• Establish or leverage a curriculum advisory team of high-performing teachers to participate in assessing the quality of existing materials and selecting, reviewing and adapting new materials. Develop a calendar for engaging these teachers, considering remote and in-person venues, in discrete activities to strengthen curricula and instructional supports and deploy these into classrooms.
• Create structures and systems that regularly gather usage statistics and user feedback. Systems we studied sought feedback through formal surveys, teacher advisory committees, and frequent school visits and feedback conversations between school-level and district staff. Use teacher feedback to continually evolve and improve curricular supports over time.

• Create professional development opportunities for teachers that are specific to individual curricula and assessments (e.g., trainings that help teachers adapt specific units for the needs for their students, workshops that help teachers unpack student assessment results in real-time and identify ways to adjust instruction). These opportunities may be run by experts on the specific content being taught, either from your system or a third-party partner.
• Create time for leaders with expertise in specific curricula to push into teaching teams, where they can provide direct support and coaching in the work of planning and adjusting instruction.
• Develop guidelines or frameworks that are grounded in what high-quality, standards-aligned instruction looks like—both in general and for specific grades and subjects, based on the curricula being taught—that teachers and experts can use as the basis for observation and feedback.

• Select a proven third-party tool, such as iMet or EQuIP, and evaluate your curriculum and related assessments. Consider starting with one grade level/subject combination that is indicative of the quality of curricula and assessments across the district. Based on the results, consider extending the analysis to other grades and subjects and developing a plan for acquiring more rigorous curricula with deeper supports for teachers.
• If you find your system lacks high-quality materials, explore your options for acquiring new curriculum and assessments. The systems we studied used a combination of purchased materials from traditional publishers, adaptation of publicly available Open Educational Resources (OERs), and copying, adapting, or creating new materials in-house. Assess your most urgent curricular needs and engage your Academic team to determine the best option for each gap.
• If high-quality materials exist, engage your Academic team to distribute scope and sequence, unit plans, lesson plans, and other curricular supports that are aligned with CCRS in ELA, Math, and other priority subject areas. To improve uptake, identify and engage a group of high-performing teachers in distribution and rollout of materials.
• Work with school leaders and instructional coaches to ensure teachers have access to instructional guidance tools, for example, lesson prep protocols, video model lessons, etc., as well as a venue for reviewing these tools, to support teachers in the rigorous application of curricular materials.
• Engage your Academics team, including school support and school leaders, to distribute common formative and interim assessments in ELA, Math, and other priority subject areas that are aligned to CCRS, state assessments, and provided curricular materials.

• Provide protocols and tools to support collaborative time
  • Work with your teachers and instructional experts to create or adapt supporting materials, such as facilitation guides, for teaching teams to use during their collaborative time. These materials should enable teams to work together productively and leave the time with concrete materials and/or next steps to deliver high-quality instruction.
  • Assign progress-monitoring owner(s) to each team who are responsible for ensuring shared-content teaching teams adhere to agreed upon protocols, produce desired lesson plans, and rely on them in their respective classrooms.
  • Leverage your data systems to ensure that teaching teams can regularly access student data. Work with teachers, instructional experts, and data experts in your system to make sure you can track the data that is most helpful for teachers and create reports that enable teachers to analyze student data and make any necessary adjustments to their instruction.
• Develop strong adult culture: Ensure that teaching teams are using their collaborative time effectively by developing a strong adult professional learning culture and providing tools to support success. Ways to do this include:
  • Strengthen professional adult culture by explicitly building and sustaining relationships. This may take place through a summer institute to lay the foundation, ongoing book studies of strong teams, and regular team building during collaborative time.
• Assign expert support to teams: Identify and assign coaches, administrators or teacher leaders with specific content expertise to each teaching team. These leaders can assist teachers as they develop common lesson plans and formative assessments, analyze results of formative assessments, and identify opportunities for intervention and adjustments to instruction.
  • Select experts who are deeply familiar with the content standards and have a track record of success teaching in the content area they are supporting.
  • Ensure that experts’ schedules are structured so that they can be available to a content-focused teaching team for the full duration of its collaborative time. Limited instructional expertise in a building may require staggering collaborative time over the course of the day, or rotating when it’s scheduled on each day of the week (e.g., grade 6 ELA on Monday, grade 7 ELA on Tuesday, etc.), to ensure available experts are able to push in.
  • Ensure that experts’ schedules are structured so that they can be available to a content-focused teaching team for the full duration of its collaborative time. Limited instructional expertise in a building may require staggering collaborative time over the course of the day, or rotating when it’s scheduled on each day of the week (e.g., grade 6 ELA on Monday, grade 7 ELA on Tuesday, etc.), to ensure available experts are able to push in.
• Assigning progress-monitoring owner(s) to each team who are responsible for ensuring shared- content teaching teams adhere to agreed upon protocols, produce desired lesson plans, and rely on them in their respective classrooms.

