Author: Partnership Staff

We ask students to grow every day, and the best teachers are practicing what they preach. They ask themselves hard questions about how their students learn and continually try new ways to help every child succeed. Supporting that evolution is the heart of what our network does.

Evolving our approach matters especially at Partnership Schools. Our students are made in the image and likeness of God, so making the most of their God-given gifts is imperative. We also welcome many students with learning gaps, so our classrooms have to drive learning at a faster rate than national averages for students to catch up and excel.

This year, we’ve made three key changes to help teachers and students accelerate learning. We created the Director of Curriculum and Instruction (DCI) role—a teaching expert at each school who joins the principal in coaching teachers. We added IXL, an AI-informed learning platform, to teachers’ toolboxes. And together, DCIs and teachers are using data far more frequently to adapt in real time to students’ needs.

How is the work to implement these shifts going? We’re learning from our school leadership teams and from teachers, including three spotlighted here.

Erin Dziak, St. Thomas Aquinas, 6–8th Grade ELA

Six years of deliberate routine-building—packets waiting when students walk in, dots on the floor to keep desks and brains orderly—have freed Erin’s attention for what matters most: getting students ready for high school, AP, and IB coursework.

This year, ongoing coaching cycles have helped Erin shift her core question from “do they know what’s in this book?” to “can they take this skill and apply it somewhere else?” IXL is helping her answer it. She assigns a single targeted skill each Friday — not from the pacing guide, but based on what she’s watching students struggle with in real time. One student might master it in 20 questions. Another needs 80. IXL makes that personalization possible. Erin’s candid that one way the network team suggested teachers use the program isn’t so useful yet: having kids get computers out at the end of a literature lesson to test on IXL. But she’s embracing the program and its skill emphasis in other ways.

The payoff or Erin’s evolving craft shows up in her classroom’s deeper moments: a seventh grader who caught an inference mid-read in A Raisin in the Sun and stopped himself to share his hunch, or eighth graders wrestling with Frederick Douglass’s arguments about faith and justice. Students who’ve been with Erin since sixth grade now have the stamina for ninety minutes of rigorous reading, writing, and thinking. And she’s fine-tuning how she teaches writing to foster independence. “I need to make sure you are ready to fly without me.”

Tiombe Morrow-Cheeks, St. Francis, Middle School Math

Tiombe’s students come with complexity — ADHD diagnoses, IEPs, a lot of energy, and significant gaps. To serve them, she worked with her new DCI, Vassimo Dillard, to adapt the curriculum, supplement it with IXL, and use the daily intervention block in new ways.

IXL’s built-in videos have been especially valuable for students with recall challenges — a resource they can return to independently. Lightning rounds and leaderboard competitions keep energy high during the morning warm-up. Exit tickets on IXL show Tiombe in real time who got it and who didn’t.

IXL and MAP data are also reaching beyond the classroom. Family goal-setting conversations help parents understand how their child is progressing nationally, and IXL gives them a way to stay involved at home. The how-to videos remove the “new math” barrier many parents face. “Parents can’t give what they don’t have,” Tiombe says — but now there’s a video.

Vassimo is a veteran educator, and her role goes beyond coaching. She co-teaches during intervention, takes small groups so Tiombe can work at multiple levels simultaneously, and brings an experienced perspective to tough parent conversations.

Kayla Stevens, St. Francis, 1st Grade Reading

In just her second year, Kayla is moving fast. She launched fluency routines in September — work she hadn’t reached until January her first year — and is now running four data-driven small groups where she had three before.

Rather than assigning IXL by curriculum sequence, Kayla curates skills directly from each student’s NWEA scores, making the experience more positive and reducing behavior issues. She’s also using IXL to address a writing gap her core curriculum leaves open, and sending it home so families have a tool they can actually use. Vassimo’s coaching adds a second set of eyes in the classroom and a steadying presence in parent conversations.

