Sara DeMartino:
Once you open up space for that motivation to come back, there’s a lot of joy in teaching. I would have to say there are teachers in the network who really were engaged in the work of adapting their instruction, had an agency to do that. Their classrooms became joyful places because students were genuinely excited to learn and to be there because they knew there was value to their ideas because the teacher centered their ideas.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Sara DeMartino, an English language arts fellow at the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute for Learning which we’ll mostly be calling the IFL in this episode. Sara started her career as a high school English teacher in Hillsborough County, Florida. She got her PhD at the University of Pittsburgh and that brought her to the IFL.
I wanted to talk to Sara because of two remarkable results achieved by the IFL’s Network for School Improvement which consists of 14 schools in the Dallas Independent School District, seven middle schools and seven high schools. And to be clear, those are public schools. I say that because I found the phrase Dallas Independent School District confusing and you might too. The first remarkable result is that schools in the network for school improvement increased eighth grade on track for Black and Latinx students by more than 25 percentage points since 2018.
The second result is that those schools improved on track rates for emerging bilingual students from 35% to 80%. That phrase on track is short for on track to graduate high school. This is something a lot of people are working to improve and there are different ways to measure it, but for the purposes of today’s episode, a student is considered on track if they have the course credits needed to move to the next grade and a GPA of 3.0 or higher.
And before we go any further, just think about that second result for a moment. Improving on track rates for emerging bilingual students from 35% to 80%, that’s more than double. So as you’re about to hear, I ask Sara the obvious question. Let’s get into it. How did you do it?

Sara DeMartino:
That’s like the million-dollar question. Right? So for us, when I sat down and thought about it, there was really two things. So it was first beginning to shift teachers thinking about their students, but also to shift teachers in thinking differently about the power they had over instruction in their classroom. So the first year of the network when teachers came to us, they were like, “Hey, we’re doing the curriculum that the district has provided to us. We are doing what we’re being asked to do and the kids are doing what they do.”
There was a lot of deficit language that was sort of showing up about kids and thinking through this problem of practice. And so we said to teachers, “Hey, let’s sit down and look at things one that we can control, but also look at the instruction happening in your classrooms.” So we gave them some shared tools. They did some analysis of their texts, their tasks and the opportunities. Students had to drive the learning in the classroom and they came back and said, “Hey, wait a second. We get it now. There aren’t a lot of opportunities, one, for students to engage in rigorous texts. There wasn’t a lot of opportunities for students to engage in comprehension, which in literacy classrooms we know is foundational to doing any of that other higher level work.”
So if I can’t tell you what a text is about, I’m going to have trouble talking about how the author uses figurative language to support his point because I haven’t even talked about what his point is yet. So giving them that opportunity to do some high-level comprehension work, but then to also think about how do you structure the class so that you’re really sharing authority with students in leading the learning so that students are learning from each other and not just sitting back and listening to you lecture. And once we help them get to that place, it was like, “Okay, let’s do this.”

Alec Patton:
I want to step back for a moment.

Sara DeMartino:
Okay.

Alec Patton:
What struck you when you first started talking to teachers about students? It seems like you very quickly recognized there was an issue.

Sara DeMartino:
We gave them some data and it was the data for their school that included attendance, it included achievement data, and all that data was broken out by the different demographics in their schools. And when we asked them, “What do you notice? What do you wonder? And how is this related to our literacy problem of practice?” They went, “Well, the students don’t want to read. The students don’t want to do the work.” And that caught me off guard because they weren’t thinking about their instruction specifically. They were all saying, “Well, everything that’s going wrong is being driven by the kids.”
And so we had to do some work then on like, “Hey, let’s talk about deficit language and let’s think about the things that you have power to control in your classroom.” And so that took a bit of work.

Alec Patton:
When I encounter as a teacher a mindset that just feels really unproductive to me, I usually get this shot of adrenaline and panic because I feel like I don’t know if I’m going to be able to help you get from point A to point B. Were you feeling that at that point?

