We are not meeting our student achievement goals. We believe it’s because there are insufficient opportunities for students to read, talk, and write in classrooms. We ran three hours of professional development on think-pair-share for teachers, middle leaders, and principals in the summer. Teachers are still doing all of the talking.

You can replace ratio with any organizational initiative – academic or operational – and the outcome is often the same. At best, leaders become genuinely curious about what they could do differently. At worst, the conversation devolves into each level of the system blaming the others for a lack of commitment, follow-through, or skill.

This pattern is hardly unique. TNTP’s The Mirage found that despite significant investments in professional development, most teachers did not substantially improve their instructional practice over time—not because they were unwilling, but because the systems designed to support their development were insufficient.

The question, then, is not whether professional learning matters. It is how we design it so that learning actually translates into implementation.

In our experience, this tension is one that leaders often miss. When rolling out a new initiative, the larger the audience the more efficiently you spread an idea but the less deeply you are likely to change individual practice. Conversely, the smaller the audience the greater the opportunity for individualized coaching and behavior change, but the harder it is to reach everyone.

To effectively move an initiative from awareness to mastery, we recommend engaging a combination of learning levers that balance both scale and impact over time. At One World we use the Four Learning Levers to help determine and ensure that each initiative has the necessary implementation structures to succeed. On one axis we look at scale and ask “how many people can we reach?” On the other we look at impact and ask “how much does this change practice?”

This results in four learning levers:

Whole Group where we build awareness, Small Group where we develop skills, One-to-One where we ensure mastery, and Independent where we build sustainability.

Whole Group:

Whole Group learning levers like professional development days, staff meetings, and initiative launches are great ways to ensure that everyone hears the same message and builds a shared vision and language. Strong, evidence-based and data-backed framing helps to create a collective sense of urgency.

At a systems-level, in our work supporting ISFODOSU in the Dominican Republic in improving literacy practices across the country, we began with large-scale training of 400 school leaders on the key principles of effective school management that included clear instruction, creating teacher development systems, and the use of data to adjust instruction. At the school level in Puerto Rico, Vimenti Schools launched a similar initiative with three weeks of whole school professional development for teachers.

The key question at the end of these sessions, however, was “does everyone understand what we are trying to accomplish?” and not “can everyone do it?” The primary focus of this lever is shared knowledge and alignment—not implementation.

Small Group

The small group lever allows for scale with greater depth. At a school level these systems include department meetings and grade level teams. At the system level these may be Professional Learning Communities or Communities of Practice. This is where we begin to move from understanding of the initiative to application. Small groups allow facilitators to adjust conversations based on the needs of the participants while remaining efficient. When scheduled, they create a greater frequency (sometimes even weekly) for ongoing exposure, practice, and support. This lever allows for in-depth discussion, practice, peer learning, feedback and continuous problem solving. They create rich opportunities to highlight excellence in early adopters and give practitioners the opportunity to make adjustments along the way so the initiative is more collaborative.

In our initiative in the Dominican Republic, this translated into small group sessions divided by teacher, middle leaders, and school leaders that met every 6 weeks virtually or in-person. At the school level in Puerto Rico this meant weekly department meetings for lesson internalization and deliberate practice.

This lever asks the question, “what does this look like in our context? And how do we do this well together?”

One-to-One

The one-to-one level is where behavior changes. This is where the greatest opportunity for individual growth and adoption takes place through individualized immediate and specific feedback.. At the systems level this happens through school visits, classroom walkthroughs, and coaching for the school leader or principal manager. At the school level it is through individual teacher observations, real time feedback, and one-on-one coaching sessions.

To achieve this one-to-one ratio in the Dominican Republic, we trained 90 principal supervisors who would conduct monthly school visits in support of the original 400 principals trained. The purpose of these visits was to provide direct feedback on implementation and serve as a thought partner to overcome obstacles specific to the school. Additionally, each visit included a whole school walkthrough and a deliberate practice clinic for the school leader and their leadership team to provide further opportunities of practice in the presence of the principal supervisor. At Vimenti in Puerto Rico, we created a system for the principal to conduct two whole school walkthroughs a week with real-time feedback as a pulse check on the week’s key practice followed by weekly one-on-one conversations with teachers.