Three classrooms, three grade levels, three different challenges. The same throughline: teachers who know their students deeply, use data to act on what they see, and have the support to keep getting sharper. That’s what learning — for teachers and students alike — looks like this year.

A’Miracle Smith is going to Trinity High School next year. Her eyes light up when she talks about it. “The students and staff made me feel welcome, even though I just met them.” She barely takes a breath when listing the activities she is eager to get involved in there— “Theater and art and sports,” the Archbishop Lyke eighth grader gushes.

This year, the Partnership network has ramped up supports for students to apply to high schools—a sometimes daunting process, particularly for families who have never done it. But when we asked A’Miracle to explain the help she received, we came away appreciating so much more than applications and financial aid. 

A’Miracle could so easily have missed the chance to go to a high school that she’s excited to attend. She attended two public schools that were full of “lots of drama,” by her account. She transferred to Archbishop Lyke three years ago, about the same time that family circumstances compelled her to move in with sister, who was already solo parenting. 

There’s a great deal of hope in many circles—including our own—about the doors that can open for children when they have public funding for school choice, like the EdChoice scholarships that have helped make Archbishop Lyke and Trinity options for A’Miracle. Yet her story points to a host of additional ingredients that are essential, particularly for young people who face challenges others don’t have.

First, A’Miracle needed her sister. Taking full responsibility for a sibling is “a big thing to do,” A’Miracle explains. But Chardae “cares a lot about others. And she puts her courage into me.” 

Then she needed a school where she could concentrate. At Archbishop Lyke, she says teachers and staff pay attention to what she needs. They also establish clear behavioral boundaries for all students, key to help her focus on learning.

But none of that might have resulted in her going to Trinity without the help of Ebonie Blake, Archbishop Lyke’s Operations Associate. A mom of three who never stops fielding requests from parents, students, and teachers in the school’s front office, Ms. Blake noticed that A’Miracle was struggling to complete high school applications. “She took time in her day to help me with the essay; she helped me understand how to focus it.” 

So when A’Miracle pulled the letter from Trinity out of her mailbox and read that she’d been accepted, “I was crying,” she said, and she called Ms. Blake to join in the tearful celebration.

Without philanthropic support through the Partnership, Archbishop Lyke would have been hard-pressed to have more than one operations staff member—making it even harder for Ms. Blake to grab time to help a struggling eighth grader. Without donor support, there might not even be an Archbishop Lyke for her sister to choose. 

And without voters and legislators, there wouldn’t be EdChoice Scholarships sufficient to put Archbishop Lyke and Trinity within reach of kids like A’Miracle—or other elements of the social safety net that are equally crucial for her and her family. 

Being “self-made” is hardwired into American ideology, so it can be nervewracking to think about how many layers of support must come into play for one young woman to thrive. But from her sister to donors and voters who have never even met A’Miracle, one person at a time has helped her make progress so far. 

That collaboration may just be, well, a miracle.

She is just getting started. In high school, she wants to “understand my work, get good grades, meet friends I can trust, stay courageous, be a leader and help others.” 

She figures can keep relying on stability and encouragement from her sister, supports that she suspects her sister did not have in high school. She’ll have the academic foundation she’s received at ABL. She’ll also be supported by the team at Trinity. “They make me feel like I can be myself and be comfortable. I never felt that anywhere except at Archbishop Lyke.” 

She’ll have both public and philanthropic scholarship assistance—but she knows it won’t be enough. Her sister will need to work more, and A’Miracle is already lining up a summer job at Starbucks. “It’s my education; I should contribute,” she explains simply. She had thought about using her savings to pay for braces, but that can wait until she’s an adult. “High school is more important,” the fourteen-year-old observes.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality,” Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote. It can make us feel “caught” to need others. But this spring, a network of individuals around one bright-eyed teenager has come together to help her access a future that she’s excited to embrace, and that’s something we can all celebrate.

Several afternoons each week, Metro Catholic eighth grader Aleena Grant heads down the hall from her English and math classes to work on her motorcycle engine.

