support teachers and students on their jour-
ney towards improving teaching and learn-
ing at their site.
Complementing this support structure,
each cohort of schools is led by a mentor
principal who works closely with site leaders
within the group by modeling equity-driven
leadership through collaboration and one-
on-one peer support. The mentor princi-
pal brings the cohort of schools together to
share in their efforts to improve student out-
comes and hold each other accountable. The
cohort group functions as a team, improving
together as a whole and succeeding together
as one united group.
Building on this structure of support to
ensure deep commitment to continuous
improvement, is an emphasis on support-
ing new administrators within their first few
years as a school leader. CVESD is working
in collaboration with San Diego State Uni-
versity and the Wallace Foundation on the
implementation of an innovative leadership
academy that bridges learning expectations
in higher education with the district’s ac-
countability measures. Learning opportu-
nities for these new site leaders are on-time,
relevant, and flexible while incorporating a
socially-focused cohort approach.
The consistent pursuit of meeting the
needs of all students is evident in the dis-
trict’s leadership moves throughout the
system. There is a continuous need to seek
the most effective, reliable means to address
learning for all students. District leaders
from the site level to the central office level
function in an all-hands-on-deck approach
to doing whatever it takes to improve teach-
ing and learning at each one of its 47 schools.
Districtwide instructional focus:
Complementing the structures for clear
decision making and the commitment to
continuous improvement, the district has es-
tablished professional learning and coaching
structures that connect the central office to
each of its 47 schools through a district-wide
Instructional Focus Statement. While the
district’s interdependent structure has attri-
butes that have led to great success among
CVESD’s schools, it proposes a unique
challenge when trying to align district-level
professional learning that meets the needs of
14
Leadership
While most districts
operationally function
either in a centralized or
an independent, site-
based paradigm, CVESD
has constructed a novel
interdependent system.
all 47 district schools. Designing centralized
professional learning that not only empha-
sizes capacity building in rich, relevant con-
tent for teachers and leaders, but also creates
cohesion throughout the district is no easy
task. However, in spite of such a challenge
within a large system like CVESD, the dis-
trict has found a way around that barrier.
In fact, one of the most definitive char-
acteristics of CVESD’s success is the inten-
tional work towards building teacher and
leadership capacity aligned with their dis-
trictwide Instructional Focus Statement.
The concept of a district-wide IFS came
as a result of various factors such as; a new
state assessment in 2014-15, a new math
adoption in 2015-16, a new ELA adoption
in 2017-18, and engagement in unpacking
the new ELA/English Language Develop-
ment (ELD) Framework. CVESD leaders
found the need to understand how to engage
in professional learning that would tran-
scend across all content areas and directly
impact teaching and learning in classrooms
throughout the district.
The IFS was created with input from a
well-rounded representation of stakehold-
ers, which included teachers, site and cen-
tral office leaders and experts in the field
of literacy, mathematics and language de-
velopment. After an intensive analysis of
high-stakes assessment data and trends over
a three-year period, it became evident there
was a need for improvement in the area of
language development, particularly listening
and speaking, which then became the core
driver for the design of the IFS. The IFS was
rolled out to school leaders in the spring of
the 2016-17 school year and included a year-
long study of work by Doug Fisher, Nancy
Frey and John Hattie on the role of high im-
pact strategies in the classroom.
Developing teacher and leadership
capacity:
District wide professional development
aligned to the district’s IFS began early in
the 2017-18 school year and was specifically
designed with the intent to build capacity
among teachers and leaders within the co-
hort. Each year, cohorts of schools, includ-
ing the executive director who oversees the
cohort, attend a series of learning sessions
tightly aligned to the IFS. The learning ses-
sions are carefully designed to build capacity
and cohesion across the district on the use
of high-impact strategies that support lan-
guage development. Each school attends the
learning sessions with their Instructional
Leadership Team, which generally consists
of one teacher representative per grade level
K-6, the site’s instructional resource teacher,
principal and oftentimes a special education
teacher. The learning sessions are facilitated
by administrators and teacher leaders from
within the cohort, who through facilitating,
develop a deep understanding of the content
and become experts that will allow them
to carry the expertise back to their respec-
tive school sites. This reciprocal teaching
method has served as an important strategy
for building capacity within the cohort and
throughout the district. This structure was
strategically designed to provide a platform
for sharing best practices across the district
on how to best to support student achieve-
ment and make progress in reducing the
achievement gap. Additionally, this method
of professional learning minimizes the reli-