Inclusive Instructional Leadership: Three Districts Foster a Culture of Learning and Achievement

Leaders at the district, school, and classroom level are finding ways to work more effectively to engage each and every student in learning. By creating collaborative school cultures that involve adults and students in decision-making about their own learning, and by focusing the combined efforts of educators at all levels on instructional improvement, students are achieving more – sometimes far exceeding educators’ expectations.

In New Philadelphia City Schools, The Richland School of Academic Arts (RSAA), and the Washington Court House City Schools, educators are using leadership team structures and inclusive instructional leadership (IIL) practices to impact student achievement.

Inclusive instructional leadership (IIL) supports educators in school districts and schools to promote high levels of learning for all students, including students with learning challenges and/or those receiving special education services. It focuses on instructional leadership through the use of four key strategies – (1) promoting systemwide learning, (2) prioritizing teaching and learning, (3) building capacity through support and accountability, and (4) sustaining an open and collaborative culture – and associated leadership team structures [i.e., district leadership team (DLT), building leadership team (BLT), and teacher- based teams (TBT)].

All three districts – New Philadelphia, RSAA, and Washington Court House – saw improvements in adult and student learning through their involvement in Ohio IIL professional learning opportunities. Often, improvement efforts started small – with one or two individuals participating in the professional learning – and grew to include additional educators and schools. The goal in all three districts is systemwide engagement and continuous improvement through the meaningful involvement of all faculty and staff and increased achievement on the part of all students.

“What started with one individual, a principal, in OLi4 will expand to have additional folks participating in AiPL next year, which is going to be awesome, and we're excited about it. For us, it’s about building our structures and increasing teacher engagement in the process. When I came in, there wasn't a lot of that going on, and I wanted the principal to build that leadership capacity within our staff. That has definitely happened over the course of the last two years as a result of OLi4,” explained Scott Will,Superintendent of RSAA. Will has been Superintendent of RSAA for about five years, having spent 20 years in a traditional public school district.

RSAA is a community school in Mansfield, Ohio that serves about 350 K-8 students through the integration of academic core curriculum and visual and performing arts. One hundred percent of the student population is characterized by the state as economically disadvantaged with the majority of students being Black or biracial. “This year is the first year where our Black and biracial population is higher than our Caucasian population. That's exciting, too, because for us, that's more reflective of our community and it's been important for our families to see,” said Will.

Dr. Tom Bailey, who served as Washington Court House City Schools superintendent for eight years and recently resigned to take a position in another district, describes his approach to involving principals in OLi4 since being introduced to the program by SST Region 14 Director Jeff Royalty:

AiPL requires partner districts to identify a school to serve as an “incubator site,” identifying strategies for increasing student engagement, learning from the experience, and scaling what has worked well to other schools in the district. AiPL teams include members from the incubator school (i.e., principal, teachers, others) and central office personnel, including the person responsible for special education services in the district. New Philadelphia’s South Elementary School, led by Principal Christa Frantz, served as the “test” school in AiPL.

“We’re a grade 2-3 building and our AiPL team is representative of the building in that there are two second grade teachers, two third grade teachers, a Title teacher, and a special education teacher. Mr. Williams and our Special Education Director are also part of the team and members are also on our PBIS team and on our BLT,” offered Frantz. “This helps bring the work to the rest of the staff through TBTs, and during DLT and PBIS meetings. It’s been really great in helping everyone use the same language, streamline the work, and work toward the same goal, but maybe through different lenses,” she added.

Elevating teacher voice, increasing teacher collective efficacy. “Using the word ‘engagement’ and having the teachers reflect has really made an impact. Mrs. Frantz has implemented many other initiatives that have helped, but I think AIPL over the last two years has really been a big part of engaging teachers and supporting them in reflecting on their own and student learning,” explained Williams.

“Those teachers leading their colleagues through the process of what our expectations for students should be was key to everyone being involved in the process, and really understanding that we valued their opinion, and that this was not us telling them; this was us together with teachers deciding what was best and using their voice,” recalled Frantz.

Teacher collective efficacy – teachers’ belief in their ability to positively influence student learning – is an important factor in impacting student achievement and one that has been evaluated as part of the OLi4 initiative. Simply put, principals from all parts of Ohio who participated in OLi4 improved teacher collective efficacy in their schools.

In one case study conducted through the OLi4 project evaluation team, Celina City Schools district leaders reported that “OLi4 reinforced the idea of collective teacher efficacy and sharing those mastery experiences through their teams... they made it possible for all principals to participate together in OLi4 so they would be able to talk about their new learning and work collaboratively to implement that new learning.” (ohioleadership.org). Similarly, in Kent City Schools, “By connecting individual leadership coaching with teacher team support… Kent City School District is building collective efficacy and a collaborative culture of continuous improvement.” (escneo.org).

