Corbin ISD was one of ten sites in rural Kentucky’s Southeast South-Central Educational Cooperative (SESC) region participating in NTC’s federal Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grant, Catalyzing Innovations in Teacher Leader Development in Rural and Urban Settings.

Prior to NTC’s partnership, Corbin ISD did not have coaching staff or an infrastructure for job-embedded professional learning and teacher support. We worked with district leaders to establish a clear vision and approach for building a cost-effective and sustainable coaching program.

Beginning with one staff member participating in NTC coaching training offered through SESC, the district now has 22 trained coaches providing teacher support across the district, resulting in what staff describe as a system-wide “culture of coaching.” The district’s goal is to continue to scale coaching capacity to reach all teachers through professional learning communities (PLCs). District staff report significant improvement in state working conditions survey results and a positive impact on teacher practice and student learning.

Research on teacher working conditions indicates that collaboration is critically important to teachers and a key indicator for retention. Professional learning communities, when implemented and facilitated with intention, can provide structured opportunities for professional learning in which educators work together to collaboratively improve instructional practice and student outcomes.

The Effective Professional Learning Communities framework is designed to support PLC growth and development in four key areas: Structure, Culture, Focus, and Facilitation. Key implementation guidelines help teams assess conditions for PLC function and maximize effectiveness.

NTC provides contextualized professional learning and instructional coaching for local curriculum. Since 2019, we have deepened our work on curriculum-based instructional coaching and professional learning through partnerships with Expeditionary Learning, Odell Education and Illustrative Mathematics 6-8.

Tennessee has undertaken a comprehensive math adoption process, which includes new math standards, a new instructional practice guide and curriculum implementation across all districts. Districts were awarded a grant for a two-year partnership to support this work.

• Year one focused on strategic planning and capacity building with school and district leaders.
• Year two focuses on supporting implementation and bringing to life each district’s vision for excellent math instruction under a statewide umbrella.

NTC supported seven districts — urban to rural — statewide with its proven relationship-driven personalized coaching approach to bring beginning, mid-career and veteran teachers through the change process. Teachers, instructional coaches, school and district leaders were able to unpack and roll out their districts’ adopted math curriculum, the TN Math Instructional Practice Guide and the TN Mathematics Instructional Focus Documents.

This resource emphasizes the importance of a rigorous selection process based on clear criteria, ongoing professional learning for mentors/coaches, and ensuring protected time for mentor-teacher interactions. By offering multi-year mentoring and continuous support for all educators, not just struggling or first-year teachers, schools can foster sustained growth and improved instructional practices across the board.

Building from our nationally recognized teacher induction program and 20+ years of experience working in close consultative partnerships with hundreds of districts across the country, the New Teacher Center (NTC) has become a leader in teacher development. Today, our evidence-based mentoring and coaching program models support leadership to design sustainable school- and district-based systems of support for teachers at all stages of their careers—from beginners to teacher leaders.

To better understand how to implement effective instructional coaching programs at scale, in 2015, NTC received a five-year Supporting Effective Educator Development (SEED) grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Working with SRI, the external evaluator for the grant, we looked at the complex process of implementing our rigorous, instructionally focused coaching model in two case study sites. Specifically, this work involved:

• Capturing data that uncovered the existing perceptions, practices, and contextual factors that impacted early implementation at the case study sites
• Using our formative assessment system in conjunction with specific recommended leadership practices to support effective implementation
• Documenting early indicators of positive change in teacher practice and student outcomes

This report presents a summary of findings, including:

• A brief description of the case for coaching as a driver of instructional improvement and outline of the NTC Program Theory of Action
• Example data from case study sites that illustrate typical coaching contexts
• Examples of implementation and course correction strategies with recommendations detailing leadership practices that have resulted in improved implementation in the case study sites
• Preliminary data that indicate resulting change in teacher instructional practice at the case study sites with potential impact on student learning anticipated in the longer term

There are many reasons we love Impact Florida’s Solving with Students Cadre. As a pilot partner, we are learning so much through this innovative professional learning model based on student feedback for Florida math teachers. And it’s not just us. Ninety-eight percent of teachers in the first pilot reported making substantive changes to their practice. What’s most exciting is what we are hearing from learners. Students of participating teachers confirmed the changes their teachers are making are having real impact on their experiences in the classroom.