The key question for this lever is, “How do you improve your implementation?” not what everyone else is doing. The goal is individual mastery of the skill and that means adjusting to the learner.

Independent

Lastly, the independent lever is where skills are sustained, adapted, and extended. For learning to happen here, the learner must have sufficient mastery of the skill that they can now absorb information from readings, videos, and other mediums and apply it on their own. This is the space to engage with new ideas and advancements in a practice—not to encounter the practice for the first time.

In the Dominican Republic this took the form of a WhatsAPP group where participants shared updates on adjustments they made to their practice to best fit their schools, asked questions of the group as they navigated challenges, and shared publishings on relevant findings in academia or current events. In Puerto Rico, teachers have similarly taken the lead in sharing updates on their implementation during their weekly staff meetings to serve as a resource for others, and they also share relevant tools and research that they gather from their own exploration of the core practice. They also began to observe each other during their preps and offer each other feedback as a way to take ownership of their growth and development.

The key question in this space is, “How do I continue improving on my own?”

Ultimately, the goal of a new initiative is more than exposure – It is increasingly independent and effective implementation. As we discussed in our earlier reflection on Plan, Train, Coach, Monitor, implementation doesn’t happen because we launch an initiative—it happens because we intentionally build the structures that support people long after the training ends. The Four Learning Levers offer one way to design those structures.

The learning levers also work alongside the Development Continuum. Whole-group learning can help people know what is expected, understand why it matters, and develop the desire to act. Small-group learning creates opportunities to practice in isolation—to rehearse, receive feedback, learn from peers, and build skill before implementation. One-to-one coaching supports individuals as they transfer and adapt the practice within the complexity of their own classrooms, schools, or systems. Independent learning creates the conditions for practitioners to innovate autonomously—continuing to refine the work, solve new problems, and contribute learning back to the organization.

This does not mean that every initiative must move neatly from whole group, to small group, to one-to-one, to independent learning. Development is rarely that linear. Different projects will begin in different places and require different levels of support. The role of the leader is to diagnose where teachers are and intentionally match the learning structure to what they need next. This is what builds the individual and organizational capacity to create and sustain change.

Point is: there’s lots to it.

Given the complexity, we’re often asked what matters most. After high expectations, the answer is – it depends.

At One World, we’ve seen change succeed when people embraced the concept of one hundred 1% solutions. The idea is straightforward: for schools to improve, lots of little things need to come together, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. And while some aspects of the change may be more important than others – the quality of curricular resources, the amount of time allocated to early grade reading and math, the quality of instructional coaching for new teachers – there are also lots of smaller components that help the big ones stick.

Consider a few examples:

• Tajikistan was implementing a new national reading and math curriculum. The resources were clearly important, but they also needed time to train the teachers. Fortunately, twice a month teachers were required to attend Saturday professional development for three hours. That gave the reform initiative an important extra 1% – a luxury we have yet to see in other national settings.

• In South Sudan, the school leader we’re supporting has to design for a wide range of literacy and numeracy skills in a single classroom to make learning meaningful. That’s the big part. But he also has to provide for students’ basic needs, so a feeding program is also essential – another important 1% needed to meet the needs of his students in their context.

• In England a large network of schools wanted to decentralize accountability and establish regional directors as the instructional leader of their cluster. Before embarking on the journey of policy changes and capacity building, it made sense to start with a basic review of the roles + responsibilities of the position, as well as expectations for how they’d spend their time – a simple, concrete activity where the 1% unlocked major changes still to come.