“It is a good way to spice up a student’s day,” she explains. 

Aleena isn’t alone; along with classmates from Metro Catholic, middle schoolers at Archbishop Lyke and St. Francis all have the opportunity to learn how to build V8 Engine Model Kits through Motogo, an innovative Cleveland nonprofit that teaches students in middle and high schools to build motorcycles—and so much more.

Students learn problem-solving and persistence. Jaylen Batch, who graduated from Archbishop Lyke last spring and participated in the program before heading to Benedictine High School this year, explains “things don’t always go right the first time” when you are building an engine, but the persistence pays off. “It’s fun.” High schoolers in the program build Honda CB350 Engines.

Head Coach Greg Boyd notes that doing something a little unfamiliar and uncomfortable helps students build confidence. And Amir Kabir, also an alum of Motogo and Archbishop Lyke who is now a sophomore at Benedictine, is clear about one lesson he learned through the program: ”Stay organized” when you are working on an engine, he advises. Jaylen agrees—and he explains that the practice he had organizing tools with Motogo helps him now with the routine of organizing papers in his binder for high school.

“It isn’t really even about the motorcycle at all,” explains Motogo Assistant Program Director Cass Jerman. “It’s about building something fun together,” Cass adds. Motogo Head Coach Brian Schaffran clarifies, though, that motorcycles are key. 

“We could use anything, but I don’t think the kids would be as attracted to repairing lawn mowers. When we push a motorcycle down the hall of a school, kids want the coolness of it.” 

The idea for Motogo began when Brian was a teacher at St. Martin de Porres. To add a hands-on dimension to a history unit on the Middle Ages, he came up with the idea of having students build trebuchets and launch golf balls in the gym. “It should have been a two day project; it took two weeks,” he explains, because students weren’t familiar with tools or building projects. Together with his former boss Rich Clark, who went on to become the founding director of Cleveland’s Partnership Schools, Brian came up with the idea for Wonder Week, an opportunity for students to do hands-on projects like taking apart his motorcycle. From that experience and with the help of now-executive director Molly Vaughan, Motogo was born.

Archbishop Lyke was the first Partnership School to join forces with Motogo three years ago. Motogo’s fees for each school are based on the percentage of students receiving free- and reduced-price lunch.

Partnership Schools administrators like Carolyn Cutler at Metro Catholic and Archbishop Lyke’s Academic Dean, Rhiann Gordon, are huge fans of the program. Rhiann explains that participating in Motogo aligns well with the academic focuses and root beliefs of our schools. “One of our root beliefs at Archbishop Lyke is that we can do hard things. Through Motogo, students learn through their failures. They gain confidence, resilience and grit. Because building a V8 model engine is something none of the students know, they learn the process together, and the program has helped some of our students believe in themselves when they struggle in other ways at school.”

The program is not about recruiting students into trades, although students love the opportunity to work with their hands, and we celebrate students who find elements of their future careers through the program—like Amir, whose participation in Motogo confirmed Amir’s ambition to become a classic car restorer.

The scope of what students can take from some time with tools and a big project like building an engine is much wider. As Brian shares, “Once kids realize they can learn how to use tools to fix the things around them, they realize they can fix other problems around them as well.”

At the Partnership, we are excited that so many Ohioans are excited about the “science of reading.” In 2023 legislation that took effect this school year, Governor DeWine and the General Assembly have mandated that all reading curricula follow this approach—one we know well, since Partnership Schools have implemented it for over a decade.

The science of reading is a body of research that points to several key ingredients for effective reading instruction, particularly systematic phonics instruction and building background knowledge, of which vocabulary is perhaps the most important form. Veteran Cleveland Partnership teacher Lisa Marynowski and members of our academic team explained those elements in a Partnership Post back when the legislation passed.