Solving with Students is an initiative of Impact Florida designed to use student feedback on classroom learning conditions from the PERTS: Elevate survey as a lever for developing teacher practice. The first pilot included 49 secondary math teachers with anywhere from zero to more than 21 years of experience representing 16 districts across the state who applied to participate. Impact Florida supported teachers in the cadre to implement the survey with students in their classrooms, analyze the results, and then test small changes in practice in iterative cycles based on ongoing feedback through follow-up surveys.

Throughout the experience, Impact Florida regularly brought the cadre together for targeted support, to share problems of practice, and to build community. Teachers also had the option to receive six additional hours of formal one-on-one virtual coaching from an NTC program consultant or informal coaching through regular check-in calls with Impact Florida’s cadre leader.

The PERTS: Elevate survey asks students to provide anonymous feedback on learning conditions in their classrooms.

One reason we are so enthusiastic about the project is it incorporates key design features that matter according to the research on what works in professional learning. These features, which also guide our approach at NTC, provide a solid jumping-off point for innovation and include:

• priority emphasis on building relationships
• well-planned opportunities for teacher collaboration
• one-on-one coaching with follow-up
• focus on subject-specific instructional practice vs. content knowledge

Another reason is the richness of the data. NTC’s impact team evaluated survey results from the first pilot and gathered insights from coaching conversations as well as teacher and student focus groups. Participants authentically shared stories of their hopes, fears, challenges, discoveries, and the important lessons captured in the nuances of what students had to say. Taken together, the findings from the pilot cadre were compelling. Not only did we see almost immediate student-reported improvements in participating teachers’ classrooms, we saw how teachers’ mindsets shifted as they engaged, with peer and coach support, in increasingly deeper ways with the feedback from their students.

We are also encouraged by the nature of teacher commitment we saw. Even after so much hardship and disruption over the past several years, cadre teachers — the majority of whom were long-term veterans with 10, 15, 20+ years of experience — jumped at this opportunity to grow professionally. They weren’t “voluntold” to participate, and the small stipend notwithstanding, they applied because they were genuinely interested in analyzing their practice from their students’ perspective to make positive changes. That willingness to be vulnerable, in and of itself, had a powerful influence on the classroom relationship, according to both teachers and students.

NTC senior program consultant and former math teacher Tiana Pitts, who coached about half the teachers in the pilot cadre, concurred. “It’s important to consider what teachers were messaging to their students by participating. They were essentially saying to them: ‘I want to grow. I want to learn. And I need you to help me,’” Tiana said. The surveys then allowed students to anonymously share their true opinions — if they thought their teachers cared about them, how the classroom community felt, if the work they were asked to do was meaningful. Using this data, teachers then chose an area to focus on, validating students’ feedback and, in most cases, bringing them into partnership to identify and test new strategies.

“It’s important to consider what teachers were messaging to their students by participating. They were essentially saying to them: ‘I want to grow, I want to learn. And I need you to help me.’”

Following each cycle of survey feedback, teachers were asked to report the extent to which they interacted with students about their focus area and strategy for addressing results. In general, teachers who intentionally engaged students in conversations about changes they were making saw more improvement in learning conditions. When teachers did not engage students in inquiry cycle conversations, the percentage of students providing positive feedback generally declined or remained flat.

Research suggests that efforts to promote student voice in the classroom can influence student engagement in learning. We believe Solving with Students reflects that potential in alignment with NTC’s guiding belief that meaningful teaching and learning is a partnership — a reciprocal, relational, human interaction between teachers and students that nurtures the potential of each individual in a community of learners.

The value-add of coaching — Teacher well-being and accelerated growth

To learn more about how coaching can both deepen and extend the impact potential of student data on teacher practice, we talked with Tiana about what she did and what she learned in her close collaboration with participating teachers. All of her coaching moves, she said, were designed to create safe spaces of optimal learning for teachers.

Of the teachers who received formal coaching, 81% strongly agreed they had made permanent and substantive changes to their practice.

Establishing the relationship

NTC’s Tiana Pitts (right) working with Impact Florida

For those teachers who opted in, Tiana provided six hours of remote one-on-one coaching from February to June, focusing on four cycles of student surveys from the teacher’s classroom.