• Invest in training and professional growth for instructional experts, focused both on continuing to grow their content knowledge as well as effective adult learning and facilitation techniques.
• Support schools in selecting school-based instructional experts.
• Create teacher leadership structures that include stipends and release time for teachers to take on instructional expertise roles in their buildings.

While most schools have some type of teaching team, few construct shared-content teams. Ideally, a teaching team includes all educators focused on the same grade and content-based academic standards, including teachers who work with English Learners or students with disabilities. To build shared-content teams, school leaders can:

• Identify the specific positions that will belong to each shared-content team.
• Determine who your top content experts are and how you will assign them to teams to distribute expertise.
• Identify a dedicated meeting facilitator for each team to ensure clear agendas and decision-making protocols result in high-quality work products. This role is distinct from that of the content expert.

• Develop or find high-quality protocols for use of team time, with a focus on developing work product that can be used by teachers (e.g. lesson plans, assessments, plans for differentiation based on student performance).
• Support small schools: Help small schools who may have many grade- and subject- singletons to create cross-school shared content teams by supporting cross-site collaboration and investing in virtual collaboration tools.
• Provide data: Ensure schools have the right data about their teachers to balance expertise on teams. This may include teacher performance or experience data. Some of our case study systems developed specific application processes to assess content expertise.

Re-work your master schedule to ensure that teaching teams have at least 90 minutes of collaborative time each week, as well as additional opportunities for school-wide collaboration (e.g. monthly data days). Ways to do this include:

• Repurposing and/or reorganizing existing teacher time outside the school day.
• Stacking existing planning and non-instructional blocks to create longer consecutive blocks available for collaborative planning. This may require all students in a given grade level to attend encore/electives or technology labs at the same time.
• Repurposing existing teacher planning time during the school day as collaborative time.
• Adding new planning blocks on some or all days. If you choose to add blocks within your existing school day, this reduces the number of sections that students have available for core instruction, which in turn can result in higher class sizes. To mitigate higher class sizes in core subjects and ensure sufficient coverage during the day, a school may choose to hire additional teachers for electives, rotate students through a technology lab staffed by teaching assistants or paraprofessionals, or rely on community partners. You can determine the right trade-off based on your school’s needs. You could also add new planning blocks on some or all days by extending the teacher school day.
• Scheduling early release for students one day a week, or relying on community partners for coverage one afternoon per week. This will free all instructional staff for an extended period at the same time weekly. Note that this approach will require lengthening the student day on other days during the week to avoid a loss of instructional time.

• Identify benchmarks: Identify local and state benchmarks on the length of the teacher day and year to determine how you compare
• Extend teacher day if necessary: Open a dialogue with your teachers (and their union representatives) about extending the teacher day and year to betters support teacher professional learning
• Provide professional learning days: Consider providing at least 8 professional learning days/year. Ways to do this include:
  • Repurpose existing administrative professional learning days, such as summer prep days, by auditing how this time was used in previous years to determine whether their usage is aligned to district priorities
  • Negotiate additional professional learning days into your collective bargaining agreement (CBA)
• Support school scheduling: Support schools in providing at least 90 min/week of collaborative time and additional opportunities for school-wide collaboration. Ways to do this include:
  • Provide technical support to principals as they build their schedules, including sample schedules and support on how to adapt existing schedules
  • Ensure that schools that want to pursue new schedules to support increased collaborative time have operational support, e.g. transportation that’s flexible enough to pick up kids later or earlier
  • Negotiate additional flexibilities into the CBA so that school leaders can repurpose existing teacher independent planning time
  • Negotiate additional teacher time into the CBA that can be used for collaboration