Sara DeMartino:
Yeah, because of all the things we sort of went into our early meetings anticipating, we didn’t anticipate that. We didn’t think that teachers would automatically jump to placing blame outside of themselves essentially and placing blame in spots that they weren’t in control of and couldn’t shift on their own without some guidance. So we were, but then we took that step back and said, “Okay, so let’s just talk to them a little bit and have them look at their language and analyze it in the way that we thought about it because we took that back to IFL.”
We had them make some charts to tease out those different causes of when we were talking about what’s happening in your data. We took those charts back and we did some analysis and say, “What did we notice about the language here? What did we notice about what they’re saying?”

Alec Patton:
So you made a chart about their charts?

Sara DeMartino:
We did. And we brought it back to them and said, “Hey, so what do you guys notice about what’s happening here?” And that was a big aha for them. They were actually asked to think about their language in a way that wasn’t, “Hey, I’m just putting language on a poster.” We asked them to think about it. It was like, “What patterns are you noticing about… What’s being referenced as a problem? How it’s being spoken about?” And teachers are like, “Oh wait, I see what we’re doing. We’re saying the kids are the problems and it’s not us.”
That was a huge turning point for them is that we were able to turn the critical lens, and help them turn it in on themselves, but also on the culture and thinking at the school and what was going on so that… I don’t want to say that they were shifting mindsets at that point, but they were forced to really take a hard look at what their beliefs were in relationship to those charts that they created and what that was signaling about those beliefs.
The other point that happened within that first year that helped with that was we sent them to do some empathy interviews with kids and the students came out and said like, “Hey, so we just want teachers to recognize who we are as people and that we’re able think.” Because they said, “We feel right now like we’re in a factory. And you’re just trying to standardize how we think, what we say, how we write. And that’s not who we are and we’re capable of so much more.”
And they sat down and said, “What are we doing to our kids?” We’ve created kids who are not afraid to speak their truth, but we’re not honoring that truth in our classrooms. So how do we then go back and course correct in our instruction to give them those opportunities to be the ones doing the meaning making, to not standardize their learning, to help them grow as humans and not just people who can take a test. Because that was a big idea that came out of those empathy interviews, “You’re creating us as people who can take a test.”

Alec Patton:
Why do you think empathy interviews work so well? I think generally speaking, skilled teachers who like teaching talk to kids. It’s not like they aren’t having conversations with kids. They have relationships with kids where kids tell them things. They probably have kids telling them things that they aren’t telling their parents that they’re trying to work through. I don’t think that’s unusual in schools, but there seems like there’s something about sitting down in the context of an empathy interview that’s just different from those other conversations.

Sara DeMartino:
It’s because it’s a conversation, but it’s a one-sided conversation. So as an adult interviewing a student, I’m saying, “Tell me your story.” I’m asking you to tell me your story on a very specific thing. In this case it was like, “Tell me what your experience has been like in ELA class.” And then I take that step back and I just listen. And the idea is I’m listening intensively for what you have to say. I think the power in these empathy interviews for our teachers though, a lot of them our teachers knew, they would acknowledge there was something that wasn’t quite right with what was happening in the classroom. But when they brought those empathy interviews together and they sat down as a group, and I think that’s where a lot of the power of the network lies.
When they came together as a group and as a collective to look across the themes and the ideas that came out of those interviews, they all collectively went like, “This is a problem not just at my school, not just at high school, not just at middle school. It’s a problem across the district. So what are we going to do about it? Because now it’s not just me saying it’s a problem.” There’s 60, 80 other people in this room from these 14 schools that are going like, “Hey, there’s an issue here and we need to collectively work on it or else we’re not doing anything to serve our students.”
And so it really was that power of that collective conversation that sparked the, “Okay, we’re going to make a change and it’s going to be okay.” There was still a lot of hesitancy in that first year. They knew that something needed to change. We had started giving them some change ideas to help facilitate that change, but there was some hesitancy there because they were afraid of what leadership was going to think about the changes once they started making them because they were afraid of alignment. There were specific rubrics and tools that principals came into classrooms using and if they did what was in the curriculum without adapting it, they would hit really good marks on the observation tools and they were afraid that if they made some adaptations, their assessments were going to go down and that was part of their pay because they’re a pay for performance district.

Alec Patton:
Wow.

