Student voice shaped a leadership coaching plan for every school.

A districtwide initiative, and one voice missing from it

Harrisburg School District in Pennsylvania serves more than 6,000 students across 11 schools. Ninety-seven percent of its students come from low-income families; 53% are Black and 37% are Latino. The district had recently moved from state recovery to court-appointed receivership and, under Chief Academic Officer Dr. Portia Slaughter, was carrying a two-year personalized learning initiative into every school.

District leaders wanted three things: a clear picture of instructional practice across the district, support for each school matched to its own strengths and growth areas, and more capacity in leaders and teachers to teach every student rigorously and well. Dr. Slaughter and her colleagues saw that they could not get there without hearing directly from students about their experience in the classroom.

The Tripod 7Cs Assessment in every school, then the results in every team’s hands

In October 2023 the district partnered with Education Elements, now part of engage2learn, to give the Tripod 7Cs Assessment districtwide. First fielded at Harvard by Dr. Ronald Ferguson, the assessment asks students about seven components of effective teaching. Harrisburg gave it school by school, so the whole school community took part.

District leaders then read the results against each school’s personalized learning goals. They held workshops in which teams examined each school’s strengths, its gaps and the support it needed, and ran the same workshops with school teams of principals, coaches and teachers.

A coaching plan for each school, and a way to measure it

The district came away with a full picture of instructional practice seen from the students’ side, for the district as a whole and for each school.

Mapping the results to each school’s goals let district leaders write a leadership coaching plan for every school, matched to what that school needed. School teams bought in as they worked through the data: many saw value in it for their own professional growth, and one coach asked whether individual teachers could get the same feedback.

With a second round of the assessment planned for spring 2024, the district set itself up to see whether the support it gave each school had changed instructional practice, measured by what students report.