But as the Fordham Institute’s Aaron Churchill astutely points out in a comprehensive road-map to effective rollout of the policy, curriculum mandates won’t advance students’ reading without effective implementation. Aaron notes that 12 of 55 urban districts in Ohio were already using strong science of reading curricula before the mandate went into effect, including the curriculum our schools use: Core Knowledge Language Arts.

The right materials and sequencing are essential. Yet as Aaron notes, teachers and schools must use these tools effectively to help students read well.

Since the Partnership network of schools began over a decade ago, we’ve been working to level up our implementation of curricula based on the science of reading. We are still learning how best to support teachers as they undertake the incredibly complex, vital work of teaching young people to read fluently, with deep understanding and engagement in the texts they are reading.

So what have we learned so far about effectively implementing research-backed reading curricula in our classrooms?

1. Even best-in-class curriculum —based on the science of reading—doesn’t teach students to read; teachers do.

We see a real difference in students’ progress depending on how teachers implement the curricula. When a teacher implements the curriculum with fidelity—holding a high bar both for their lesson preparation and the learning they expect students to demonstrate—then young readers learn avidly and are hungry for more. But when teachers implement a curriculum out of compliance alone and without a spirit of curiosity and rigor, students progress far more slowly.

2. Most elementary educators are not trained to teach phonics, so we owe them effective, efficient training to develop that skill. But to build the  skill, we also have to—and can—build the will.

Anyone who thinks teaching phonics is simple can get a taste of how complex it is from this analysis of just two minutes of effective phonics practice from Teach Like a Champion’s Doug Lemov and Jen Rugani.

Jen has a growing fan base among our teachers in Cleveland, whom she has trained. She packs a lot into a day’s workshop. But even when the list of skills to teach and practice is long, she takes the time to start with cognitive science and reading research. Teacher buy-in increases as they reflecting on how that science shows up in their own experiences as readers. As a result, Jen builds teachers’ will to implement curricula effectively by exploring the why behind the work with them first. We find that when teachers are more familiar with the research behind what they’re doing, their will to do it well often increases.  

3. Teaching phonics well requires a high degree of precision, expert modeling, and real-time feedback to students.

In baseball, the difference between a home run and a foul ball is often a matter of millimeters—a shoulder just a smidge too high or weight distribution that’s just a little off. The same is true of teaching phonics well: the little things matter a lot.

For a deeper dive into the fine points of what we see great early elementary reading teachers doing, this overview of how a few of our colleagues adapted to do it during COVID still resonates with us.

4. The work doesn’t end at third grade.

The complex texts students should encounter as they get older will challenge the limits of their fluency. Sometimes described as “meaning made audible,” fluency spans the ability to read with automaticity, appropriate intonation, and expressiveness. It is the job of teachers at every level to build fluency through instruction, in both explicit and implicit ways. They can do that in part with lots of shared reading aloud, in which teachers carefully prepare to maximize fluency development and comprehension at the same time.

Note that we say students should encounter complex texts. Too many students don’t read rigorous, grade-level texts as they get older, and that is deeply problematic for their success in high school and beyond. For so many reasons, it is crucial for us to center ambitious books in our reading classes as Emily Badillo, another expert who has trained our upper elementary and middle school teachers in cultivating fluency, elaborates here.

5. Urgency matters.

We must teach every day like the future of our students hangs on the next few minutes of instruction—because it does.

That urgency calls on us to do many things well—including lesson pacing. Our team has developed year-long pacing guides that go beyond slotting in one lesson a day, and we try to guide our teachers in how to judge when some skills may need an extra day of instruction.

These are not easy decisions with high-quality reading materials, though. These curricula are dense, involve spiraled practice and repetition over time, and students come to us with varying degrees of readiness for the work. Yet their cumulative growth depends on teachers teaching deeply the entire scope and sequence by the end of the year, one year after another.

A few years back, our colleague Fiona Palladino coined the phrase “patient urgency” to describe how we needed to make progress as educators. It is an ethos that Ohio legislators, educational pundits, and parents might adopt now, as we all seek to improve students’ reading. Like all deep investments in children’s learning, the shift to implementing curricula based on the science of reading must be done well and urgently—and it will require years of sustained resolve, knowledge-building, and responsive implementation to produce the gains we seek.

