Building a vision for instruction — A professional learning journey for school leaders
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 with specific focus on equity concerns, 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.”