Clovis Unified School District (USD) serves about 43,000 students in a city just northeast of Fresno. The district is diverse, serving sizeable groups of Latino/a and Hmong students, and 40% of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. The district's proportion of English learners is below the state average, but students are…

Located just southeast of Fresno in California's Central Valley, Sanger Unified School District (USD) serves approximately 12,000 students in 20 schools. Sanger USD students are predominately from low-income families (73%); most are Latino/a (70%), and about one in five (18%) are English learners. During the accountability era of No Child Left…

"Strategic Inquiry" is an innovative model for promoting teacher collaboration around identifying specific "learning gaps" that keep struggling students from succeeding. Gaps may include anything from the proper use of commas and conjunctions to concepts such as "slope" in math. The authors argue that addressing these…

In the Scaffolded Apprenticeship Model (SAM), a school improvement strategy in place in New York City; Boston, Massachusetts; and Oakland, California, teacher teams improve their schools by studying and closing high-leverage learning gaps for small groups of struggling students as a strategy for systemic change. SAM's goal is for each school to…

Current policies place unprecedented demands on districts to use evidence to guide their educational improvement efforts. How districts respond is likely to be influenced by how individuals in the district conceptualize what it means to use evidence in their ongoing work. This study draws on sensemaking and institutional theory to investigate how…

This book is about teachers' professional communities in U.S. high schools at the end of the 20th century and the significant differences in their response to the challenges of teaching. It describes how the work of teaching differed across three distinct types of communities found and high schools and subject departments studied in the early…

The framework of reflective ideas and tools presented here, and in the companion, "Leading for Learning Sourcebook: Concepts and Examples," supports leaders' efforts to improve student learning in schools and districts. Overall, the framework sees to enable powerful, equitable learning for all students. Its ideas and tools highlight five…

The ideas presented in the sourcebook, and in a summarized companion volume, "Leading for Learning: Reflective Tools for School and District Leaders," support leaders' efforts to improve student learning in schools and districts. The ideas constitute a framework for enabling powerful, equitable learning for all students, outlining five areas of…