A Call for Systemic Instructional Improvement
To transform student outcomes, leaders must answer the call to shift their own practice, not just expect teachers to change theirs
In a 2022 piece on the Shankar Institute blog called “Connecting and Animating the Infrastructure for Reading Instruction,” researchers Sarah Woulfin and Rachael Gabriel illuminate a problem with the focus of contemporary reading reform efforts.
Woulfin and Gabriel write:
The current wave of SOR reforms focus heavily on how individual teachers translate the findings from scientific research in the teaching of reading. However, a more salient focus is needed if lasting instructional improvement is the goal. Students need educators who have the support of a coherent, transparent, and feasible infrastructure, supporting system-level changes in reading instruction. This infrastructure provides the conditions so teachers and leaders can work together to implement SOR, including interpreting ideas on SOR and magnifying ideas to the system-level—with the ultimate goal of improving outcomes. (emphasis mine)
Put simply: we can’t expect student outcomes to change if we insist only on teachers changing their practice, but do nothing to change the systems and culture – i.e. the educational infrastructure – in which they operate.
The reality is that districts have historically not been particularly skilled at this. It’s only in the last few decades that K-12 school districts in the United States have gone from systems of “mass schooling” to “instructionally focused education systems” that work to actively organize and manage the quality of instruction within and across schools (Peurach et al., 2019).
This work of effectively organizing and managing instructional quality is what writer Karin Chenoweth (2021) argues sets apart “districts that succeed.” What’s different in these districts? Two things stand out:
A culture of trust akin to what Amy Edmondson describes in The Fearless Organization – rooted in psychological safety and the ability to be vulnerable with one another and learn from mistakes, rather than be driven by fear and compliance
Shared systems and structures – for pretty much everything related to instruction1, including how educators within and across the system define instructional quality, assess student learning, examine data and student work, and invest shared time in making sense of data and student work to reflect upon it and improve teaching.
Chenoweth argues that this combination of factors supports teachers in asking what she calls “the most important question in education: “Your kids are doing better than mine, what are you doing?”
Without trust, teachers have very little incentive to surface this question. It takes vulnerability to voice such a query, and like writer Brene Brown says, most of us would, quite reasonably, prefer to run from vulnerability than embrace it.
Without shared systems and structures, it may not only go unasked and unanswered, but perhaps even unpondered. As I’ve written about before, when classrooms operate more as autonomous egg-crates than interconnected beehives abuzz with collaboration, the closed door is far more the norm than the open question2.
Furthermore, districts that embrace these two things successfully do not just do so in a technical sense. They are also engaged in deeply adaptive work – rooted in a profound commitment to the success of all students. Rather than delegating such responsibility to individual teachers, behind individual classroom doors, these districts hold onto it – and take collective responsibility for student success.
In my own experiences as an educator, I’ve had the privilege of leading schools that have embraced this ethos – and it’s magical when it happens. As a principal, I used to love leading team meetings where teachers trusted one another so fully – and knew both their own and one another’s strengths so well – that they’d ask increasingly precise questions about one another’s craft, in service of improving their own.
As a school system leader, I saw what was possible when principals asked one another Chenoweth’s powerful question. Again, such discussion and the action that followed from it would not have been possible without the existence of robust infrastructure for managing and supporting instruction not only within but across schools.
I’m encouraged by district leaders who are putting in the work to (re)build their system-wide infrastructure – reimagining what central office support of teaching and learning can look like and building the type of culture that enables and facilitates the type of collegial inquiry and intellectual engagement that can have such a profound, if indirect, impact on student outcomes.
Yet I’m also concerned that this type of shift in practice at the system level isn’t even on the radar of some teams at the system level. And that in some cases, even where the vision exists, the capacity to support schools in this way is severely lacking.
I’m concerned that too many districts see their role in instructional change as dictating that others change, but never holding the mirror up to their own practice. If the only shift district leaders are making in the adoption of a new curriculum is managing through a different set of spreadsheets, log-ins, or vendors, something is amiss.
As researchers Meredith Honig and Linda Rainey (2023) write, to transform instruction, district offices need to reconsider the “core premises” upon which they were founded — premises that more often entrenched inequity than upended it, that more often surveilled than supported teachers, and that more often required compliance over instilling commitment.
As district leaders engage in large-scale instructional improvement efforts, they have a chance to revisit the way they go about their roles, to ask themselves: what would need to change for us to facilitate the structures and create the conditions so that teachers and principals ask and answer Chenoweth’s key question? What would we need to do differently to show up for our schools differently? And what support do we need to catalyze such a change?
Where I live, here in New York City, when Chancellor Banks launched the NYC Reads initiative he noted that NYC teachers had been given a “flawed playbook.” He made a point to reinforce that it wasn’t their fault, just as it wasn’t the fault of a student who never learned to become a proficient reader. Contemporary instructional reform efforts across the country promise a new playbook. But for student outcomes to transform at scale, these reform efforts entail can’t be confined only to teachers in schools. Districts need a new operating system. And that has to start with changes that district leaders engage in about how they approach their roles, how they organize and manage infrastructure, and how they drive and sustain systemic instructional improvement.
References
Chenoweth, K. (2021). Districts that succeed: Breaking the correlation between race, poverty, and achievement. Harvard Education Press.
Honig, M. & Rainey, L. (2023). From tinkering to transformation: How school district central offices drive equitable teaching and learning. Harvard Education Press.
Peurach, D. J., Cohen, D. K., Yurkofsky, M. M., & Spillane, J. P. (2019). From mass schooling to education systems: Changing patterns in the organization and management of instruction. Review of Research in Education, 43, 32-67.
Woulfin, S. & Gabriel, R. E. (2020). Interconnected infrastructure for improving reading instruction. Reading Research Quarterly, 55(1), 109-117. https://doi.org/10.1002/rrq.339
Interestingly, Chenoweth refrains from naming shared curricula on this particular list, though many of the successful districts she studies indeed invest in shared, high-quality instructional materials as central to their system-wide improvement efforts.
The beehive metaphor comes from Susan Moore Johnson, who cites Tyack and Lortie as the source for the egg-crate analogy.
Far too many Education Leaders don't know what they don't know!!! Thanks for posting!