In her first interactions with teachers, Tiana said her priority was to create connections. “They don’t know me. We’re meeting virtually. I’m in North Carolina. They’re in Florida. So, it was critical for me to establish that relationship from day one, set a really solid foundation, to build that rapport and trust in order to have some tough conversations later. That first coaching session, I said, ‘we’re not looking at data; we’re talking to each other. Let’s talk about how your life is; let’s talk about how things are going.’ I asked them to tell me about their journey in education. ‘Where did you start? What made you decide to teach? Why are you still teaching? Why are you teaching at the school where you are now? Why did you choose this particular professional development opportunity? What are you looking for out of this experience?’ I also told them a little bit about myself, my background, that I was a math teacher, and I understood where they were coming from.”

“They don’t know me. We’re meeting virtually. I’m in North Carolina. They’re in Florida. So, it was critical for me to establish that relationship from day one, set a really solid foundation, to build that rapport and trust in order to have some tough conversations later.”

Taking a deep look at student feedback

The next thing Tiana did was ask each teacher to re-engage with the student data, understanding the competing priorities teachers are continuously juggling. I said to them: “I know that you probably have looked at your data, but you probably had interruptions because it was your planning period or you looked at it real quick after hours at home, so I want to take some of our time together to look at it with fresh eyes.’ We spent a good 10 minutes looking at it independently; my camera is off, their camera is off, to really ground us in the data before we talked about it.”

Spending that time to look at the student feedback in more than a cursory way, and in the context of having an immediate and immersive conversation about what the data meant and what to do about it, was what made the difference. One focus group teacher said: “I look through the survey, and I’m like, ‘Oh, oh, okay. I don’t know how I’m going to fix that.’ And then you have that hour with Tiana, and she’s like, ‘Well, wait a minute. It’s not really that bad … let’s work on this.’ She pointed out things that I would never have taken the time to look at, and it helped me tremendously.”

Spending that time to look at the student feedback in more than a cursory way, and in the context of having an immediate and immersive conversation about what the data meant and what to do about it, was what made the difference.

Starting with what’s working — Assets, not deficits

Another key step was to focus on what’s working. Tiana said she had to push teachers not to overlook data that indicated where they were already having positive impacts on the learning environment. “They’re math teachers; they want to solve problems. They’re going to go to the problems first. That’s just how our brains work. As a coach, I have to help them prioritize looking for the things that are going well. I have to push them. It’s part of building the rapport, but there’s also a lot of meaningful data there that they shouldn’t overlook. For example, if your results for ‘meaningful work’ are at 80%, that’s a good thing. Of course, we have to look at that 20%, but let’s start with the 80% —‘What do you think you’ve done to create that kind of environment for your students?’ That’s hard for them, first to stop and name what’s going well but also to identify what behaviors or actions might account for that, and that’s really important to know.”

Starting with what the teacher was doing right proved very meaningful for participants. It also modeled a critical stance of asset-based, learner-centered teaching. “I had a couple of teachers start crying. You can go into it with a deficit mindset of all the things you’re not doing right. Me reminding them of the things that are going well is good for their spirit. I had one teacher say, ‘thank you for pushing me to see that because I thought I was failing my kids.’ They’re hard on themselves, some of them are really hard on themselves, and I get to see all the data. So I say, ‘do you understand that two-thirds of your kids think that you care about them? That’s a good thing.’”

“I had a couple of teachers start crying. You can go into it with a deficit mindset of all the things you’re not doing right. Me reminding them of the things that are going well is good for their spirit. I had one teacher say, ‘thank you for pushing me to see that because I thought I was failing my kids.’”

Tiana asked teachers to identify what actions or behaviors they thought created these positive experiences. “We dig into it and write it down. We don’t just talk about it. We want them to keep doing that stuff while they are also focusing on where they want to improve. Unless you name that explicitly, those actions and strategies might get lost.”

“It’s only after that that we talk about what they want to focus on,” Tiana said. “And I want to point out that the language of that conversation is huge. It’s not, ‘where were results low; it’s, now what do you want to focus on?’”

From there, Tiana supported teachers to dig deeper into their data, encouraging them to look at even smaller differences that might illuminate how some aspect of their teaching practice could be changed. And the more teachers learned, the more they wanted to know. “What was so cool,” Tiana said, “was that the teachers’ mindsets were changing, and the kids were getting a different person. There was one teacher who was about to walk away from teaching after the pandemic. This experience totally turned her back around, rejuvenated her, because she connected with her kids on a different level.”