But in our experience—one in which we get to go into middle school classrooms and hear students reading complex texts like The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass fluently or gasping out loud at details in the works of John Steinbeck and C.S. Lewis—that effort is worth every minute.

Maggie Johnson is the Vice President for Academics of Partnership Schools.

Mason Jennings graduated from the Partnership’s Sacred Heart school this month, following the path of his two older siblings. He’s headed to Regis High School next year; his brother, Myles, attends Cardinal Hayes; and his sister, Diem, attends Convent of the Sacred Heart. They each chose a different high school—and together, they embody the goal of the Partnership’s high school placement support program: finding, being accepted to, and securing funding to attend the “best fit” high school for every student.

“The Jennings family is a shining example of how parent partnership and student agency can access excellence in High School Placement,” says Chris Matesic, the Partnership’s High School Placement Director.

Diem, the eldest, was initially on track to attend a specialized public school. Her mother describes her as highly goal-oriented and focused, and thus likely to excel anywhere. Yet the rising junior has found something more at Convent of the Sacred Heart: co-curriculars like violin that sustain a passion begun in elementary school, exchange programs with sister Sacred Heart institutions across the globe, and personalized attention from teachers that “helps me grasp and understand topics and classes that I may need help with,” explains Diem.

Myles embraces the standout welcome he has received from the Cardinal Hayes community—a welcome he in turn extends to others. “I’ve made friends in my honors classes and I consider my lacrosse teammates brothers,” he explains.

Mason gravitated to Regis for the academic challenge it offers: “Next fall, I look forward to overcoming obstacles and continuing to succeed,” he shares. But he also sought out a high school that could continue another foundation he has built in elementary school: an active spiritual life. “Sacred Heart has spiritually prepared me for the best school experience because they helped me actually establish and build on my relationship with God,” he notes.

The Partnership’s Sacred Heart School has been an integral partner in nurturing all three, says Mason, Myles, and Diem’s mother, Enjoli Francis. “It is really helpful when you can send kids off to school and know that the same things that you are saying to them at home are reflected at school–a sense of yourself, of your potential, of your leadership.” 

She and her husband considered other school options but sent all three children to Sacred Heart based on the strength of its co-curricular programs, like music, its academic program, and the faculty’s clear investment in and attention to her children. “They saw what we’re trying to do and became a part of that.” 

When it came to high school placement, Ms. Francis credits principal Abi Akano with suggesting that Diem take the admissions exam for Convent of the Sacred Heart. “That opened the door to us keeping our ears open to all the possibilities” for Mason and Myles as well.

Our schools are beyond fortunate to have parent partners like Enjoli Francis and Mark Jennings and high school partners like Regis, Cardinal Hayes, Convent of the Sacred Heart. To have others who see the same promise in our students that we do means the world to all of us at the Partnership. Thus, the Jennings’ family’s experiences highlight more than the value of our network’s high school placement program; they demonstrate that helping kids thrive truly is a partnership.

Giving teachers the support they need to help students excel is at the heart of the Partnership’s reason for being. That support includes carefully chosen curricula—along with the training teachers need to teach it well. We certainly hope teachers respond positively to this investment in their professional growth, but we’ve been blown away by the positive feedback from Cleveland Partnership teachers who spent two days in our New York schools recently.

“I can’t stop gushing about it,” St. Thomas Aquinas first-grade teacher Shannon Altenbach volunteers.

“I’ve never in my life had professional development like this,” Metro Catholic math teacher Carolyn Cutler explains. 

Along with five other teachers, a principal, and superintendent Christian Dallavis from our Cleveland team, Shannon and Carolyn observed their New York colleagues teaching, debriefed together with them, and analyzed strong instructional practices with the network team.

