A client/partner spotlight from McREL
by Michelle Askeland
When a three-person, district-level academic team is tasked with refocusing foundational teaching strategies across 24 schools serving 21,000 students, where do they begin?
For the academic team with Wilson County Schools in Tennessee, it began by clearly defining their goals and finding resources and an external partner to support those goals, and then committing to and carrying out a multi-year implementation process that involved a lot of hard work.
“They have accomplished so much. They set the foundations for what great instruction looks like and sounds like, as well as what a great instructional leader does to affect change in their building,” said Tonia Gibson, a McREL consultant who served as the primary external partner on the work. “They got to a place where they wanted to be.”
Identifying a Need
As Wilson County Schools returned to in-person learning after the pandemic, they were facing many common challenges. Educators were struggling to get back into traditional routines, students were disengaged, and a large cohort of new and alternatively licensed educators were in need of additional supports for high quality teaching and learning. Administrators and school leaders were dealing with COVID-fatigue as meetings were dominated by conversations about the managerial and logistical components of dealing with the pandemic. The district team realized it was time to get back to the fundamentals and refocus on the reason everyone was there: improving instruction and student learning.
“We wanted to create a unified instructional language across our district,” said Jennifer Cothron, the district’s deputy director of academics. “Our district was growing so quickly that we needed a way to support our new teachers with a common instructional approach across our entire district.”
Already familiar with McREL’s Balanced Leadership professional learning program, the academic team knew that supporting their principals’ instructional leadership knowledge and skills would need to be an important part of their initiative.
Next, they turned to McREL’s The New Classroom Instruction That Works (TNCITW) book and professional resources. The team liked its 14 research-based strategies, which seemed like simple but powerful shifts that could be implemented districtwide, from pre-K to 12th grade, even in a district as large as Wilson County.
The district reached out to McREL for assistance with strategic planning and implementation and were partnered with Gibson. “Tonia has been instrumental in our process of rolling this out,” said Cathy York, the district’s supervisor of educator effectiveness. “She’s very open to hearing our feedback and our goals and gave us some really good information and research that we could use.”
“To have a thought partner like McREL that’s experienced and knowledgeable in this work was super helpful,” added Amber Gailbreath, the district’s middle school instructional supervisor. “Tonia was open to our feedback but also did a really good job balancing that with her expert knowledge and recommendations. It was extremely helpful across the board.”
Implementing the Plan
With the goals of improving core instruction and instructional leadership to improve student outcomes, the academic team went to work. Using TNCITW strategies and Gibson’s expertise, they crafted a customized game plan. First, they coined the phrase, “Powerful Core Instruction,” or PCI, as the umbrella term to describe their work. “We really wanted to focus on the foundational strategies that teachers need in their Tier 1 instruction,” said York. The implementation plan was mapped out to cover several years, introducing a few new instructional strategies each year, while monitoring progress and adjusting as needed.
One of the benefits of this project was how well it married two of the academic team’s goals—building capacity for their school leaders and strengthening educator skills. As a district, they had already begun shifting the role of principals and assistant principals from managers to instructional leaders, said Gibson. So, when the implementation of PCI was discussed, it made sense that the best people to train the teachers would be the instructional leaders within their building.
“We, at a district level, can’t touch every classroom in our district, but our principals can if they have that capacity,” said Cothron. “Our goal was for them to be instructional leaders in their building. As we grow, we’ve got to build the capacity of the people in our buildings, and I think this project helped us to do that.”
While the intended goal was to have consistent Tier 1 instruction in every classroom across the district, the academic team recognized they needed to begin by making sure their district administrators and principals were unified and had a full understanding of the work. “We typically talk about top-down as a negative thing, but with stuff like this, the top has to have a full unified understanding first, so we’re all saying the same thing,” said Amy Gullion, the elementary school instructional supervisor. “We started from the jump with a unified understanding of what we were moving forward with, and it was that book study with district staff and principals to get us all on the same page.”