• Work with your system’s HR team to clarify the goals and purpose of teacher leadership in your system and define the roles and responsibilities teacher leaders will play to support that purpose. Teacher leaders in our case study systems focused on supporting and coaching other teachers, leading teams to share the work of instruction, responding to student learning needs, and improving teaching practices. Engage multiple stakeholders throughout this process, including teachers themselves.
• Build the case for your teacher leadership program and ensure a smooth implementation by identifying potential concerns early on and making any necessary adjustments to district policies, union contracts, expense and payroll systems to address these issues. If your teacher leadership program already exists, consider gathering feedback from participants to identify opportunities for improvement.
• When selecting teacher leaders, deliberately and rigorously recruit, select and reward excellence.
  • Review your system’s existing teacher career pathways and compensation system to ensure it allows for this type of deliberate and rigorous selection process.
  • Budget for stipends to teachers serving as Teacher Leaders facilitating cycles of observation and planning and/or collaborative time. The amount varies, but best practice is to provide a stipend for teacher leaders to both compensate them for the time beyond their regular work required to prepare for and manage cycles and collaborative time, and to recognize their instructional accomplishments as part of the school and/or district’s career path.
• Ensure that teacher leaders have dedicated time in their schedules to prepare for observations, debrief sessions and collaborative planning meetings, as well as release time and processes that make it possible for these teacher leaders to contribute what they are developing and learning back to the TL learning community.
• Measure performance and student-learning impact of teacher leader roles for the purpose of improving selection and support and recognizing strong results.

Set expectations for, and ensure schedules enable, regular cycles of observation and feedback: In the systems we studied, teachers receive most of their coaching outside of formal observations and debriefs. Instead, they integrate ongoing cycles of informal observation and growth-oriented feedback so teachers can receive frequent support from instructional experts in the building and build trusting relationships with them.

• Set expectations with teachers and instructional experts for how much time they will invest in formal and informal observation and feedback sessions:
  • Formal observation: 30-60 min/year
  • Formal debrief/feedback: 30-60 min/year
  • Informal observation: 15-20 min/week
  • Informal debrief/feedback: 15-20 min/week
• Help teachers and instructional leaders ensure that this observation and feedback time is reserved, on an ongoing basis, on their calendars, and that they have an appropriate space to meet and discuss the teacher’s progress and development needs.
• Focus on building trust and a growth mindset among the adults in your building. Demonstrate through your own actions that regular observations are supportive, rather than evaluative.
• Consider using video to enhance observations and/or enable coaches to “see” classes when they’re not there. The practice of recording instruction can also significantly enhance the coaching experience because coaches and teachers can observe the footage together later as part of their debrief discussion.

• Reduce teacher support loads:
  • Re-evaluate current staffing plans and – if expertise exists – consider allocating more instructional expert positions in the school to reduce the average teacher support load. To be truly effective, full-time coaches and administrators should have a caseload of no more than 12-22 teachers whom they are responsible for coaching, facilitating content-focused collaborative time, and evaluating through formal observations.
  • Adjust schedules so instructional experts have sufficient release time for observations and debrief for the teachers they support.
  • Ensure your instructional experts have and use tools and protocols to guide them in observations and debrief sessions.
  • Look for opportunities to provide additional training and supervision for instructional experts, to ensure they and the teachers they support are generating maximum value from their time together.
• In keeping with your instructional vision, support school leaders in playing an instructional role:
  • Incorporate into the school leader evaluation system a clear structure for monitoring and holding principals and assistant principals accountable for cultivating a strong professional learning culture at their school.
  • Clearly and deliberately define school leader roles to distribute instructional leadership and enable more attention to professional learning in the building.
  • Ensure that school leaders have the support they need to do their jobs well, including sufficient release time for observations and debrief, tools and protocols to use this time well, and ongoing training and supervision.