Both teachers observed specific strategies they want to replicate in their own classrooms. But what they took with them is far more complex than a few techniques. They got a glimpse of the excellence they and their colleagues are working toward. As Shannon explains, “We saw three schools, two of which have been in the Partnership for over ten years and have been using the curriculum that long. We are still getting used to it…but we also saw veteran teachers who are really making it happen. And we will be there in a few years.”

“We were a great school before,” Carolyn explains about Metro Catholic, but the curriculum and instructional practices she began learning from her first Partnership workshop almost two years ago “are putting us on a path to where education needs to be—” particularly, she adds because Metro’s ambition is to foster “human beings who are going to change the world.” 

On the journey—which Carolyn calls an “immersion trip”—the practices she observed intentionally built not just knowledge but a way for students to act around each other that reflects the aspirations of a faith-filled community. For example, she notes, “The way kids support each other when they make mistakes–they embody a culture of error that we are trying to teach. They are all carrying each other.” That culture is particularly important given the level of the curriculum she is now using. “I was blown by the depth and breadth of the content,” she recalls from her first Partnership training, and “The kids love it. They want to be challenged, and they are stepping up.”

In addition to a vision of excellence and strategies for building community and learning simultaneously, Shannon and Carolyn also found community—with their fellow Cleveland educators and with their New York counterparts. “They were asking us questions too. It is so nice to meet people who all want the best for each other, and we were able to collaborate with people we wouldn’t have met if the Partnership hadn’t brought us together.” Carolyn also notes the sense of community emanating from the Partnership network team. All trainings, including the trip to New York, are “based on what the deans and the network team are seeing in our classrooms,” she notes. “They are recognizing what we’re doing well and seeing where we can do better. It is a true growth mindset and a community; we are going to do better together.”

Fiona Palladino, the Partnership’s Director of Instruction, explains that the Partnership invested significant resources and staff time into bringing the group of Cleveland teachers to New York to acknowledge their zealous work for our shared mission by further developing their teacher toolboxes and expanding their picture of instructional excellence.  And according to Fiona, “the whole-hearted embrace of learning by our Cleveland colleagues inspires and energizes all of us.” 

“I’ve felt appreciated before,” Carolyn reflects. “But I’ve never felt so respected as a professional.” 

Translating respect for our teachers into an investment in their growth has only been possible thanks to our philanthropic partners, and to them, Shannon and Carolyn have one simple message: “thank you!”

Partnership Superintendent Kathleen Porter-Magee has shared that she is stepping down from her position this summer after ten years of service to our schools. 

Kathleen has accepted the position of Managing Partner of the Leadership Roundtable, an organization of lay, religious, and ordained leaders who work together to promote best practices and accountability in the management and operations of Catholic institutions throughout the U.S.

Partnership Executive Director Kristen Gengaro announced that Kathleen will transition from Superintendent to the role of Special Advisor to the Partnership, so she can continue to support our important work and offer continuity moving forward. Christian Dallavis, current superintendent of the Partnership’s Cleveland schools and former head of the Remick Leaders Program at Notre Dame, will take on the interim management of our principals in both New York and Cleveland so that our work will continue uninterrupted in the months ahead.

In a message to her colleagues, Kathleen shared:

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years since I joined what was then the brand-new Partnership Schools network. At that time, our network was seen as a risky experiment. Today, it serves as a powerful example of an emergent Catholic schools renaissance.

We took a leap of faith together to preserve those things that made our schools and communities great while embracing new approaches to drive life-changing results for the students we serve. 

While the work we do is deeply personal, our core value of humility calls each of us to remember that our success demands that we build something that will outlast us. And so as I wrap my tenth year, I leave with confidence of knowing that our strength lies not with any individual, but in the collective wisdom and experience of the entire team of network leaders, faculty, staff, and school leaders who support our students and communities everyday. 

