Setting a Vision for Excellent Instruction
Tyler Wood
Assistant Principal, Orange Park Junior High School
Defining and developing a shared vision with respect to instructional leadership and excellent instruction is a substantial task that, if we are being honest here, can occasionally feel insurmountable.  

In my experience, beginning the work alone can be a troublesome task. How often do we as an Instructional Leadership Team (ILT) get a substantive opportunity to be together and complete an all-inclusive/functional plan for excellent instruction? To be fair, the scope of this mission is expansive and there are opportunities to dive into this work during the summer, but it can sometimes feel fragmented and disconnected as you’re working to prepare for the school year. Fortunately, for approximately 60 school principals, assistants, district-based administrators and FLDOE personnel, TNTP conducted an Instructional Leadership Team institute aimed at challenging leaders to first reflect and then plan for strengthening the ILT. But how can the ILT work cohesively to establish a culture of learning rooted in the school’s vision for excellent instruction, the major instructional shifts in math and literacy, and the instructional core?

In reality, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this professional development opportunity prior to our FASA conference. All I knew was I’d be spending two additional days in Tampa and my sincere hope was to experience something I might be able to bring back to and implement in our institution. I’m entering my fourth year as an assistant principal in Clay County and currently work at Orange Park Junior High School. Our school has a large percentage of minority students with about seventy-three percent of our students receiving free or reduced lunch. Our teachers are, for the most part, dedicated to our student population and want to play a part in building our students’ capacity to learn but, given my own ILT experience, it could be said that our overall vision with respect to excellent instruction is convoluted at best. Certainly research-based strategies are employed regularly but what does a shared vision regarding excellent instruction look like? The ILT institute challenged us to identify the myriad roles of the Instructional Leadership Team in developing a shared instructional vision and direction to strengthen the pedagogical fortitude of our staff.

Over the course of two days, TNTP, through the ILT institute provided those participating an opportunity to reflect, discuss, and prepare to shift the culture of learning and strengthen best practice within our schools. Embedded in this process were discussions centered on the shifts in math and literacy as it relates to the instructional core. Our facilitators challenged us to think more acutely about the effect these shifts should have on instruction and what should be seen and heard (from both teachers and students) as we navigate the planning process. Evident in our conversations was the need to give content an equitable amount of attention in the instructional core (students, teachers, content) and that changing, removing, or ignoring content can affect student learning and performance as dramatically as removing another component from the instructional core.


Instructional strategies can vary from school to school and class to class but excellent instruction will have commonly shared behaviors in all schools. Though there is no prescriptive approach to excellent instruction, the ILT is paramount in defining this vision. While my thoughts here only convey a snapshot of what was both facilitated and learned, it can be said with certainty that my experience during those two days has magnified my capacity as an instructional leader. I end with a sincere thanks to those from TNTP and from FASA. The opportunity to learn and develop would not have been possible without your dedication to our profession.

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