Partners In School Innovation
renewing the promise of public education
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 Our Results
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Silicon Valley Initiative

 

 



Our Approach

Partners in School Innovation: Core Service Model Levels


Core Instructional Program

Integrated Systems for Professional Learning

Results-Oriented
Leadership


We work with teachers to:

  • Establish a rigorous standards-based curriculum in literacy and English Language Development
  • Develop standards-based lessons that incorporate effective pedagogical practices for all students, particularly African American, Latino and English Learner students
  • Plan and refine weekly instruction in a results-oriented way
  • Build a system of strategic interventions for struggling learners
  • Purposefully use data from a comprehensive set of assessments in order to identify student needs and inform instruction


We work with leaders to:

  • Build an effective leadership team that cultivates a professional learning community within the school
  • Foster grade-level collaboration in which teachers plan standards-based instruction together, analyze their results, and adjust practice using Results-Oriented Cycles of Inquiry (ROCI)
  • Plan high-quality whole staff development on instructional strategies attuned to the needs of African American, Latino and English Learner students
  • Create a system of instructional coaching that provides teachers with differentiated support to improve instructional practice


We work with leaders to:

  • Set and sustain a clear and compelling vision and establish school-wide goals for student achievement and school capacity-building
  • Develop a theory of action for reaching goals and an aligned instructional action plan
  • Implement a system for monitoring implementation and outcomes and adjusting the school's approach to improvement along the way

How We Work: Service Delivery

Foundational Planning Sessions We begin our partnership with planning sessions and professional development to set the stage for the year ahead and begin developing the basic components of a core instructional program.
Professional Learning Communities Once the year begins, we organize a cross-school professional learning community (or "network") within each district that we partner with. These provide principals, coaches and teacher leaders with professional development on our Core Service Model above and facilitate shared learning and accountability. We co-develop the sessions with district leaders to ensure alignment and coherence with district goals, priorities and initiatives.
Site-Based Partnership PartnersSI also provides site-level implementation support 2 - 3 days a week. Each participating school is provided with a team of School Innovation Partners who partner with principals, coaches and teacher leaders on the implementation of the Core Service Model. SIPs meet weekly with school leaders for joint planning to improve student outcomes. They then work strategically throughout the week with leaders and grade-level teams to carry out the work.
District-Level Partnership To ensure systems-level alignment, PartnersSI's District Partnership Directors (DPDs) meet regularly with designated instructional leaders and assistant superintendents who supervise principals. This district-level partnership ensures ongoing, two-way communication about the work as well as continuous learning about what it takes to achieve extraordinary success in low-performing schools.

How We Work: Our Approach

We establish authentic partnerships with our school and district colleagues by working side-by-side with them and sharing responsibility for student outcomes. Our partnerships follow a series of phases that mirror the continuous improvement cycle, ensuring that the work we do is explicitly agreed upon, planned, implemented, and adjusted, along the way, based on data.

Our Coaching Strategies

We use four essential coaching strategies to build the capacity of teachers and leaders to sustain improvement over time.

  1. We engage in action-driven conversations, where we work one-to-one with principals, coaches and teacher leaders to plan, discuss barriers, brainstorm solutions and plan for next steps.
  2. We engage with our partners in accelerated action cycles where we strategically demonstrate early results in targeted classrooms and grade levels that are then used to create momentum for further improvement efforts.
  3. We use the apprenticeship model for capacity and skill development, enabling our partners to learn particular skills through our modeling and guided practice, leading to independent practice.
  4. We coach grade-level teams and leadership teams to become adaptive learning teams that are able to grapple productively with problems that have no easy solutions.