Principals in OLi4 learn how to be collaborative leaders. Research in Mid-Western Educational Researcher (Howley, et al., 2019) examined OLi4’s impact via a quasi-experimental design. It found statistically significant improvements in principals' attitudes toward inclusive instructional leadership, especially in areas like collaborative problem-solving and professional learning (effect sizes .47 for attitude, .38 for practice) (mwera.org). Since collective efficacy thrives on shared leadership and joint instructional reflection, this suggests OLi4 fosters conditions for teachers’ collective belief to grow.

In a 2022 Learning Policy Institute report that reviewed principal professional learning programs, Darling-Hammond and colleagues described OLi4 as “perhaps the most intensive and tightly focused approach” of the programs studied, which seeks to build principals’ capacities to be inclusive instructional leaders (p. 34). Authors further noted that “comparing survey responses of participants to those of a matched control group, researchers found that program participants reported significantly higher ratings both on their attitudes toward inclusive instructional leadership practices and on their practices of working with teachers on collaborative problem-solving and collaborative professional learning.” (p. 24).

Superintendent Will describes increases in principal capacity to engage teachers in collaborative problem-solving in RSAA:

Return on (Instructional) Investment

All three districts – New Philadelphia, RSAA, and Washington Court House – saw improvements in adult and student learning. During South’s first year in AiPL, the team focused solely on students, teaching characteristics of the academic behavior they wanted to observe in the classroom. “We called it Quaker PRIDE – Perseverant, Responsible, Inquisitive, Determined, and Engaged – and spent a lot of time honing in on what this looked and sounded like in the classroom through literacy activities,” explained Frantz. In year two, the AiPL team focused on staff and what it meant to be reflective about the practices they were using.

“We’re very very proud of the work of the results and I truly think AiPL made the impact. It made teachers stop and ask, ‘am I engaging kids, is this student engaged?’ We learned different ways of communicating because sometimes teachers struggle being told what to do by other teachers. We learned through AiPL that it’s not really telling; it’s working collaboratively,” recalled Williams. The increase in ELA and math proficiency rates were not seen in other New Philadelphia schools.

Bailey and Wills also noticed that principals and teachers working differently. “When I got to Washington Court House, there was a whole math curriculum sitting in boxes never opened. Through OLi4, principals were holding teachers accountable for implementing the curriculum, but they were also helping to guide them through implementation, as opposed to just throwing it at them and saying, ‘here, have fun!’ It was deeper, it was richer, and less surface-level about implementation. The conversations were about why we're doing this, and what needs to be done, not only in curriculum, but in taking into account the students and their needs,” described Bailey.

“The biggest thing I noticed is the interaction and engagement of my principal with the staff. He became more of a mentor and facilitator of what they were trying to do. It definitely created a better climate,” said Will. “The accountability and ownership of what we’re doing has just grown,” he said.

Participation in AiPL “helped our teachers look at the individual student and to stop for a beat and look at the whole child,” said Williams. “Our students started to have high expectations for themselves and our OST scores are one data point that we can look at and our OELPA4 scores for our English learner population are another. I’ve never had this before, but 12 students will exit the program this year because of their OELPA scores. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you’re going from two or three to 12, if was a big difference. One little guy, and I’ve never seen this in all of my years in education, went from 603 in the fall to 704 in the spring. I was shocked and am so happy for him, recognizing the work that went into this on his part, as well as the staff’s part in supporting him,” described Frantz.

“Those academics in the forefront of our students’ minds really did make a change in their belief about themselves too,” she Frantz. “The benefits of AiPL have been tremendous for my building and I would love to see it continue because I know when our kids leave South after 3rd grade, they go to a 4th grade building and they’ll want to know, ‘what are the expectations of me?’”

References

Darling-Hammond, L., Wechsler, M. E., Levin, S., Leung-Gagné, M., & Tozer, S. (2022). Developing effective principals: What kind of learning matters? [Report]. Learning Policy Institute. https://doi.org/10.54300/641.201.

Howley, C. B., & Howley, A. (2023). The evidence basis for primary features of the Ohio Improvement Process: Data-driven decision making within leadership teams. WordFarmers Associates.

Howley, C., Howley, A., Yahn, J., VanHorn, P., & Telfer, D. (2019). Inclusive instructional leadership: A quasi-experimental study of a professional development program for principals. Mid-Western Educational Researcher, 31(1), 3–23.