Instructional Leadership Team SY 23-24

Purpose and Implementation

In New York City, we are committed to deepening and expanding our shared commitment to equity and excellence to ensure that every student will be ready for the next stage of their education, and ultimately, their career and their future as empowered agents of change in their communities and world. The knowledge and skills required for students to thrive in the 21st century continue to rapidly change. The exponential growth of literacy demands is closely connected to our changing economy, labor market, and technological advancements.

We need students to be critical thinkers, capable of working with new information in order to solve unstructured problems, many of which we cannot yet anticipate. We must also acknowledge the lack of access and opportunity for historically underserved students.

As a system, our instructional priorities and practices need to shift to meet these changing demands with every student in mind.

The New York City Department of Education Framework for Great Schools represents what great schools must have. With the Instructional Leadership Framework, we are continuing to deepen this commitment – namely: rigorous instruction, collaborative teachers, effective leadership, and a clear focus on student achievement.

The Instructional Leadership Framework is a system-wide approach to:

• Ensure that every school has the strategy and tools to continuously improve instruction, and provide our students with the rigorous learning experiences they all deserve, and

• Take stock to identify what instruction every student is receiving, how they’re receiving it, why they’re receiving it, and how it can be improved.

The Instructional Leadership Framework combines research-based practices outlined in Teaching Advanced Literacy Skills and the tenets of Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education. We know that successful schools drive improvement through forming and empowering teams dedicated solely to instruction and leading instructional improvements. Though we know that sometimes these teams take on different names, for the purpose of this approach, we’ll refer to these teams as Instructional Leadership Teams (ILTs). An ILT is driven by the belief that collective instructional leadership and strengthening teacher practice has the greatest impact on student learning.

The Instructional Leadership Framework supports leaders in planning, organizing, and streamlining their schools’ work in order to ensure that every student in NYC experiences instruction that supports them in developing advanced literacy skills in learning environments that affirm students’ strengths and their racial and cultural identities, while developing students’ abilities to connect across cultures and think critically.

Action

Supporting diverse learners means providing strong core instruction. To get there, we need to make sure every student in every classroom is engaging with rich and inclusive curriculum materials and with appropriate assessments so that we understand and meet their needs. This by no means is an easy task, yet it is essential that we undertake this work in order to raise academic achievement for every student. This is the critical work at the center of the Instructional Leadership Framework.

As we engage students in learning through responsive and rigorous teaching, we must continue to shine light on two recurring challenges throughout our City: 1) inconsistent instructional opportunities to advance learning for every student and 2) a feeling of competing or disconnected priorities for the adults in the system.

Instructional Priority Areas

To tackle the first challenge, the Instructional Leadership Framework establishes three priorities, rooted in the research-based practices of Advanced Literacy and Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education:

No single priority can be achieved without creating a supportive environment and setting rigorous expectations for every student.