A recent article in the US about the “MIssissippi Miracle” brings the point home. The author, one of the leaders who helped with the amazing transformation in early grade reading results, writes, “Reforms that try to copy only Mississippi’s commitment to reading science without accountability will not deliver the intended results. Fixing education is never that simple.” She goes on to explain the nearly 15 years of policy reforms that helped change the mindsets and behaviors of students, educators, and lawmakers. “The shift to higher expectations did not apply only to children and schools; it required a new attitude at the Mississippi Department of Education.” She then describes other states that have tried to replicate Mississippi’s results, but without success. In an effort to expedite change, they missed finding their own 1% solutions to go along with the bigger pieces of the puzzle.

Trying to cut, copy, and paste someone else’s solution doesn’t work.

Even trying to lay out the sequencing of the 1% solutions at the start of the journey is fraught. Stuff happens. And as it does, plans have to adapt, flex, and adjust. Just ask the folks in Mississippi.

None of this should be discouraging. It should serve as a reminder that we don’t have to know exactly what to do, when to do it. Improving experiences for students in classrooms isn’t a straight-forward problem to solve. It’s not a broken window or faulty wire. Education reform is a complex, challenging problem with enormous interdependencies. Cultural contexts, language differences, urban vs. rural, coastal vs. the mountains. The list goes on – and that’s just within a region, let alone a country or a continent.

What matters most? Not believing in silver bullets or someone else’s answer is an important place to start. By embracing the idea of one hundred 1% solutions, those attempting to improve education – whether lawmakers or parents, teachers or principals – will be well on their way to generating the small gains needed for transformational change.

I would leave meetings with marked-up calendars, action lists, and a stronger sense of urgency. The plan felt like progress. Sometimes it was. Too often, it was just a to-do list on paper that I sometimes got to and, more often than not, left sitting on my desk.

That is the hard part of school leadership. You are trying to run the day to day while also trying to change future outcomes. You are dealing with attendance, staffing, behavior, parent concerns, and the hundred small things that can fill a day. At the same time, you are trying to improve teaching and learning. In that kind of environment, planning can become the work instead of the start of the work.

This is where Plan, Train, Coach, Monitor, or PTCM, comes in.

At One World, we use PTCM as a disciplined way to turn priorities into action. It is not a separate initiative. It is the way leaders carry a priority from diagnosis into daily routines. The priority might be improving the teaching of phonics, independent practice, lesson internalization, questioning, or attendance. Too often, the adults responsible for the work are not yet acting in a way that gives teachers practical support.

PTCM can support whole-school improvement as well as classroom improvement. In some cases the work is directly instructional. In others it is broader, such as attendance or family engagement. The discipline is the same: name the gap, prepare people to act, support them as they do, and keep checking whether the work is landing.

That is why school leaders need something more than a plan.

Clear and focused planning matters. Strong implementation does not begin with a broad goal. It begins with a clear gap. “We want reading scores to rise by ten percent” is a goal. It is not yet a plan. The better question is what exactly is getting in the way. Are students not reading with fluency? Are they not understanding what they read? Are teachers not using the curriculum as intended? Are lessons too dominated by teacher talk and not giving students enough time to think and write for themselves?

That is where planning becomes essential. It moves a school from ambition to action. It asks what students are not yet able to do, what evidence shows the gap, and what adults at each layer need to do differently to close it. In practice, that often means smaller, tighter plans inside the larger goal. A school might need one plan for attendance and another for independent practice. One for phonics in Grade 1 and another for lesson internalization in Year 7. The goal is still the same. PTCM helps the work become clearer.

In earlier pieces, we have written about alignment and the 5 Misalignments that often get in the way of improvement. That framework helps leaders diagnose where the problem sits. PTCM helps leaders respond. If the 5 Misalignments help name the gap, PTCM helps turn that diagnosis into action.

Once the plan is clear, training matters. Unfortunately, this is a step that many schools move through too quickly. They explain the priority, hand out the materials, and assume people will know what to do next. Usually they do not. Good training stays close to the work ahead. People need to understand the gap, see what better practice looks like, and rehearse before they are expected to deliver it. That applies to school leaders, middle leaders, coaches, and teachers alike.

