as the team quickly reorganized to create a plan for virtual learning. 

When Gladstone Elementary shifted to virtual learning, Ms. Carter was determined to continue to build on her team’s progress in ELA and math instruction. She recalls, “I did a lot of work with the team on how we can still present all of the instructional practices and preparation we had established, but now through a computer.”

Working alongside Ms. Carter, the Instruction Partners team provided virtual teacher support, including:

• Conducting virtual classroom observation and feedback cycles
• Creating an attendance tracking system 
• Identifying priority standards and pacing considerations for virtual learning 

The virtual support helped teachers overcome online engagement obstacles in grades 3–6 while continuing to deliver grade-level content. However, engaging K–2 students in a virtual classroom proved to be an ongoing challenge.

In the spring of 2021, with virtual professional learning in place for ELA and math, Ms. Carter turned her attention toward strengthening science instruction. Although it began in a virtual context, the science improvement process followed a similar trajectory to ELA and math support:

1. Building Principal Carter’s science leadership capacity by deepening content expertise through the lens of the science IPG
2. Establishing a vision for science instruction at Gladstone Elementary aligned to the Next Generation Science Standards
3. Implementing high-quality materials and establishing ongoing professional learning for teachers

Over the course of three years of partnership, Principal Carter built her capacity to provide high-quality feedback to her teachers across three content areas, resulting in significant improvement in instructional practices.

Once an instructional support system is in place in a school, how does a leader monitor the strength of that system? 

This is the question that Principal Carter and the Instruction Partners team considered at the start of the 2021–22 school year. 

Charlotte Hansen, Director of Instructional Support at Instruction Partners, recalls, “One thing that we thought about last year is, if you have a really lean leadership team, what is the key instructional data that will give you a line of sight into your school—both where the strongest points are and where there are opportunities for improvement?”

The Instruction Partners team set out to create a system for collecting key instructional data at the leader, teacher, and student levels:  

1. Leader data: Frequency of classroom observation and quality of feedback (How often is the leader observing classrooms? Are they normed on the IPG? Is their feedback leading to a change in teacher practice?)
2. Teacher data: IPG indicators, participation in collaborative learning time, and qualitative survey feedback (Do teachers feel that their professional learning time is valuable?)
3. Student data: Student outcomes on both curriculum-embedded assessments and nationally normed assessments (Are students demonstrating grade-level proficiency?)