Sara DeMartino:
There was a lot of knowledge around good instruction. By mid to end of that first year of the network, there was just a lot of fear though.

Alec Patton:
You’ve set up the perfect transition because you said there were two things. The first one was shifting the teacher thinking about students, and the second one was shifting the teacher thinking about their power. And you’ve just seamlessly transitioned from the teachers understanding the issue with the students to now shifting their thinking about their power. And I’m really curious because it actually sounds like their understanding of their power was very accurate.

Sara DeMartino:
Yes. And so when I say shifting their understanding of power, it wasn’t so much that we’re saying, “Hey, the district is telling you have power, but you’re not taking it.” It was us saying like, “Hey, you need to actually grab the power over your instruction because you recognize that something is not right. And we’ll help you with that.” As the intermediary in the network, we were able to have conversations across role groups in ways that other people in the district weren’t having because we were not someone who had power within the district. So there was no like, “Hey, such and such is telling me these things, so I have to follow it.”
But also I could speak up to somebody who was in a leadership position and say, “Hey, these are the things happening in your schools and these are the messages that teachers are hearing, and so something needs to shift because it’s not working correctly.” So there was no repercussion to me or to anybody else at IFL that was working on the project and sort of doling out hard truths.

Alec Patton:
Still sounds stressful.

Sara DeMartino:
It is. Do you know that game telephone you’d play as a kid, you whisper in somebody’s ear and then the message gets distorted down the line?

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Sara DeMartino:
So that’s what was happening. So upper leadership in the district, but like, “Hey, the curriculum is a resource and teachers should have some agency to make some adaptations and use their professional knowledge and what they knew of their students to make adaptations.” As that message came down the line, the message was being delivered to teachers like, “The curriculum is the curriculum. It’s a good quality resource. You need to use it as written.” And so that’s what they were doing because that’s the message they were being sent.

Alec Patton:
I’ve heard this in multiple countries, this is endemic to school systems that suggestions become fiats by the time they reach teachers.

Sara DeMartino:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
But it seems in this case, it wasn’t a matter of perception if the teachers were being assessed based on their fealty to a curriculum. That’s not just a game of telephone. At some point someone is making structures.

Sara DeMartino:
Yes, the messages and tools for sure went back to teachers like these are the things you need to do, especially when your pay is tied to hitting specific points on those tools. And so for us, we had to do a lot of work with leadership to get them to align their vision of teaching and learning back to the vision that teachers were setting in the network.

Alec Patton:
So the IFL helped create space for teachers to modify the curriculum and experiment with it. Can you tell me about what the teachers did?

Sara DeMartino:
So I’m thinking about one of our seventh grade teachers that by the end of the project was just so thoughtful about integrating different scaffolds as tests have changed into her instruction that it was like watching a concert or a symphony. So kids would come in. She was working with the HQAM. Kids would come in for, let’s say, their first reading of a text. So it’s their comprehension task. She had a class that was seventh grade students.
50% of them were emergent multilingual students and their curriculum said, “Have kids on their computers read and annotate the text.” And then their version of comprehension which we know is not high level comprehension. And the kids told us it was very gameable comprehension because they figured out how to keyword search and answer the multiple choice questions that the HQAM put in there because everything was computer-based. So they didn’t actually have to read.

Alec Patton:
Smart kids.