Coaching for collective impact

Impact Florida team members work with NTC’s impact team on design

In addition to supporting individual growth, coaching served as a conduit for teacher collaboration. To help teachers think about what they were doing well, Tiana appealed to their instincts to help other teachers for the collective good. “I tell them: ‘I need to know what you did so I can tell other teachers. That’s a part of coaching. We’re collaborating. I’m not sitting here telling you all the answers. I need to hear what you’re doing right because somebody else is struggling in this area and what you’ve learned could help them.’ Naming that I am learning from them in ways that could help other teachers continues to build that rapport and also appeals to their spirit of teamwork…. We’re all in this together.”

In focus groups, teachers also talked about the value of working with their peers across the cadre on similar problems of practice. “What can I do differently to build relationships with my kids? It’s really, really comforting knowing we all have the same issues…. It’s a common bond we all have…. [How can we] break that cycle as a group? What can we come up with?” Focus group teachers also expressed a desire to extend what they were learning in the cadre to influence change in their school and district culture. “I’m going to take the results and information and show them. Because we need to modify the culture of our school,” one teacher said.

This impulse toward collective action is just one example of the ripple effect we anticipate from this unique professional learning opportunity as Impact Florida continues experimenting and bringing the cadre approach to scale. “We’re already impacting students all over Florida,” said Tiana, and word is spreading quickly. Over 130 teachers applied for the 75 openings in a second expanded cadre experience offered in Fall 2022. And with 34 teachers from the original pilot applying to participate again, Impact Florida incorporated a school-based Professional Learning Community (PLC) focus into the design to extend the learning to other educators at cadre teachers’ schools. Staff reports that teachers from other subject areas want to join as well.

Our takeaways from our partnership with the Solving with Students Cadre are significant, with implications for how we think about involving students in the co-design of new models for coaching and teacher development. Creating safe yet challenging opportunities like the cadre experience — that prioritize student voice and encourage connection in the classroom — is where we need to focus our energies as we continue our work to reshape the future of teacher professional learning.

Clint Independent School District, one of the fastest developing areas of El Paso County, spans a diverse, geographically large area (379.9 square miles) within the Upper Rio Grande border region. The district serves three major and distinct communities — the town of Clint and surrounding farms and ranches; the town of Horizon City, a growing suburban area; and the community of Montana Vista, an unincorporated colonia.

With an enrollment of 10,555 students, Clint ISD has 14 campuses — four high schools, four middle/junior high schools, and six elementary schools. Of the nearly 1,200 districts in the state, Clint is among the top 100 in student population.

Nearly all (95 percent) of students in the district are Hispanic, and 41 percent are emergent bilingual. The vast majority (87%) are considered economically disadvantaged.

While we’ve worked with Clint ISD since 2016 to support the district’s induction programming for new teachers, our instructional leadership partnership is a more recent development funded through the Texas Effective Schools Framework (ESF) program originally involving five Clint ISD schools identified for improvement. When we started this work together, though district leaders had recommended curricula to schools, decisions about which materials were ultimately used in classrooms were left to principals and teachers. Thus, our first primary goal was to help the district develop a system-wide instructional framework.

Instructional audit

To help understand what curriculum was being used in schools, gather data, and build buy-in for change, NTC conducted an instructional audit in the first project phase. This process included classroom observations of over 80 lessons in five ESF grant schools, reviewing instructional materials to understand the intended curriculum, and organizing focus groups with school and district leaders, teachers, and students to gather diverse perspectives on teaching and learning. Additionally, NTC reviewed various data sources to better understand the structures that might be leading to or detracting from academic success, including:

• the teacher experience/job satisfaction
• average teacher retention rates
• demographic data
• student attendance
• disciplinary incidents

The analysis highlighted strengths and challenges to guide future work. One notable finding was the district’s strong sense of community, with teachers and leaders actively building relationships with students and each other. As one student shared, “I’m very connected with my teachers. I think of school as my second home. They are all super connected, and they are like family members to me.”

This evidence of a strong relational culture in the district is a positive, especially since other findings revealed diverse stakeholder perspectives on a vision for excellent instruction and broad curricular inconsistency within and across schools.

