My conversation with Laurie Regan, Assistant Superintendent of the Attleboro School District in Massachusetts was wide-ranging. The district is making a lot of exciting moves collectively by empowering leaders and educators to leverage their expertise and share in the decision-making process.

"Our current professional learning focus is on ensuring students actively hold the cognitive load during lessons, fostering deeper engagement and understanding, with strategic support for our multilingual learners (MLLs) and students with IEPs. A key outcome of this work is to intentionally plan lessons with learning targets and the necessary scaffolds for our diverse learners.

Our principals are the instructional leaders within their schools, with district coordinators in content areas, MLL, and Title I offering valuable expertise and guidance. Instructional coaches integrate district and school priorities into their coaching cycles. We then utilize our interim assessment data to track student growth from beginning to end of year, providing insights on the effectiveness of our instructional shifts.

Before the pandemic, we partnered with an external organization called Great Schools Partnership to develop our Portrait of a Graduate (POG), which embeds essential social and behavioral competencies. We are now intentionally connecting these skills within our Portrait and integrating into learning experiences, reinforcing the 'why' behind the lesson design. Recently, we have also developed a digital learning portfolio that starts in kindergarten and progresses through grade 12 to showcase student learning aligned with our POG. We envision this as a metacognitive tool that fosters internal motivation and allows students to track their own growth and interests over time. This initiative is being spearheaded by our Teaching and Learning Council, a labor management group that began its work prior to the pandemic and recently completed a successful small pilot. We are now planning the next phase of implementation, ensuring that the teachers who piloted the portfolio can offer their experience to their students.

While much of our professional learning is built and delivered by internal staff, we do appreciate partners and have benefitted from their expertise. Our participation in Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education Learning Acceleration Network has been instrumental in focusing our efforts. And working with a consultant from TNTP we engaged in the Instructional Prioritization Institute, a process that allowed us to analyze our data and identify key areas for meaningful change. TNTP conducts learning walks across our eight buildings, providing valuable feedback and identifying areas of progress and growth."