Dallas ISD/IFL Network for School Improvement: Enacting Instructional Change in ELA

Dallas ISD/IFL Network for School Improvement: Enacting Instructional Change in ELA

The Dallas ISD/IFL Network for School Improvement has been working together for the past five years to improve 9th-grade on-track literacy for college and career readiness for African American and Hispanic students, as well as those living in poverty. As we begin to wrap up our final year collaborating with Dallas, we’ll share a little about the work we’ve done with teachers to understand the problems of practice in ELA in their schools, how we’ve partnered with teachers to enact instructional changes, and how those changes have had an impact on student achievement. This article is the first in a two-article series.

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Using Accountable Talk® Features to Think Through the Design of Remote Instruction

Using Accountable Talk® Features to Think Through the Design of Remote Instruction

Infusing practices from the business of instructional technology with Accountable Talk® features provides a light that can guide the planning of technology-based instruction, helping educators navigate challenges in order to enrich remote learning.

® Accountable Talk is a registered trademark of the University of Pittsburgh.

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Making Space for Creativity Using A Mathematics Lesson Routine

Making Space for Creativity Using A Mathematics Lesson Routine

Creativity in mathematics abounds at the intersection of belief and practice! When the belief that all learners are doers of mathematics and enter the classroom with valuable lived math experiences intersects with the use of a lesson routine that offers space for students to do the thinking, learners become the creators and authors of the material from which they learn.

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Liberating Your Summer Readers

Liberating Your Summer Readers

A district’s goal for summer reading should be to help students continue to build their independent reading skills and to foster a love of reading. Students who take up summer reading typically have access to compelling books and choice in what they read (Shin & Krashen, 2008). To achieve a reading program with books that engage students, student voice should be central to summer reading lists.

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Questioning the Author: A Powerful Approach to Promote Student Understanding of Complex Texts

Questioning the Author: A Powerful Approach to Promote Student Understanding of Complex Texts

Questioning the Author is a discussion-based approach that supports students in studying and understanding complex texts. Comprehension work is an essential piece of any text-based task. If students don’t get the gist of the text or grasp an author’s ideas, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to do deeper analytic and interpretive work. It is especially important for emerging readers and emergent multi-lingual (EML) students to be able to access the big ideas of a text while building their comprehension muscles.

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Organizing Instructional Tasks with Landing Pages

Organizing Instructional Tasks with Landing Pages

Teachers have found great success using landing pages to organize learning for students across one text or across multiple texts in a unit. A landing page is a page on a website where students “land” to do their work or engage in a task. Landing pages, much like task sheets, provide students with both the why and the what of an instructional task. They support more equitable access to instructional activities by making expectations clear and providing step-by-step guidance for students as they engage in learning.

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Remote Coaching for Rigorous and Engaging Online Classroom Discussions: Layering New Forums with Fresh Insights

Remote Coaching for Rigorous and Engaging Online Classroom Discussions: Layering New Forums with Fresh Insights

Coaches have a critical role in assisting teachers in continuing, rather than abandoning, important pedagogies while teaching online. Read about what is being learned through ongoing research at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center on how coaches can support teachers remotely to engage students in rigorous and interactive online discussions.

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Using Student-Centered Classroom Routines to Improve Comprehension of Complex Texts

Using Student-Centered Classroom Routines to Improve Comprehension of Complex Texts

The Networks for School Improvement (NSI) work taking place among Dallas ISD (DISD), the Institute for Learning, the University of Pittsburgh School of Education Center for Urban Education, and the Learning Research and Development Center, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has largely focused efforts on improving instructional rigor, providing better supports for English language learners, and improving cultural relevance.

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Supporting Coaches to Lead Change Efforts at Their Schools

Supporting Coaches to Lead Change Efforts at Their Schools

As part of the Networks for School Improvement (NSI) work, I’ve been working directly with 8th grade coaches and their grade-level professional learning community (PLC) teams in the Dallas Independent School District (ISD) to understand and use two protocols that first work to honor the knowledge and day-to-day lived experiences that teachers bring with them to their PLCs, and then ask teachers to critically reflect on classroom experiences and student work to increase professional knowledge and enhance student learning (Vescio, Ross, & Adams, 2008).

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Conferring with Teachers & Coaches Requires Setting Clear Learning Goals

Conferring with Teachers & Coaches Requires Setting Clear Learning Goals

Conferring with teachers in advance of observing a lesson is a critical component of the Content-Focused Coaching® (CFC) cycle. These “pre-conferences” are opportunities for the coach and the teacher to reflect together about a teacher’s lesson plan, and thus are a rich opportunity for teacher learning. Lesson planning is specifically important for facilitating rigorous Accountable Talk® classroom discussions.

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Increasing High-Quality Student Talk

Increasing High-Quality Student Talk

The Institute for Learning (IFL) and Schenectady City School District have worked collaboratively for several years, and this year, we continued our ongoing partnership with a focus on using improvement science methodology to “get better at getting better.” District-wide, there is a focus on using improvement science to work on persistent problems of practice.

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Creating a Map to Bridge Differences

Creating a Map to Bridge Differences

When we are working with teachers on their curriculum, we often find ourselves having to reinforce the idea that it’s important to do the tasks that we’d like our students to do. This is sometimes called dogfooding—it’s slang in the corporate world for testing your own product to work out the kinks.

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A District’s Perspective: CFC and Differentiation

A District’s Perspective: CFC and Differentiation

Coaching, at its best, bolsters district goals while supporting individual needs, gracefully weaving coherence and differentiation into a tapestry of continuous learning. With Content-Focused Coaching® (CFC), both the culture and the instruction are positioned to evolve in ever-increasing complexity through the interdependence of people—coaches supporting teachers through individual conferring and teachers supporting one another during PLCs that are truly collaborative pursuits.

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Searching for the Root Cause: An interview with Bridget Goree, NSI Coordinator for North Dallas High School

Searching for the Root Cause: An interview with Bridget Goree, NSI Coordinator for North Dallas High School

Campus Network for School Improvement (NSI) coordinators learn to discover and understand the root causes of a problem of practice and find that understanding the problem takes time and requires a cultural shift. In this interview, Bridget Goree, an instructional coach at North Dallas High School, shares her own experience learning to approach this work. She discusses three considerations—what to stop doing, what is important to do, and what they are learning to build.

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Cognitively Challenging English Language Arts Instruction

Cognitively Challenging English Language Arts Instruction

We have known about harmful effects of high-stakes state testing on students, teachers, and the curriculum for decades, yet we continue to perpetuate the belief that they test what students know and can do. Daniel Koretz (2017) demonstrates that they have become ends in themselves and take valuable time away from instruction designed to grow students’ intelligence rather than their test-taking abilities.

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