Dr. Edmond Martinez, former director of effective school improvement for Clint ISD (now dean of accelerated learning), stressed that the district needed to focus on instructional rigor and content coherence. “We had teachers in one grade level doing different things, and when their students got to the next grade, nobody could be sure what instruction they’d received. We knew we had gaps, so we said, let’s start there.”

Subsequent discussions centered on creating an aligned system-wide instructional framework from grade-to-grade and across every school feeder pattern. At this point, the district also decided to expand the focus from the original five grantee campuses to all 14 district schools.

However, agreeing on an established curriculum had its challenges. District staff reported some pushback from principals who wanted to maintain autonomy over their campus’ curricula. The switch to a standard literacy curriculum faced resistance from teachers accustomed to different approaches to teaching reading.

“I’m not going to tell you that it was easy,” said Martinez. “In fact, there was a lot of tension. It was a learning curve for the district, but we put a process together so campus principals were involved. We presented findings and posed questions to them so they had opportunities to discuss it and really internalize what the audit findings meant to them at their campus. It was a really good exercise, and the principals were very reflective. They realized the direction we were going in was unsustainable, and that traditional remedies, such as tutoring, weren’t going to fix things,” Martinez said.

From there, using the ESF “levers” of strong school leadership and planning, high-quality instructional materials, and effective instruction, NTC supported the team to develop a plan that included curriculum review and adoption and aligned professional learning for teachers and leaders from all Clint ISD schools.

Instructional leadership includes coaching

Having consistent curricula enables districts to compare outcomes across schools and student subgroups and to identify which strategies are working. But curriculum alone is not a magic fix. Research shows that when principals focus on instruction in their work with teachers, they can have a big impact on student achievement and teacher retention. As one recent Wallace Foundation report put it, “effective principals focus their work on feedback, coaching, and other instructional improvement work that is grounded in classroom observations and other data about teaching and learning.”

To help develop effective instructional leadership practices, principals and assistant principals attended professional learning on high-quality instructional materials and were responsible for selecting a lesson they would prepare for and teach at their campus. Working with the materials and curriculum helped administrators gain valuable perspective, according to Martinez, for creating the conditions for effective planning. “They invested themselves, and the takeaways were: I know now what it takes to plan to deliver these materials and can better support my teachers.”

School leaders also needed the opportunity to practice their coaching skills to provide actionable instructional feedback for teachers. To develop this skill set, NTC supported principals and assistant principals in becoming more familiar with coaching language and stances and ways to deliver feedback that was less evaluative and more collaborative and facilitative.

We then asked them to practice coaching teachers while being observed by their peers, while also providing our own in-field coaching after observing their instructional interactions with teachers. Assistant principals were also included in these activities to increase their role in providing instructional support for teachers.

Martinez noted this was an eye-opening experience for school leaders. “I think initially we had principals who thought, ‘no problem… I’ve been giving feedback to teachers for years.’ But giving feedback and coaching don’t necessarily mean the same thing. Principals are a tough bunch,” he said, “but we heard back things like: ‘This was the best professional development ever’.”

NTC’s next steps were to help build structures to sustain the vision and support ongoing implementation. This involved clarifying the roles and responsibilities of instructional leaders at both district and school levels to ensure collaborative, systematic teacher support.

Takeaways thus far

A little over two years into the project, most of the skeptics have come around, according to Martinez. “Even the ones who were the most hesitant came back and said ‘You know what? That was the hardest thing I ever did,” he said.

Before the project, many principals and assistant principals focused their classroom observations on logistics rather than instructional quality. Now, with common curricula in place and a coaching mindset, school leaders are much better equipped to support teachers with lesson preparation, execution, and monitoring student learning. Many have shifted from being “operational” to “instructional” leaders, moving from offering “feedback” to truly “coaching” their teachers, Martinez added.

Teachers have noticed the change, too. “They were saying [in survey data] ‘This is the first time anyone has ever asked me those questions,’” Martinez said. “‘I can see where there’s an opportunity for me to grow in my instruction.’”

Students are beginning to benefit as well, with testing showing increased rates of academic growth among low performing students. Additional information on student achievement from testing conducted in January will allow school leaders, teachers, and coaches to continue to refine the instructional framework.

For now, what is evident is that key conditions for teaching and learning have improved in Clint ISD. “We’ve seen a major culture shift,” Martinez said. “People are speaking a common language. Our vision is now becoming coherent.”