School and System Leadership Professional Learning Sessions

Key leaders from all levels of the district system, including district and campus administrators and lead teachers, will engage in structured collaborative conversations about the implementation of the standards.

After identifying the current state of district structures and practices, this representative group will craft recommendations to district decision makers for advancing district-wide implementation of an appropriate standards-aligned instructional program.

In this session (also listed in the teacher strand of sessions), teachers and leaders will work toward deep understanding of the purpose, intent, depth, and clarity of the standards. This session is also designed to foster a sense of urgency and a commitment to engaging in an ongoing study of the standards on campuses and throughout the district.

Teachers and leaders will learn and practice using tools to explore the horizontal and vertical alignment of the standards. These tools can be leveraged among groups of teachers to build a common understanding of the standards and to strengthen system-wide capacity for continuing study of—and alignment of the instructional program to—the standards.

You will also explore ways to use the standards to guide decisions around teaching, learning, and assessment.

This session is offered regularly with a focus on the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills or the Common Core State Standards. It can be tailored to any state or national education standards.

Campus principals, instructional coaches, lead teachers, and district instructional leaders learn how to implement the Dana Center’s updated Classroom Walkthrough for Continuous Improvement processes and tools.

By engaging in video-based practice walkthroughs, participants will strengthen their understanding of the Dana Center’s data-collection “look-fors,” which are aligned to the expectations outlined in college and career readiness education standards.

Classroom walkthroughs are a quick and easy way to gather real-time data on the real-world implementation of your instructional program. Our unique classroom walkthrough process provides you with tools and resources to use for your continuous improvement process.

In this session, you will practice using the data collection tool to accurately gather, aggregate, and analyze the data to identify patterns and trends. You will also learn and practice a process for promoting meaningful, reflective conversations and for generating classroom-level actions to strengthen your program.

Change is a process, not an event. When your system begins implementing an innovation, it is critical that you actively engage the individuals who will implement the change. 

Leaders and change facilitators need tools to help gather data about people’s attitudes, beliefs, feelings, behaviors, and actions with respect to the specified change.

Key leaders from all levels of the system, including district and campus administrators and lead teachers, will engage in a change simulation designed for use by collaborative teams. 

Developed from the research of Gene Hall and Shirley Hord, the Concerns-Based Adoption Model (CBAM) describes, explains, and predicts emotions and behaviors throughout the change process. 

Two of the CBAM components, Stages of Concern and Levels of Use, are particularly helpful to change facilitators in diagnosing and determining interventions to support the users of the innovation.

In this session, you will learn about the Concerns-Based Adoption Model and how to use Stages of Concern and Levels of Use to support the individuals responsible for advancing and monitoring the implementation of a school system’s change initiative. Participants will gain a deeper knowledge of the change process and will experience planning for—and leading—organizational change.

The Instructional Leadership Academy is designed to promote equity and access for all students. It engages leaders in a set of research-based processes and tools to capitalize on existing district structures, identifies areas for growth, and supports a standards-based instructional program. 

The Dana Center partners with districts to customize a cohesive set of protocols that allow leaders to zero in on key effective policies and practices that can be leveraged to improve a district’s education system. In the Instructional Leadership Academy, leaders focus on processes and skills for collecting data, aligning curriculum, instruction, and assessment, and promoting collaboration among colleagues in ways that foster continuous improvement. 

Potential intended outcomes of a customized Instructional Leadership Academy include: 

• Deep knowledge of effective leadership practices, personal strengths and areas for growth, and an action planning strategy to strengthen personal leadership capacity in ways that align to the district and school vision for student success. 
• Increased capacity to build and sustain professional learning community structures that promote collaborative and ongoing study and alignment of instructional practices with rigorous academic standards. 
• Ability to leverage principles of organizational change and strategies to support teams and individuals as they navigate change initiatives. 
• Proficiency with our unique classroom walkthrough process that gives leaders a quick and easy way to accurately gather, aggregate, and analyze real-time data about instructional programs. 
• Ability to engage staff in meaningful, reflective conversations that generate classroom-level actions to improve teaching and learning. 
• Facility with tools that support purposeful opportunities to collaboratively examine current conditions and determine actionable steps to improve leadership, coaching, and/or specific instructional programs. 

Could you use a coherent set of tools and processes for initiating or strengthening your local instructional coaching program?

In this session, you will 

• explore several innovation configurations—maps showing levels of implementation of an innovation—for a district coaching program, 
• acquire easy-to-use tools for gathering data, and 
• learn how to use supporting tools and processes in collaborative work with teachers. 

You will also determine how these tools and processes fit within your current coaching program and map out implications and next steps for your program.

These resources are designed to support coaching initiatives throughout implementation, from initiating the conversation to assessing the need in your district to guiding the work of your coaches.

In this session (also listed in the leadership strand of sessions), teachers and leaders will work toward deep understanding of the purpose, intent, depth, and clarity of the standards. This session is also designed to foster a sense of urgency and a commitment to engaging in an ongoing study of the standards on campuses and throughout the district. 

Teachers and leaders will practice using tools to explore the horizontal and vertical alignment of the standards. These tools can be leveraged among groups of teachers to build a common understanding of the standards and to strengthen system-wide capacity for continuing study of—and alignment of the instructional program to—the standards. 

Teachers in teams organized by subject matter and/or grade band will study the standards to develop their understanding of the horizontal and vertical alignment of the student expectations and to plan lessons that address implications for classroom practice. 

This study and lesson development will focus on areas within the standards in which the scope or rigor of the content shifts significantly—and for which there are potential challenges to classroom implementation.

By using diagnostic, goal-setting, mapping, and monitoring tools, these teachers will initiate or strengthen professional learning communities among their colleagues, with the goal of improving standards-aligned teaching and learning throughout the school or district.

Through collaborative processes, teams of teachers, divided into grade-banded groups particular to content, will parse the standards into a document that outlines the relevant standards taught within units of study.

The resulting scope-and-sequence document—and the processes learned—will provide a foundation for continued work by teacher teams to design units of study and create common lessons, and a platform from which to build a system-wide district curriculum framework for implementing the standards.

Representative teachers from the identified grade levels will develop units of study that are aligned to the standards identified in the Scope and Sequence document. These units will include 

• an overview of the unit (total number of days, student learning expectations for both the content and the processes to be learned, and essential questions the students should be able to answer by the end of the unit) and 
• a clarification of the standards within a vertically aligned instructional program.

Teacher team members and their colleagues draw on the processes they learned during the Scope and Sequence and Units of Study work, to engage as independent teams to

• Study the Units of Study collaboratively,
• Plan common lessons, and
• Document any revisions/refinements necessary in the Units of Study. 

Teachers will engage in and learn a process for examining available instructional materials through the lens of the standards. This vetting of resources will provide viable options to bolster the District Curriculum Framework with aligned supporting resources.

Teachers will implement the refinements necessary to strengthen the District Curriculum Framework.

Participants will analyze the documentation they gathered through the collaborative process of implementing the curriculum framework, reflect on how well the framework aligns vertically and horizontally to the standards, and determine which refinements will strengthen the framework.