Beyond ‘Hire and Hope’: Leading Instructional Improvement across a Rural School District

Abstract

Most school districts lack a coherent, actionable strategy for improving teaching and learning across the system. Current instructional improvement strategies enacted in many districts could best be described as hire and hope, where districts focus on hiring great teachers and then hope those teachers will develop themselves. During the 2021-22 school year, I developed and implemented an instructional leadership strategy in a small, rural district (Rankin Independent School District) to help all teachers improve their teaching practice. This capstone explores the unique challenges, assets, and opportunities associated with leading instructional improvement in rural districts, and how rural districts should serve as an integral component of educational innovation and learning on the national stage. This project resulted in growth in teachers’ practice and administrators’ instructional leadership across the district; additionally, the district’s culture became more instructionally focused. These gains were driven by the change leadership strategy we implemented, district-level leadership providing authority and legitimacy to the project, an explicit programmatic focus on coaching and growth, and our use of collaborative teams and processes. Constraints that limited our progress included varying levels of project ownership, an incomplete focus on the instructional core, leadership team dynamics, and asymmetrical growth foci for teachers and administrators. This capstone generates important learning for school districts and external organizations alike. School districts can adapt key learnings from this project by valuing instructional leadership across their district and community, while simultaneously adapting best practices to their local context. State and national organizations (including professional organizations, state education agencies, and philanthropies) can value rural spaces as centers of research and innovation through rural-centric initiatives, advocacy, networks, and funding opportunities. This capstone presents a process for designing and implementing an instructional leadership strategy focused on teacher growth, while also centering the need for rural districts to adapt this process based on the strengths and challenges of their unique context. The promise of this capstone is that teacher growth can be cultivated at-scale across small, rural districts—and this growth can foster the success and well-being of all people in the district, students and adults alike.