As part of a balanced curriculum, students and educators have sufficient time for foundational, high-priority subjects and skill development.

Students benefit from significantly smaller classes based on their needs or in priority grade levels and subjects (such as 3rd-grade literacy or 9th-grade algebra),while attending larger classes in other areas.

Students experience a mix of large-group, small-group and 1:1 support from a team of educators who deeply understand both the curriculum and each student’s individual needs.

Adjust schedules to increase time in core subjects and target more instructional time to students whose learning has been the most disrupted.

Assign multiple educators — including aides, social-emotional support staff, and administrators — to push into targeted classes, enabling more “just-in-time” instruction in small groups and one-on-one.

Explore options for providing intensive tutoring to groups of students who need the most help by partnering with local organizations and service providers, coordinating with a local university, or creating new roles for existing staff. 

Identify specialized or advanced courses that could be offered online across multiple campuses, potentially freeing up teachers for higher-need grade levels and subject areas.

Teachers feel well-supported by district leaders, by leaders in their building, and by their peers — including a sense of collaboration and shared work at every stage of their career.

Teachers’ work day and work year includes ample time for reflection, collaboration, and building individual connections with students without requiring long after hours work.

Teachers’ student loads, especially in core subjects, are small enough to enable deep engagement with individual students’ work.

Pre-service and early career teachers benefit from “shelter-and-develop” models that lighten their workload while accelerating their development.

Highly effective teachers have opportunities to share their strengths and extend their impact through meaningful leadership roles that allow them to continue working with students.

Throughout the course of their career, teachers’ compensation is highly competitive with other professional roles and can grow based on their contribution and impact (for example, through teacher-leadership roles).

In addition to all of the basic materials needed for teaching and learning, teachers have state-of-the-art technology and tools that save them time on administrative duties, lesson planning, and grading, and that help them problem-solve instructional challenges.

Students benefit from increased stability as more teachers stay in the profession and in their schools longer, improving their craft and expanding their impact over time. 

Set up teaching teams so that every team has at least one instructional content expert to help with the extra planning and learning that is needed now. 

Provide significant stipends and release time to teachers who are carefully selected to take on high-impact leadership roles that require greater expertise and skills.

Leverage district buying power, community partnerships, and in-house expertise to organize wellness supports for teachers, such as in-school mini-substitutes or physical and mental health programs.

Partner with local schools of education to integrate teacher-residents, student-teachers, or practicum/field-work students into targeted classes on a part-time basis, and plan for how to compensate teachers for these increased mentorship responsibilities. 

Begin “stay conversations” with teachers — starting with those who are most likely to leave at the end of the year   — to understand the conditions that would make them more likely to stay in their role.

Role assignments, routines, and operating norms that help educators and students build and sustain positive school and classroom culture, as a foundation for positive relationships and learning. 

Scheduling and staffing models that help educators and students build and sustain positive relationships — for example, block schedules, looping, and drastic class size reductions in top-priority courses and grade-levels.

School staff can more proactively identify which students need additional support and what types of needs they have. This includes routines to identify students who are chronically absent and engage their families through direct outreach and support. 

Students are rapidly connected to needed resources and effective school-based and third-party provided services who can help meet their distinct needs. 

Educators inform the continuous improvement of processes used for identifying students’ needs, referring students to services, and following through to ensure students both receive and benefit from the services they need.

With input from families and school staff, build out routines and staff assignments for regularly touching base with groups of families, with the goal of identifying and learning more about students’ academic and social-emotional needs. Ensure that each student is accounted for in this plan.

Create shared-student collaboration points for staff to clearly and efficiently connect and norm on the individual student needs they’re surfacing. 

Identify which types of data about emerging student needs are most helpful to capture; for what purpose (such as streamlining connections with community partners, identifying trends, informing the allocation of resources, or guiding continuous improvement); and through what methods or processes. 

Develop a working bank of partners in your community who are available to support students and families with specific needs — this will help staff more seamlessly connect students and families with the resources they need.

Students benefit from participation in community partnerships that deepen learning and engagement, both during and beyond the school day.

Families have access to out-of-school programming, such as child care, enrichment, core academics, homework help, social-emotional programming, and athletics.

Partnership models are designed to address local demand and need, align with student and family schedules, and link to processes that effectively connect students to the most appropriate service(s) for addressing their needs.

Families maintain visibility into what students are learning and receive guidance for helping to develop students’ learning habits.

Develop clear norms for who communicates with families, what they share and when. 

Make sure that all district and school communications successfully reach families — for example, by communicating in their home language to ensure accessibility, and by using the most relevant and effective methods and messengers (which will likely vary by family and by circumstances).  

Give thoughtful consideration to families who may typically fall through the cracks — identify who those families might be and align your strategy for successfully reaching them accordingly. 

Identify roles, routines, and relevant platforms that can be leveraged to provide families with more responsive, two-way communications. 

Actively work to foster genuine forms of engagement with families, especially those from underserved communities, around how the school community can better support them and their students — this may range from input used to inform resource allocations and partnerships, to collaborative decision-making, to family-led ways for identifying problems and generating solutions. 

Use input from students, teachers, and families to inform how you’ll leverage or expand existing community partnerships to accelerate learning and improve student well-being.