Then comes coaching. This is the part that often determines whether the plan succeeds or fails. Training helps create clarity. Coaching is what turns clarity into habit. It is how a leader helps another adult get better at the work. That means staying close to meetings, lessons, student work, and feedback. It means naming a precise next step, creating time to practice it, and coming back to see whether anything changed.

In my experience, this is where leadership starts to show itself. The plan may be strong on paper, but the real question is whether leaders stay with it long enough to help people improve. That is as true for a principal working with an SLT as it is for a department head or instructional coach supporting a teacher.

Then there is monitoring. This is often the hardest part. In weaker systems, monitoring slips into compliance. Did the meeting happen? Was the lesson observed? Was the form filled in? Those questions matter, but they are too shallow on their own. Strong monitoring stays tied to students. What can they do now that they could not do before? What is changing in their independent work, assessments, and classroom responses? What needs to be tightened, adjusted, or dropped?

That kind of monitoring takes discipline. It also takes honesty. Sometimes the issue is not in the implementation. Sometimes the original plan was too broad, too vague, or too ambitious. PTCM helps leaders see that sooner.

We have seen this approach work across very different contexts. In South Africa, Common Good’s school improvement work gained traction where leaders were aligned around the same evidence and priority, had a clear model for the work, and kept returning to it through planning, training, coaching, monitoring, and adaptation. The same pattern has shown up in Oasis Community Learning in the UK, where PTCM has helped school leaders move priorities from paper into action, and in the Dominican Republic, where it has supported early literacy by helping leaders and teachers focus on the practices that matter most for young readers. The settings are different, but the implementation challenges are similar.

That, for me, is the value of Plan, Train, Coach, Monitor.

Planning matters, but schools improve only when the work after the plan is carried through.

Most schools do not struggle because leaders cannot name the right priorities. They struggle because too much gets lost between the meeting and the lesson. PTCM helps leaders stay with the work long enough for it to improve the student experience.

At One World, we have experienced both sides of continuous improvement efforts. There have been moments where learning has been sharp, shared, and cumulative, where insight from one project clearly informs the next across contexts and teams. And there have been other moments where strong work stays localized and great thinking sits within an individual or team.

The challenge is not generating insight. It is ensuring that insight travels in a way that strengthens our collective capability.

This past year, we engaged with the work of Jal Mehta and colleagues to strengthen our efforts at continuous improvement. His framework helped us move beyond seeing continuous improvement as a tool to install or a tangential effort, toward seeing it as something that depends on the right conditions and is embedded in our daily work.

A framework for continuous improvement

Inspired by this work, we have centered our approach on Mehta’s four interacting elements: mindsets, routines, practices, and relational conditions. These elements are deeply connected. Weakness in one area will often limit progress in the others.

• Mindsets influence how people approach change—whether improvement is experienced as compliance or as an opportunity for growth.

• Routines determine where improvement actually lives. Without protected time to reflect and plan, learning remains occasional.

• Practices make improvement visible. They define what people actually do—how leaders lead, how teams respond to evidence, how support is provided.

• Relational conditions make improvement possible. Trust and ownership allow people to surface challenges and adapt their work over time.

As we studied this framework, we also looked beyond education, speaking with senior partners from high-performing professional service firms. In these organizations, impact depends on their ability to learn across projects and continuously strengthen their practice.

Across those conversations, a consistent pattern emerged. Strong organizations are intentional about how learning is captured, shared, and used. They build cultures where individuals feel responsible not only for their own work, but for contributing to the organization’s collective knowledge. They rely on predictable routines to study what enables success, and they use specific practices to ensure that insight does not remain isolated.

We have begun adapting these ideas to fit the relational, context-specific nature of our work at One World.

We are still early on our journey, but our research and initial efforts have clarified a few conditions that appear essential for continuous improvement to take hold.

