G. Land Final Presentation

Hi. My name is Greg Land.

I'm a principal in the Los Altos school District, which

is a K eight school district.

Really close to Stanford in the Silicon Valley, we are

known for revolutionizing line to set the stage.

Um, from my audience, I am going to present my

have this presentation for the superintendent, the assistant superintendent of

curriculum instruction, our student services director in our special education

director, Um, this is a narrow audience, but one that

really makes the decisions in our district, especially for curriculum.

Um, in fact, this kind of this conversation or this

this drive came out of a conversation of one of

the three conversations with my assistant superintendent of curriculum instruction.

We talked pretty much about some successes that we had

in the past and where we're going and where we

were struggling currently.

Um, right now, we are struggling in math and really

needed some shifts for the future.

And that's kind of where this the presentation comes from

To give a little history.

Um, in 2017, we adopted English language arts curriculum, which

was focused on a little bit of pedagogy as well.

Um, it was readers writers Workshop, uh, and Lucy Calkins,

units of study as to be successful.

With that, we decided to as a district, have instructional

coaches for the first time in one particular area, which

was literacy.

We call them the Literacy.

I s t s uh huh.

With that program, we have found great success and continuity,

Um, and really touched on a lot of the successes

that we've talked about in class of best practices for

PD professional development for teachers.

Now move a little forward to 2019.

We did the math adoption with a different provider and

did not see the same successes.

And, uh, we have been struggling in our math adoption

and what we've done.

Yeah. Which brings me to our current situation, which we

are going to do in math adoption in 2021.

And like I said, my conversation with the curriculum and

instruction assistant superintendent helped guide me towards this presentation.

So with that, I'll start the presentation questions to think

about. I really want the audience to think about how

much support do I need to back it with research

And how detailed do I need to be?

Am I making the points across or do I need

to go into more depth to really convince, uh, the

cabinet what to do and the shifts that we need

to make So with that presentation goes as follows.

Hi, Jeff and Sandra.

Um, thanks for bringing me in cabinet so I can

talk about this.

Um, I really want to talk about the recent math

adoption we're going to do and, uh, the professional development

over the next few years, not just next year, but

even into the future.

Mhm. I want to go a little bit back in

time and talk a little bit about r e l

adoption and its success because I think for our district

in 2000, 2017.

And since then we've really done a great job of,

um introducing reading workshop, writing workshop, using the using the

units of study and building onto that over time, using

the successes that we have.

I think so.

I'm just going to go back.

And remember, when we had our initial leadership retreat, we

really had a learning focus, and we really defined what

our expectations were.

Not only we did we do that, but the implementation

of the instructional coaches of the literacy coaches really made

a difference in how we implemented this change.

Um, making sure that the literacy I STs had a

coaching mindset, how they worked with teachers, but also with

administrators. And we really define their role.

Well, what did they do?

How did they do it and what were they not?

And I think that that was a real huge success

because it made our teachers trust the process and actually

practice what they need to practice As, um, taking a

little note from my course at Stanford, we really wanted

to talk about I wanted to talk about the five

key features Effective teacher learning, um, content focus, active learning,

making sure that it has a duration of time, not

just a short period of time that we have this

collective participation and we have this coherence.

And with our English language arts adoption, we really had

all these elements.

We had a real content focus with the choice that

we made with Lucy Caulkins units of study.

We did active learning not only from the beginning, but

we also, um, made it happen with our instructional coaches.

that ongoing relationship that was built where they would walk

into rooms, work with them, practice lessons, have them practice,

watch each other.

These were great models that really helped with that collective

participation using our PLC s to help guide us and

direct the learning that was going on.

So there was a huge success is when we did

this in, um, for English language arts.

So in the coherence as well.

But when we get to our math focus and we

did this and again in 2019 and we knew that

we were out of alignment and we worked with Brenda,

the principles exchange.

Um, but we didn't see the same successes.

We saw some real shifts.

We talked about no standards and clustering standards and really

making majority for heavily weighting which ones were more valuable

and which ones were supporting standards and really digging deep

into the curriculum.

Focus. Um, so we had the standards focus, but we

didn't have the pedagogy to go with it.

We didn't have a clear curriculum.

We were still using.

Our are envisioned.

So it's good to see that we are really, um,

trying again with looking at an adoption process and a

formal one.

Um, I think it's great that we're going to look

at San Francisco Unified Math Program and it has both

curriculum and lesson designed.

So there's pedagogy as well as curriculum as to focus

and gives more coherence.

But some of the things that we need to do

to support that, um, let's go back to what we

were talking about with L.

A. Um In the past, what worked was having those

instructional leaders working with the administration.

Having teacher leaders in our PLC is working on, um,

each unit, how it was going checking in with the

CN I department.

Um, we had that clear focus of expectations as well,

with our lessons and the curriculum.

So building with San Francisco Unified, we definitely know we

can head in the right direction in the future.

Um, some of the things I think we need to

work on is including the principles this time.

I think we missed that last time with the math

instruction and the math, adoption or work with Dorinda.

I think we have some opportunities to use our PLC

is better.

And, um, that's something that didn't happen in the math

adoption the first time.

And we really need to bring back coaches to the

sites. So looking at recommendations, I really have five recommendations

to to support what we're doing.

So initiate the adoption of the San Francisco curriculum and

instruction with district Wide PD just the way we did

with Teachers College initially breaking into it with everyone developing

the i s t s to be the experts in

the curriculum.

So there has to be some training on this with

the instructional and call them math coaches or math STS,

um, shift their roles and, um, make sure that number

three that we have them site based again to begin

that implementation.

I think that was critical.

Um, I think the work at the site level is

very important.

Um, and having that modelling done at the site level

really is the the details that was missing with our

last math adoption, I think we also need to train

our principles like we did the first time.

Utilizing evaluations was a real important point.

We gave additional feedback that helped us, and we help

the coaches understand what directions they needed to go in.

So that partnership was real important.

And I'd like to see that happen again.

Um, finally, we should really capitalize on our PLC groups

and work on that cycle of inquiry in learning in

small groups as we did with the teachers college, because

that really helped teachers feel comfortable in a place where

they can try things out and go back and try

things again if they needed to.

So those are some of my recommendations?

Um, thank you very much for listening.

I hope we can make some real big change over

the next few years for our district.

Now, back to my audience.

Um, at Stanford.

Uh, so in reflecting on this, um, I really wanted

to know, um, if I needed to do more with

the research and really connected a little bit more solidly,

I know I touched on it, but I really wanted

to see if I made the points that accurately enough

to make a change.

And was I detailed enough?

Um, I really feel in my mind that it's really

about practice, you know, it's implementing theory into practice, and,

um, I really I'm more of an implementer and you

know where the rubber meets the road.

And so I'm hoping that this direct discussion that will

happen, um can make a difference in my district.

Thank you.

Yeah.

G. Land Final Presentation

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