In the same announcement to our staff,  Kristen shared with the entire Partnership team that we are heartened by knowing that Kathleen’s impact will spread further through the Leadership Roundtable, with whom the Partnership has collaborated over the last several years. “We certainly look forward to more synergies with the Leadership Roundtable’s work and the Partnership’s in the years to come,” she noted. 

For more on the Leadership Roundtable’s work and their announcement of Kathleen’s position, click here. 

For more information, contact Beth Blaufuss at beth.blaufuss@thepartnershipschools.org. 

“I learn every day.” 

At Partnership Schools, we certainly hope to hear our students rejoice in learning every day. It is uniquely gratifying, though—and not surprising—to hear it from Maritza Minnucci, who has taught Kindergarten at Sacred Heart School in the South Bronx for over 25 years. This year, she explained recently, she is sharpening her use of clear aims to guide each lesson. That focus on leveraging aims to level up instruction is a network-wide effort, but Maritza is making it all her own.

The satisfaction she takes in continually improving how she teaches her young students is just one of the qualities that make Maritza a truly special teacher. The skills she is refining might sound a tad wonky to someone who has never taught—she is particularly excited this year by her work with anchor questions, for example—but the joy she exudes when she talks about continuing to improve her craft is unmistakable. 

It is a joy she shared recently along with two of her colleagues—Elvis Eduarte, who has been teaching math in Partnership Schools for a handful of years and who is refining his lesson planning with a keen eye to what his middle school students already know; and Dominique Brown, who is in her second year of teaching second grade at Sacred Heart. 

As a newer teacher, Dominique explains that she is gaining confidence. “Being really focused on the lesson aim gives me a goal to meet when I am planning lessons,” she explains; she particularly embraces the practice of writing out a perfect exemplar of work students will be asked to do and anticipating what roadblocks the diverse learners in her class might encounter along the way. She is working with Sacred Heart’s principal in residence, Kelly Quinn, in routine coaching cycles like those most Partnership teachers engage in, which provide an opportunity to integrate planning practices that emerge in network-wide workshops and school-site weekly trainings. 

Like Dominique, Elvis is planning with the wide range of prior knowledge his students have in mind. Along with other Partnership schools in New York, Sacred Heart has had an influx of new students in the last few years, many with varying degrees of lingering learning loss from the pandemic, and meeting all of their needs has made even trickier the already significant challenge of helping middle schoolers grasp the fundamentals of Algebra. Yet Elvis gets animated as he explains one simple shift he’s making: no longer calling on students to add their ideas as he does the demonstration portion of lessons. The single-voice approach is helping his most struggling students have a clear model to refer to as they practice a new algorithm, and he is seeing them make new progress as a result.

Listening to Maritza, Elvis, and Dominique’s enthusiasm for improving their professional practice is even more heartening in light of recent polling of over two thousand teachers by the Pew Research Center. Words like “stressful” and “overwhelming” punctuate the report, in which over half (52%) of the public school teachers polled indicated that they would not encourage a young person starting out today to become a teacher. 

At the Partnership, we know that if we want thriving students, we need teachers who feel–and are–effective. We are blessed to work with teachers who are motivated because they care deeply about the communities we serve. They came to make a difference—and comprehensive support of their development is crucial for our teachers to make the impact our students deserve, impact that also helps inspire teachers to stick with challenging work, year after year.

Principal in Residence Kelly Quinn notes that Maritza, Elvis, and Dominique are all committed professionals whose growth is, in part, self-driven. But all three explain that it is the combination of network-wide workshops integrated with school-site sessions and individual coaching that makes a real difference in their technique. Maritza is quick to point out that she relishes network-wide workshops because they give her an opportunity to learn from colleagues at other schools; indeed, the fact that all our schools share the same curricula and lesson pacing amplifies the peer learning at network events, because teachers are all applying new skills in real time to upcoming lessons and giving each other feedback. 

Teacher development is about our students’ learning—but it gives us so much more. We often say that our schools are more than classrooms; they are communities. Professional support for teachers is vital to sustaining those communities and advancing their pursuit of academic excellence.