Sara DeMartino:
I know. Isn’t it great? I mean, the questions were not worth answering and they knew it, so they figured out a way to game it. But what she did was she took them off the computer. She created paper copies of the texts, but then she scaffolded across the three different needs in her classroom. She had kids who were able to read straight through and annotate and then respond to a really high level question about what’s this text about or what’s the big idea in this text.
She had kids who needed a little more support, so she created another version of the text that had segments. So they would stop after where an idea was changed or something shifted in the text and there was a question there to help them process that text. So they were answering small open-ended questions along the way in service of getting to that big question at the end that the kids who didn’t have the segmented text were answering. So everybody was working towards the same question.
And then she had a small group of language learners that needed some additional support that she took to the front table. And those kids had the questions. They had the text segmented. She would read the text and stop and orally ask the questions to kids. They had the questions in Spanish on their document and she would have them talk about it. And then they were notating also the responses on their paper in a way that was most comfortable to them. So it could have been in Spanish. They could have been trying out their English, whatever made the most sense for them.
And again, working in service of answering that question. So she had three different groups of kids in seventh grade working with the same text, working towards the same question, but just utilizing some different scaffolds where in the past where we’ve seen… And this is how the curriculum had suggested scaffolding, was that they had a base text, which was the text unedited, and then you could down the Lexile.
So Lexile is a score that is assigned to text, and many people use the Lexile score to judge the complexity of a text. And what the Lexile really is, is just a computer measure of the words in the text sentence length, looking for things like are there a lot of tier three words which are more technical? Are there a lot of punctuation that can increase a Lexile score. But Lexiles aren’t accurate. So Romeo and Juliet has a second grade or third grade Lexile score, but we wouldn’t give that to a second or third grader.
So Lexiles are an accurate way to judge complexity. So what the curriculum did though is if you told it to make the text a little simpler, it would down the Lexile so kids would get a version of the text that wasn’t maybe quite the same as the standard version. And so there was potential there for kids to be missing information that some of the kids who were reading the other text got. But they weren’t engaging with the full text. They weren’t getting that opportunity to build their reading muscles because they were getting something shorter and essentially easier when a scaffold really was about processing and not, “Let’s take the words out so you don’t ever have to be exposed to them.” And so she did this really masterful three tiers of scaffolding within one classroom that we hadn’t seen in other spots.

Alec Patton:
You described what she did as test for change. What makes that a test for change rather than just a cool idea that a teacher tried?

Sara DeMartino:
There was another seventh grade teacher that came to the network meetings with her. They would talk about the potential of any sort of test of change that we shared with them for her students. So they made some adaptations to it. One of the adaptations they made for their language learning students was that they had annotated all of the cognates that they thought were essential to text understanding, so that those words highlighted for their Spanish speakers. And then they also pulled out some tier two words that are high leverage words that we hear in conversation, but maybe not typically defined for kids to help them understand what those words are.
And then some tier three words that are more technical, if it was a technical text that maybe needed to be defined for them as they read because it would impact their comprehension. So she would adapt it that way for her students, try it out, see what happened. And she added that vocab in after the first round because she realized the scaffolding was working in terms of stopping and asking them questions to help them process the whole text.
But there were still pieces they were missing because there were vocab boards and then they weren’t quite getting. So she was making those adaptations after considering the data around the first time that students utilize that. So she collected their quick writes at the end. She collected the annotated texts with the questions on the side, and then she collected quick writes at the end to see where students were and compared to some of the quick writes she had collected prior to trying that with a comprehension task to see if it actually did make a difference, and she was finding it was.
So it was a test of change in that she was studying the data making adaptations to see if the data shifted based on those adaptations and then taking it up as part of her regular practice if it did work. And she was having those conversations both with her teaching partner or the other seventh grade teacher at the school at the time. And she was bringing that data back to our network meetings and sharing it with some of the other teachers that were part of the network to get their feedback as well to make sure that what they were seeing wasn’t a product of something else based on what other teachers knew about students in that feeder pattern and students in the district.

Alec Patton:
I’m struck that compared to the alignment assessment that we were talking about initially of checking to see if teachers are doing the thing as written. She’s not doing less assessment, she’s doing way more assessment. Way more assessment is happening in the classroom, but the locus and the focus of the assessment has shifted. Rather than saying, we’re going to assess teacher fidelity to the curriculum as written, you are assessing student learning.

Sara DeMartino:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
Rather than having a kind of straight line of, this person is assessed it and they pass it up to the person above them in the hierarchy, and then eventually it goes to see whether their pay gets docked or not, it is, we take it to a large group of people who look at this and would look at the assessment that’s being collected from 13 other schools.

