I have interviewed a couple of leaders who have worked their way through the ranks from classroom teacher to superintendent. Their context, empathy, and expectations are a superpower! Karen Barber, Superintendent of Santa Rosa County Public Schools in Florida is that leader. So many gems in conversation #90!

"I’ve spent 29 years in this district and my background is in curriculum and instruction. It's where I earned my doctorate and it's the lens through which I have approached every role I have held. When I became Superintendent six years ago, I brought that same commitment to building instructional leadership capacity across all 36 of our schools.

Every month, our principals and assistant principals gather for 90-minute sessions where we dig into the research and practice of instructional leadership together. Grounded in The Wallace Foundation's research on effective school principals, we have built a culture where being a school leader means being an instructional leader first. We have done full year book studies on titles like Leverage Leadership by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, examining the seven levers that matter most and asking hard questions about how leaders are actually spending their time.

This leadership commitment isn not new. We launched a STEAM initiative 12 years ago with Discovery Education that created a teacher leader corps through a train-the-trainer model. That program is still running today and the conditions it created made everything we are doing now possible.

Over time, we have layered in research-backed frameworks like Marzano's new observation rubric, the student-led academic team model, and The Opportunity Myth, all focused on ensuring students experience rigorous, standards-based instruction every day. This year we added The Rigor Walk, a classroom walkthrough tool built around 3 pillars of instruction. Standards-aligned instruction has climbed to 93.1% and we're seeing fewer high school seniors at risk of not graduating because we are addressing gaps earlier.

I walk classrooms at all 36 schools on a 9-week cycle alongside my team and principals. The most common implementation gap we find is that the taxonomy of instruction is sometimes too low for where students should be in the school year. That's where coaching and professional learning come in, particularly around over-scaffolding and releasing more ownership to students.

We have just partnered with MagicSchool AI to help teachers use AI to build learning progressions and generate standards-based lesson ideas. Our Teachers on Special Assignment (TOSAs) are supporting the rollout. While newer teachers have embraced it quickly, we are being intentional about training everyone well.

We have a menu of professional development options and we design tasks with rigor that force individual leaders and educators to be interdependent. The scalability challenge across a large district with limited time and resources is real. If structures like PLCs are going to work at the school level, then I have to model that same structure with my leaders, because that's how things stick."