Instructional Focus at the School Level

As I said in the introduction, considerable progress has been made at the classroom and school level over the past decade. In the first two articles, colleagues and I focus on school leadership and the link to “breakthrough” results that we define as full success in achieving proficiency in literacy and numeracy for virtually all students. The evidence is that this will require shared leadership, a sharp focus on “deprivatizing” classroom teaching in order to get at instructional improvement, deliberate daily use of diagnostic data, and school cultures where all teachers learn how to get better all the time.

DuFour and his colleagues reinforce these notions by showing how “professional learning communities” involve deep and ...