Following the book study, it was time to talk strategies. One of the most attractive elements of the 14 TNCITW strategies is that they are content and grade-level neutral. Basic, everyday Tier 1 instruction in the classroom—best first instruction, as McREL calls it—includes elements that every teacher can use and every student benefits from. They include things like cognitive interest cues, student goal setting and monitoring, and vocabulary instruction. TNCITW then goes one step further, mapping the strategies to a 6-Phase Model of Student Learning, which is based on research about how the brain processes and retains new information. This science of learning framework helps teachers recognize when to use the right strategies at the right time to maximize learning.
Gibson helped the academic team examine their district data to pinpoint where to begin. While there are 14 strategies, implementation isn’t a prescribed sequence that goes from 1 to 14, she said. Deciding on the best order requires reflection on where you are currently and where you want to go and then being open and flexible to make changes as you roll out the strategies, Gibson said.
By engaging everyone in professional learning, principals and assistant principals enhanced their leadership skills and educators strengthened their Tier 1 instructional practices. Photo provided by Wilson County Schools.
When the first strategies were selected, work began in June 2023 with a two-day professional learning session for principals and assistant principals, which included discussions on what the strategies look like in classrooms and how to talk to and coach teachers about strategies. Once the principals were confident in coaching the instructional strategies, they would implement the strategies in their school. Gibson and the academic team developed presentations and resources for the principals to use at their schools during their staff development days, which occurred later in the summer.
Monitoring the Work
During the school year, the academic team and Gibson conducted classroom walkthroughs to monitor the use of the strategies, providing feedback to principals. “It was nice to have an outside partner come on some of our walks and ask probing questions to our administrators and to help us grow,” said Cothron. “I think that outside support and partnership was really nice, because it helped us see things from a different lens that maybe we were blind to at times.”
Throughout the first year and into the second, the district team made minor adjustments based on what they were seeing and hearing. They also expanded the role of some school leaders. For example, many principals began involving their school’s leadership team members and mentor teachers in the coaching process to help reinforce content and model the strategies. Principals also began doing walkthroughs at other schools to see how the strategies were being used across the district and discuss implementation processes in small leadership groups.
“Instead of doing traditional principal meetings, we turned those into learning walks for our administrators,” said Cothron. “They love going into other buildings and classrooms and seeing different approaches to leadership styles.”
The 2025–26 school year will be the third year of PCI implementation and will focus on rolling out the final two strategies. When they look back at the first few years of implementation, the academic team said flexibility and the patience to go purposefully slow were the biggest lessons they’ve learned. During the first year, they said they rolled out too many strategies at once and realized some required additional support.
“We had to really change our approach and scale back a little bit,” said Gailbreath. “It was one of those things where you have to go slow to go fast—we have to give teachers time to master a strategy before we start building on it.”
The walkthroughs and conversations continue to expand and help the academic team continuously provide feedback on all of the strategies they’ve introduced. “They’ve been so good at providing resources, monitoring implementation, making adjustments, and helping teachers have the intended impact on student learning,” said Gibson.
Seeing Results
Some of the intended impacts are measurable. The district has seen positive movement in multiple grade bands for overall proficiency levels on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP). And teacher evaluation indicators have also shown growth, especially in the areas the district placed targeted emphasis. “There is a lot of evidence that what we’re doing is really impacting instruction and student growth and achievement,” said Gailbreath.
The PCI initiative also allowed district staff to collaborate and increase interconnectivity, which helped break down silos. Before PCI, when teachers and principals searched for resources and help they tended to look within their own grade levels or similar schools. But now high school principals will walk through elementary schools, identify commonalities and new approaches, and bring them back to their own school, the academic team said.
“This work has built the capacity within our principals, where everybody’s an instructional leader, and that was our goal,” said Cothron. They have knowledge of good instruction, as well as clear expectations from the district about what good instruction looks like, and that has led to deeper conversations with teachers and other leaders, she said.
“It also created an environment where everything could be a coaching conversation,” added Gailbreath. “What Tonia and McREL modeled for us was really helpful as a coaching model for how we were working with our leaders and administrators.”
