Narrowing the Focus: Honing a Plan to Close Equity Gaps in Instruction

"If we expect to dismantle historical patterns of inequity in DPS, we have to stay laser focused on putting the right work in front of students and giving them the best possible instruction. And we cannot use the pandemic as an excuse for why we’re not doing that." - Heather Haines

The Problem:

Ensuring Consistency and Rigor in Turbulent Times

Heather Haines is no stranger to complexity. She oversees 30 campuses in Denver’s predominantly low-income and Latinx Southwest region — from early childhood classrooms to high schools. But when the pandemic hit, the number of critical issues demanding her attention grew exponentially.

Amid a blizzard of new concerns — from health and safety to technology for online learning — her challenge was to stay laser focused on instructional equity and improvement. She had to be crystal clear — to herself and others — about where everyone should be focusing their energies, and about how they would do so.

The Innovation:

A Streamlined Plan for Building Needed Capacities

To confront this challenge, Haines led the development of a concise 90-day plan with a handful of priorities, benchmarks, and key actions to align instructional improvement efforts from the regional office to the classroom level. With a calendar of check-ins and implementation steps, this “playbook” revolved around two high-leverage focus areas:

1. Get close to student work to monitor the learning
2. Ensure all teachers have deeply internalized and planned for the lessons they would teach each day

Her thinking: By using comprehensive data to identify key equity gaps that exist across schools, and clearly stating goals and drivers to close these gaps, she could build her teachers’ and leaders’ capacities to increase rigor, engagement, and learning across her region of schools.

The Story:

Planning for Vertical Alignment

Zeroing in on the Gaps

When schools switched to remote learning in the spring, Haines saw existing gaps in instructional practice increase dramatically. Too frequently teachers regularly replaced tasks from a rigorous curriculum with lower-level ones. Leaders and teachers alike focused almost entirely on their own moves — like directing students to turn-and-talk — and not on what students were saying and producing.

In fact, Haines had been working on these issues since they were identified in an extensive instructional audit last year. But the pandemic exacerbated these gaps — a major concern given studies showing traditionally under-served students get grade-level assignments less often, though they’re just as able to succeed on them.

Prioritizing Skill Building

In these trends, Haines saw a skill-building opportunity. Given the rigor of new standards-aligned curriculum, not all teachers and school leaders fully understood the content deeply enough to see the consequences of substituting their own lower-level tasks. Often teachers mistakenly reduced the rigor in order to make the content more accessible to students who were behind.

Further, based on observations, Heather and her team could tell that not all teachers knew how to monitor student work in real time — especially in a virtual environment.

For the problem of below grade-level tasks, Haines placed her bets on unit and lesson-internalization skills; teachers would more likely stay true to the curriculum if they better understood how to identify the most rigorous parts of an upcoming lesson and plan carefully to teach towards it. Learning how to strengthen her teacher’s approach to planning and monitor student work during lessons — especially when conducted remotely — would be a matter of training, practice, and feedback.

Setting Goals, Defining Roles and Naming Actions

In this plan, Haines set measurable benchmarks for each level of leadership, and timelines for meeting them. After focusing on student attendance and engagement in weeks 1–3, for weeks 4–9 the goal is that in 90% of observed lessons, all Black and Brown students have the opportunity to engage in grade-level, curriculum-based tasks.

Haines defines everyone’s role in building these capacities. School leaders will observe virtual lessons and curriculum internalization meetings. And her regional team will develop PD and coach school leaders on recognizing effective remote learning and giving teachers actionable feedback.

For Haines, naming the target demographic was critical: “When we talk about leading for equity, we need to name the students who we have most under-served… When we say ‘all students’, it’s not specific enough to the work that we really have to do.”

Shaping the Work

As a regional instructional superintendent, Haines sees her role as shaping the work of the 8-person team she directly manages — including two assistant instructional superintendents and four subject matter specialists. Hence her 90-day plan includes a calendar with common agendas for her team’s check-ins and co-observations with principals.

In the weeks ahead, she will observe those check-ins herself to coach her team. She also plans weekly meetings with the group to review progress monitoring data, including trends observed in virtual instruction and in principals’ abilities to identify high-leverage action steps for teachers.

Haines says part of deciding what to hold tightly to across schools and classrooms is deciding what to put off. For now, she’s not emphasizing the specifics of her region’s coaching model; her main focus is getting principals proficient in observing virtual instruction and identifying high-impact action steps for teachers.