Sara DeMartino:
It’s interesting because we had to do a lot of work with the executive directors, with principals to help them see, like, we put tasks as written and tasks as adapted by teachers in front of principals and executive directors, and had them analyze and say like, “Hey,” with some student work attached to them and saying, “which one is the experience where students are actually doing some meaningful learning and what do you notice about the other task in doing that comparison?”
And they’d always go like, “We want them to do the adapted task. This is what we want in our classrooms.” And so we talked to them about the walkthrough that they were doing, the observation protocol they had and said, “How does that align with what teachers are being observed on? How is that message being sent through your tools?” And so we worked with them on when they go into classrooms to do feedback observation that they’re doing something, IFL calls a learning walk, which is noticings and wonderings through the lens of the test of change that teachers are working with.
So typically there were student-centered practices, seeing where students were getting the opportunity to do that student to student conversation where the students were the one presenting their thinking, presenting their evidence, presenting their reasoning, and then pushing back on ideas with each other and doing that questioning instead of the teacher going, “Hey, that’s a really interesting thought and I bet you saw this here in the text.” The students are the ones doing that.
And so we shifted how they were going in and doing those feedback walks and in the process they started to align their understanding of some of the protocols for doing the pay observations with the practices that were coming out of the network work with those more student-centered practices and saying, “Hey, I think this really could mean this. So let’s focus in on seeing like…” Oh gosh, I can’t remember what they are off the top of my head. But I kept hearing about domain three.
Domain three was a big one for them, and it turned out by doing some of the adaptations, teachers were better hitting whatever domain three was on that observation protocol before they were just seeing it as more of a compliance thing and rather than really understanding what domain three or whatever it was actually really meant.

Alec Patton:
Do you remember what domain three was?

Sara DeMartino:
I can’t remember. I was trying to see if I had it here somewhere.

Alec Patton:
No problem.

Sara DeMartino:
I want to say though, it was something to do with the balance of talk.

Alec Patton:
Quick interjection, after the interview, Sara checked on domain three. It’s actually about student engagement generally rather than balance of talk specifically. I don’t think that matters in terms of the point Sara is making here, I just want to make sure we aren’t misrepresenting domain three. Now, back to Sara.

Sara DeMartino:
The balance of talk in a classroom in theory is it should be instructionally balanced and that teachers and students are both having a voice in the classroom. And how that was being taken was, if it was a back and forth, like an IRE discussion where the teacher asked a question, the student responded. Teacher usually goes, “Good.” They ask another question, the student responds, the teacher goes, “No, that’s not right. Ask the question again.” Somebody else responds, teacher goes, “Good.” So it’s this back and forth that would be like, “Okay, you hit domain three. We heard equal teacher and student voice.”
Whereas teacher in student voice in an authentic and a shared authority way in a classroom, in a student-centered classroom is that teacher might ask a really high level open-ended question. Students discuss that question. They talk about their reasoning. They talk about their evidence. They make some claims. The teachers there are charting and maybe helping to synthesize ideas and connect ideas, and putting it back on kids like, “I heard so-and-so say this thing.” And it sounds a little bit similar to what Billy said over here. What do you guys think about that? Is there a connection there or are we seeing something different?
And putting a question back out there for students to process that information. That’s instructionally balanced as well. Teachers are guiding that heavy lifting that’s being done by kids as opposed to an evaluation back and forth between teacher and student.

Alec Patton:
Okay. So clearly moving away from an absolute focus on alignment with curriculum was really working. Why do you think there was that focus on alignment with curriculum at least for some leaders in the first place?

