Education Week - February 19, 2020 - 28

"If you don't change those core beliefs ... then it won't matter
what resource you put in place," says Francis.

Pat McDonogh for Education Week

Francis, background,
right, spends much of her
time visiting classrooms
and collecting samples
of student work to learn
how teachers are putting
a new curriculum
into action.

guiding students' answers, Francis said.
Seeing students working showed Francis something
about instruction that she couldn't have learned from
the resources alone: The 6th grade lesson was less
rigorous than the 1st grade one-not because of the
materials but because of the way the teacher was
using them. Later, Francis would create professional
development for instructional coaches designed around
these work samples, highlighting the importance of
increasing challenge through grade levels.
It's not that Daviess County hadn't prioritized
instruction before, said James Lyddane, the district's
director of elementary schools. But over the past few
years, Francis started a coordinated drive forward that
felt new-and urgent.
In doing so, she became part of a burgeoning national
movement around universal, high-quality curriculum.
More districts are now looking to materials designed
to build knowledge coherently through grade levels,
aiming to prepare students with a strong foundation for
reading comprehension. But many school systems are
still figuring out how to support their teachers with PD
that helps them use these new resources effectively.

28 | EdWeek Leaders To Learn From | February 19, 2020

Francis is now expanding this work across the county,
starting to examine instruction in other grade levels and
subject areas. Her goal is for all educators in the district-
from principals to instructional coaches to teachers-to
come to a shared understanding: What does standardsaligned, cognitively demanding teaching really look like?
And when it's not happening, why not?

Francis, 47, is a third-generation teacher. Her
mother and grandmother both taught in Flatwoods, Ky.,
near where Francis grew up in Russell, Ky.
She considered other career paths-in high school, she
was set on becoming a corporate lawyer-but the idea of
teaching kept calling her back. So as an undergraduate at
Wellesley in the 1990s, Francis joined the college's new,
nontraditional certification program.
The class of 10 women included history, computer
science, and psychology majors. Francis was working
toward a degree in pure mathematics. In class, they dove
deeply into the content they were preparing to teach.
That liberal arts approach was "the biggest influence
on my career as an educator," said Francis. "I was
actually in an institution that asked me to read, and
think, and argue, and convince not only myself of my
ideas but to prove them."
After college, Francis taught in DeKalb County school
district in Georgia. But she moved back to Kentucky
soon after, starting as an instructional coach in
Daviess County and eventually becoming the district's
assessment coordinator. Even then, she saw her role as
instruction-oriented. "Yes, I can crunch the numbers,"
Francis said. "But can I help you figure out what to do to
get the numbers to change?"
Now, she says, she spends a lot of time "getting
teachers to think about ideas." Why is it important that
students learn this? How does it fit into bigger district
goals? "That to me is what being a thinker is about,"
Francis said. "Taking an idea and being able to break
it apart, learning more about it, and then saying, 'How
does this apply to us?' "
But when the district adopted the Common Core
State Standards nearly a decade ago, there was one
idea she couldn't break apart. Francis was in charge of
training teachers and principals on the shifts in ELA,
but when she got to the standards' requirement for
building knowledge, she paused. She remembered
thinking-standing there in front of 200 educators who
were waiting for guidance-that she had no idea how
that could be done. How could a school system create
a coherent program of study from K-12, when schools
almost always made content decisions independently?
Through workshops with the nonprofit Student

Education Week - February 19, 2020

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