A Network for Instructional Improvement

How Teachers and Leaders Made It Work

Sara DeMartino, Anthony Petrosky, Glenn Nolly

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2026
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9798765154120
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

We face vast challenges in education, but districts and schools are full of educators ready to take on problems of practice that can't be solved quickly or alone. When we support schools and districts to become continuous improvement organizations, we create space for educators to come together as a network to understand challenges to high-quality instruction and to spread promising practice so all students benefit.

A Network for Instructional Improvement: How Teachers and Leaders Made it Work tells the story of how a community of educators in a large urban district, with support from the University of Pittsburgh, worked as a network for six years to change literacy teaching and learning for students who are furthest from opportunity. The authors take readers into the heart of the project-the classrooms, the practices, the learning walks, the deep collaborative work of continuous improvement-and show how student achievement rose as a result. Using the stories of these educators and their schools, this book shares research-based, actionable examples of how teachers and leaders centered literacy teaching and learning on students.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 How Did the Big City SD/IFL NSI Project Work?
• 2 An Overview of the Qualitative and Quantitative Outcomes
• 3 How the Network of Teachers Became an Improvement Community of Practice
• 4 PLCs that Support Instructional Inquiry: Building In-school Improvement Capacity at Arlington High School
• 5 Leadership for Instructional Change: Rose-Wood High School and Zora Neale Hurston Middle School
• 6 Supporting Every Student’s Engagement in Cognitively Demanding Studies: Miles Middle School
• 7 Two Teachers Adapt the Student-centered Practices to Their Instructional Contexts: Richard Wright Middle School
• 8 How We Assessed the NSI Instructional Changes and Their Implementation
• 9 A Theory of Improvement for Instructionally Focused Change
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Authors