Sara DeMartino:
Time. I don’t know that they had a lot of time to sit down and make meaning of the instruction that was actually happening. They were in some way, shape or form also receivers of information that this was good instruction and that if kids did this instruction, they would do well on the assessment. So their lens for judging instruction was like, “Hey, since I’ve been told this curriculum is good, that’s what I need to see,” without taking the time to sort of sit down and analyze those products. What we did was we forced them to create space by inviting them to a meeting and having the EDs and some district leadership become a network within themselves to really sit down and look at those artifacts of instruction and say, “Okay. Really is this what you want your students to be doing?”
And if it is, the system is only going to get out what you’re putting into it. And so don’t be surprised by the results you’re seeing on the assessments because that’s what this curriculum is geared to get. So it was time in their lens. And so once we gave them time and really helped them to align their vision for teaching and learning to the vision that teachers really created through doing that initial root cause analysis. I didn’t name it that at the beginning, but that’s what they were doing. Through this root cause analysis about why their students weren’t hitting literacy proficiency by the end of eighth grade and then ninth grade.
By helping them see that and giving them the rationale behind it, there was a lot of power in that in shifting their mindsets, especially since it was coming from their teachers. If we had just sat down and told them and said, “Look, the instruction you’re asking teachers to do is not good. It needs to change.” We’re not from there. We’re coming in from Pittsburgh and telling them things are bad. It wouldn’t have had the same clout as them seeing it and hearing it because we did bring teachers into their meetings to talk to them about their instruction. Hearing it from their teachers held a lot of power, and I think it did a lot to start to shift their thinking about one, the agency to give teachers or to allow teachers to have in making instructional decisions, but also about like, “Hey, the curriculum really is a resource.” And sometimes there needs to be adaptation and sometimes even there needs to be some supplement to it because it just is not relatable or kids don’t see value in it.
We talk about attendance issues, but you look at instruction that’s not interesting or engaging. There’s no motivation to show up. Then we think of the teachers. They’ve gone to college. They’ve been doing their job for years and years and years. They have a ton of professional knowledge, but we’re going to say like, “Hey, we know better than you do about how your kids learn, so just do what we tell you.” So that strips the motivation and it just goes right up the chain.
So once you open up space for that motivation to come back, there’s a lot of joy in teaching. I would have to say there are teachers in the network who really were engaged in the work of adapting their instruction, had an agency to do that. Their classrooms became joyful places because students were genuinely excited to learn and to be there because they knew there was value to their ideas because the teacher centered their ideas.
So the amazing thing about, yes, the network shifted instruction and we got good results, but what it brought was joy to these classrooms because teachers and students were working together in community as opposed to teachers were doing what they were told and students were being compliant.
The network at the end of the day offered a sympathetic and sort of non-judgmental ear, collaborative space, chances to engage in some professional learning or to deepen understanding of practice. I mean, we helped align the system for those 14 schools so that everybody was singing the same song about teaching and learning. So no one was being forced into something that they knew wasn’t going to work and wasn’t going to help their students just because somebody up high said so. Because we got rid of that sort of up high, “This is how I view teaching and learning, and aligned everybody in a…” I know. I’d say it like we did it. I mean, they did it. We just provide space for them to do it.

Alec Patton:
It’s interesting that you use the metaphor of everybody saying the same song because in some ways they did, and in some ways they listened more attentively to each other’s songs.

Sara DeMartino:
Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. I think it’s that communication channel too. I don’t know. I mean, think about… I don’t want to say fear because it’s not fear, but I think as a teacher, if you don’t have a trusting relationship with the people above you, you’re not going to feel comfortable saying like, “Hey, you’re telling me to do these things and this is not right, and this is why.” And so we were that conduit where we didn’t have… No one was going to move my position. No one was going to fire me if I told them like, “Hey, you may have thought you said this thing to your teachers, but this is what actually got communicated down.” And that’s what you’re seeing in the classroom.
So then is that really what you intended? And if not, how do we shift that message? So it’s the sort of space you have as an intermediary that I think sometimes is not the same space that people within a district have to have that conversation amongst themselves. And some of that is just adult relationships are dynamic and crazy at times too. So it was the power that we had. We didn’t have to worry about keeping the peace amongst people by being super political like we could tell them the hard truths and they would hear it from us because they knew we weren’t coming from a place of malice. We were really being critical friends in the conversations that we had with them. And we’re working from the space of, “We want to help you improve your system, and we’re not saying these things,” just to stir things up.

Alec Patton:
Sara, I think that’s a perfect note to end on. Thank you so much, Sara DeMartino. This has just been a delight to hear about.

Sara DeMartino:
Oh, you’re welcome. I always love talking about my Dallas teachers. They’re really special. They really want to do what’s best for their students, and they want their students to enjoy coming to their classrooms every day. So I love talking about them.

Alec Patton:
That’s awesome. Thank you so much. High Tech High Unboxed is hosted and edited by me, Alec Patton. Our theme music is by Brother Herschel. Huge thanks to Sara DeMartino for this conversation. We’ve got a link to the Institute for Learning’s Network for School Improvement in the show notes. Thanks for listening.