Hop, Skip, Leapfrog

This was, perhaps, never more true than during the pandemic. Driven by the urgency of meeting new needs, schools and districts seeking to improve and innovate had to move with agility, proximity, and transparency. Given the sustained duration of the crisis, short-term behavior changes morphed into new habits and mindsets.

Explore the ways schools and districts figured out how to:

• Create new, essential supports for implementing hops, skips, and leaps practice

• Shift core structures and systems to increase resources and reduce friction, enabling greater agility and responsiveness

• Drive forward progress through leadership processes that engaged and built collective ownership for solving challenges

As you explore these examples, consider how these different shifts might be relevant to your own school or system.

Adopting new hops, skips, and leaps in practice meant quickly putting aligned supports in place around students and teachers. Leadership teams needed to quickly build teacher capacity through targeted professional learning structures that modeled new instructional expectations. Centrally-created instructional materials spurred focus on priority learning standards, lowering the planning and resource curation lift for teachers. New partnerships and people capacity created additional, critical wraparound supports for students and families.

Supporting Staff Professional Learning

Leaders leveraged remote tools and approaches to offer learning opportunities to educators – teachers and leaders – that were more agile and personalized. Teachers were able to opt-in to the support and development they needed as well as collaborate across sites more effectively.

Focusing Instruction Through Central Materials and Resources

Recognizing that teachers needed help prioritizing instruction and using aligned resources, central office teams leveraged new learning management capabilities to centrally adopt new curricular tools, build model units, and foster greater collaboration across teams.

Creating New, Wraparound Supports for Students and Families

Leaders tapped into unlikely partners and staffing configurations to maximize support for student and family engagement, wellbeing, and achievement.

Districts needed to shift structures and supports to align resources and create greater flexibility, efficiency, and transparency. In addition to investing in technology platforms that created more equitable access, teams rethought the use of space and time to maximize support and instructional opportunities. They invested in consistent communications to students, staff, families, and their broader communities. They deployed staffing resources — people and budgets — towards highest need areas with greater agility.

Increasing Simplified Access to Necessary Technology

Nearly every system noted that improving access to instruction and learning materials online required both tackling challenges as well as simplifying structures. These investments increased usage, lowered perceived barriers, and encouraged greater collaboration across common platforms.

Reimagining Use of Time and Space

Given distancing requirements and virtual learning, teams needed to rethink how and when child and adult learning could happen. This included using both time and space more flexibly for different groups of students as well as creating dedicated time for new activities, often in new places.

Improving Communication

Leaders identified ways to build more frequent, consistent, and often two-way communication with students, staff, families, and community members.

Putting People Resources Proximate to Highest-Need Areas

Teams sought to redeploy personnel time and resources towards students and tasks that needed greatest attention. This meant using existing capacity in new, flexible ways, as well as reimagining structures for teaming to create greater efficiency of learning and implementation. In some cases, districts brought in new human capacity into the district through new partnerships.

District teams needed to put in place processes for systems visioning, change management, planning, and improvement that offered clarity on an overall “north star” vision, working inclusively with stakeholders inside and outside their system to prioritize action.

Offering a “North Star” Clarity On Beliefs, Aims, and Quality

Teams leveraged existing instructional and innovation visions to “double-down” on beliefs about teaching and learning in their systems. Working from these visions, teams used tools that clearly communicated aims and expectations to increase commitment to working in new ways to achieve adopted pre-pandemic objectives.

Inclusively Building Understanding of Needs and Stakeholder Buy-In, and Ownership for Change

While leaders were able to leverage existing visions and tools, they needed to work with their staff, students, families, and broader community to define goals for improvement and change. This work required focusing effort, engaging stakeholders in inclusive design and planning, and building broader teams to create shared ownership of goals.