We're back with #100DistrictConversations! We've got 40 more conversations to complete by the end of the calendar year and #61 is a great one. Thank you Sujata Bhatt for connecting me with Adrienne Usher, Deputy Superintendent of Bullitt County Public Schools in Kentucky.

"Our North Star is simple: Students Matter Most. Every decision we make gets filtered through one question: "Will it improve student success?" Strategic plans of over 25 pages make it difficult to design the accountability measures for all of those pieces. Instead, we favor focused guiding documents that we can leverage for decision making and alignment.

As a district leader, when I think about hiring, placement, and professional learning, the bottom line is that while we can't teach someone to love kids, we can teach them how to teach. Our instructional coaching model is built upon 3 elements, creating a spider web of connection points between district vision and classroom implementation:

1. The Cohort Model is our foundation: In a district of our size, when we want sustainable change in teaching practice, we use cohorts led by our instructional coaches. Most meet monthly, combining learning with the expectation that teachers try new strategies between sessions.

2. Lab-hosted classrooms: From these cohorts, we are working to re-establish model classrooms where educators can observe authentic implementation of the strategies and models discussed in cohorts.

3. Strong instructional coaching: We blend federal and general funds to pay for these positions. I was an instructional coach and understand the impact they can have on students and teachers. Coaches act as anchor points within our district, supporting the key initiatives that the district would like to see scale to every school.

Each lever is about innovation through choice because cohort participation is voluntary and spreads organically by word of mouth. When a teacher joins a cohort, they share learning with their building teams – that's how scaling starts to happen. We also run monthly drop-in design sessions from 3-6PM. These sessions are opportunities for cohort members to bring additional teachers from their school in to plan and build learning experiences.

Not everything is about innovation and pushing forward on our guiding documents. Sometimes we need to focus on foundational learning by supporting educators with classroom management and unpacking standards. This year, we welcomed 80 new teachers, and 65% didn't come to us from traditional educator prep programs. That's an increasing trend we are seeing post-COVID. Our mandatory "THRIVE" cohort supports teachers in their first 3 years, pairing them with mentors. Our goal is that no matter where you are in the organization, you can access our instructional vision around authentic instruction.

We have started using and building AI chatbots using Playlab.AI. We talk about traditional, transitional, and transformational – the chatbots aim to help teachers redesign their lessons in the direction of transformational without dismissing traditional models outright. Our High-Quality Instructional Coalition is a team of teachers that tests these tools and provides feedback. We can analyze the feedback to better understand teacher pain points and questions.

Looking ahead, we're preparing for Kentucky’s shift toward vibrant learning and student defense of learning style assessments and working with a variety of partners to help our schools to create structures and tools for quality implementation."