Grade Level: Secondary
Main Focus: Creating structures, practices, and tools to promote and monitor instructional improvement and consistency
Additional Facilitation Options: Instructional leadership, Professional Learning Communities, Accountability

Investigates how an administrative leadership team structures common planning time for teachers and employs informal classroom observations to support and monitor progress toward the consistent implementation of instructional strategies.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Being directive in establishing instructional expectations
Additional Facilitation Options: Instructional modeling, Leadership

Shows how a principal prioritized her time to develop teachers' skills through modeling to clarify her expectations for classroom instruction. Highlights the leadership moves a principal made to focus on instruction, including moving her office to the hallway, tutoring students during in-school hours, and conducting a morning reading session.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Developing strong data-driven instruction through PD
Additional Facilitation Options: School leadership team, Vertical teams, Instructional consistency, Classroom walkthroughs

Follows the process used to establish a data-driven culture among faculty through highly focused PD centered on assessing students' progress and setting goals. Explains how a principal set up structures to support vertical and grade-level planning based on an in-depth understanding of students' progress toward SMART goals.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Providing, monitoring, and refining the use of interventions
Additional Facilitation Options: Targeting areas of student need

Investigates the potential risks, benefits, and implications of gradually rolling out interventions as a key strategy for addressing and targeting student need.

Grade Level: Middle
Main Focus: Involving students in the assessment and data-analysis process
Additional Facilitation Options: Student ownership, Defining academic expectations, Accountability, Teaching Practices

Explores why and how a school developed a formalized structure called Test-N-Talk to support teacher-student reflection about test results and student achievement. Discusses the tools and the variations on the structures, as well as shares the potential benefits and challenges associated with the Test-N-Talk process.

Grade Level: High School
Main Focus: Teaching and learning in a block schedule
Additional Facilitation Options: Benefits and challenges of block scheduling

Explores how a high school transitions from a traditional schedule to a block schedule to improve the quality of instruction. Focuses on how the school leadership creates buy-in to the new schedule, the impact the block has on teaching and learning and school culture, and how the administration supports and monitors effective teaching within the block.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Establishing structures and protocols for data discussions
Additional Facilitation Options: Leadership teams, Instructional consistency

Explores how a principal implemented "Data Talks," a systemized, schoolwide protocol for ensuring teachers know how to use data to drive instruction. Highlights how she developed the roles of "lead teachers" to support their grade-level peers in honing their instruction.

Grade Level: Secondary, Middle
Main Focus: Developing faculty capacity to talk about and strengthen instruction
Additional Facilitation Options: Unwrapping standards, professional learning community, principal walkthroughs, coaching

Spotlights the highly deliberate way that a school prepares, supports, and holds teachers accountable for the development of instructional practices that are intentional and based on students' needs. Provides a window into how to develop a faculty that is purposeful and evidence-based in its work.

Grade Level: Middle
Main Focus: Developing grade-level goals and passing requirements
Additional Facilitation Options: Defining academic expectations, Accountability, Student Progress-Monitoring

Explores how a school established a grade-level promotion system that not only standardizes the content and skills that students are required to learn at each grade level but also endorses students' efforts. Looks at the structures and tools designed for students to achieve grade-level goals.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Gaining buy-in of faculty for principal's instructional vision
Additional Facilitation Options: Defining academic expectations, entry plan

Shows how a principal with secondary experience entered an elementary school and led an effort to cultivate classroom consistency through the adoption of workstations. Illustrates the importance of gaining buy-in for an instructional vision, leveraging experts in areas in which one lacks expertise, and putting in place the supports and structures necessary to pursue instructional change.

Grade Level: Secondary
Main Focus: Establishing and managing partnerships with outside organizations
Additional Facilitation Options: Identifying financial and community resources, Managing effective tutoring

Explores how school leaders built partnerships with local universities to provide its students with intensive, ongoing tutoring to prepare them for the MCAS. Looks at the strategies the school uses for monitoring the effectiveness of partnership programs and maintaining positive relations with partner organizations.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Cultivating relationships as a leader
Additional Facilitation Options: Having difficult conversations, Adaptive leadership

Demonstrates how one leader employed his personal leadership skills and behaviors to drive the changes he wanted to see. Provides a window into how the principal values and invests in relationship-building with students, teachers, staff, and community members.

Grade Level: Pre-K–5
Main Focus: Building a Professional Learning Community through collaborative examination of student work
Additional Facilitation Options: Professional development, School culture, School-entry strategies, Looking at student work

Analyzes strategies for facilitating data-driven professional dialogue and engaging adults in collaborative instructional decision-making. Focuses on how school staff analyzes student data to identify a strategic area of need, collectively implements a focused instructional response, and collaboratively examines student work to monitor the effectiveness of instruction.

Grade Level: Secondary
Main Focus: Modeling relationship-building with students
Additional Facilitation Options: Fostering positive school culture, School turnaround

Highlights how one principal made it his personal priority to create a school environment in which students feel safe and cared for. Describes the methods he uses with students and teachers, from talking with students in the halls to addressing teachers who do not believe in his vision.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Raising professional norms for teachers
Additional Facilitation Options: School turnaround, Aligned staff

Relates how a new principal established higher expectations for professionalism at a struggling school through explicit direction, observation and feedback, and collaborative PD structures. Also shows her alignment of external partners to better support academic goals.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Staffing and defining the work of a leadership team
Additional Facilitation Options: Building leadership capacity among staff

Shares a principal's process for identifying candidates and selecting members to form the school's leadership team. Explores how the principal unified the team and restructured the overall goals of its work. Highlights each member's distinct roles and responsibilities, and specifically how they support teachers to raise student achievement.

Grade Level: Secondary
Main Focus: Building school identity and community
Additional Facilitation Options: Leadership

Highlights how a principal led a cultural turnaround of a failing middle school by implementing programs to develop a progressive discipline system and by establishing schoolwide rituals, routines, and slogans to forge a healthy school culture and climate.

Grade Level: Secondary
Main Focus: Creating a roadmap to set behavioral expectations
Additional Facilitation Options: Leadership, School turnaround

Focuses on the practices the leadership team put in place to define "The Bruce Randolph Way" by developing a plan that describes the systems, structure, and protocols of the school. Demonstrates how the school uses the "Challenge 2010" plan as a tool to define a school culture and support new teachers in successfully managing their classrooms.

Grade Level: Secondary
Main Focus: Creating structures and practices for managing student behavior
Additional Facilitation Options: Modeling, Defining behavioral expectations

Explores ways to support teachers and students to address discipline and behavior issues in a way that is mutually respectful and positive. Highlights how interventions can support struggling students and help to build relationships between teachers and students.

Grade Level: Elementary
Main Focus: Prioritizing input of faculty and community
Additional Facilitation Options: Schoolwide enrichment, Leadership, Gaining buy-in

Illustrates how a school forges relationships within and outside of the school by eliciting input and responding accordingly. Shows how one principal prioritized getting staff, family, and community input in order to cultivate investment in and commitment to the school—from conducting a survey of the community to hiring an outside consultant.