Conversation #27 is great example of a district leader building trust with partners and committing to a long term professional learning strategy that is both complex and paced for scale. Angela Holt, is the incredible Director of Curriculum & Development in Woonsocket, RI.

"What does student-centered learning actually look like? It's not just about putting students in groups; it's about truly empowering them to take ownership of their learning. This cognitive shift hasn't been easy, but we’ve been at it now for almost four years. We laid a foundation through our collaboration with Throughline Learning working with the "learning pit" from James Nottingham, helping teachers embrace productive struggle as a critical part of the learning process for students. Now we are working with the team at Instructional Empowerment (IE) to change the way we approach teaching and learning.

This is year four of our IE partnership. We started small, focusing on increasing discourse for our multilingual learners, and then expanded it to all students. We have built a 'coalition of the willing', with principals identifying teachers in their buildings who are ready to embrace this work as we gradually bring more teachers along. We are also using data dashboards to track progress and inform our decisions. We have made significant progress. We are seeing students who used to be silent in English class now actively engaged in discussions.

Much of our progress has come from focusing on and returning to three key questions:

1. Can our students articulate why they're doing what they're doing in every lesson, every day
2. Are we truly standards-driven, not textbook-driven?
3. How are we connecting learning to our competencies for success, which we've brought all the way down to kindergarten? Even our youngest learners are saying, "Today I was a reflective thinker because I did…"

Perhaps the biggest challenge has been moving away from the textbook as the 'bible' and seeing it instead as a resource for implementing standards. We are encouraging teachers to be critical users of their textbooks, supplementing materials intentionally and understanding why they're making those choices. We are working on backward mapping from standards to create engaging, student-centered tasks. This frees up teachers to facilitate learning and move around the classroom, supporting students as they work in teams.

Our innovation specialists support classrooms as embedded coaches. The data speaks for itself: in classrooms where teachers have received this support, we are seeing double-digit increases on RICAS (state assessment) scores. We are also providing coaching for our administrators, emphasizing the importance of not 'rescuing the ducklings' and allowing for productive struggle.

We have invested in sending our principals to conferences and providing them with coaching. We meet with them twice a month – once to discuss instructional strategies and creating student-centered schools, and again to focus on district strategies and adult learning."