Mindsets matter. Continuous improvement depends on a shared orientation toward growth and contribution. In strong organizations, individuals do not only seek to improve their own work. They see it as their responsibility to contribute to the learning of the organization as a whole. Without that mindset, insight remains personal rather than collective.

Routines must be embedded into the work. Learning does not travel on its own. It requires predictable structures that create space to reflect, study practice, and apply insight. These routines are most effective when they are built into existing rhythms rather than added on top of the work.

Improvement must strengthen internal capability over time. For impact to increase, the organization itself has to get better. Each cycle of work should not only deliver results externally, but also build the internal knowledge, judgment, and capability of the team. Without this, improvement resets rather than compounds.

Continuous improvement, in this sense, is about enabling learning to move and accumulate.

For schools and systems, this shifts the focus of improvement work.

Rather than asking what new program or strategy to introduce, the more important question becomes: what conditions exist for learning to accumulate over time in ways that strengthen teaching and student experience?

Without those conditions, improvement resets instead of compounds. Strong practice remains isolated, and systems become complex without becoming stronger. Classrooms vary widely, and access to rigor and joy depends too much on the individual teacher. With the right conditions in place, something different becomes possible. Learning becomes part of how the organization functions, practice becomes more consistent, and classrooms become more reliably rigorous and joyful for every student.

At One World, we have begun to apply this approach internally and with partners. It has helped shift conversations from introducing new initiatives to strengthening the conditions that allow improvement to take hold. Most importantly, it has focused our work on how learning moves and how insight generated in one place can inform action elsewhere.

The question is not whether improvement is happening. It is whether learning is accumulating in ways that lead to more consistent classrooms of rigor and joy.

Our work aims to change that by building the conditions that help learning to move, accumulate, and inform what comes next. That is what allows improvement to compound and endure, and what makes high quality learning possible in every classroom.

Achieving that at scale? Ensuring all students, regardless of starting point, have these opportunities?

Every school system has a top 1% of classrooms and schools. These are classrooms and schools where teaching is thoughtful, intentional, and effective. Driven by high expectations (here) and supported with systems alignment (here), these schools help transform the lives of young people. That’s depth.

Breadth is what systems do to make it happen everywhere else. New strategies, new programs, new training. Maybe there’s an evidence base to support it, maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s based on local examples, maybe it’s not.

As underscored by the Center for Global Development’s research (here), system-wide efforts rarely succeed. When they don’t, strong practice stays isolated, and system efforts stay superficial.

We think both are possible and necessary: depth and breadth.

Depth is about enduring impact—practice that genuinely improves learning. Breadth is about broad exposure—how widely that practice is spread.

Ultimately, it becomes a cycle of continuous improvement:

• Establish exemplars

• Capture what works

• Train at scale

Then repeat. Because as practice spreads and educators experiment in their local context, new exemplars will emerge.

Our experience working in the Dominican Republic serves as a promising case study.

In the DR, 73% of Grade 3 students do not read proficiently, and by grade six that number rises to 84% (UNESCO, ERCE 2019).

In collaboration with ISFODOSU, one of the leading universities on the island for teacher and leader training, we partnered with a two-pronged approach:

• Breadth: instructional leadership training for 450+ school leaders

• Depth: science of reading implementation support for 6 schools

The goal was both reach and proof. The core practices of instructional leadership – creating a culture of high expectations, using data to drive instruction, supporting teachers through coaching – would be essential across the system. Establishing the mindsets and routines of instructional leadership had to happen.

But it wouldn’t be enough. We also had to go deeper to learn at a more granular level what classroom practices were required to move student learning, and in the process, what leadership moves were required to support teachers. In this case, our focus was on 1st grade reading, so the deep support included reviewing curricular resources, developing teacher resources, exploring effective phonics-based practices, and implementing meaningful assessment.

Within a year:

• 90% of Grade 1 students showed growth

• 41% met benchmarks vs. 9% in control schools

• Reading fluency increased threefold

Recent data shows those gains continuing, with more students moving out of risk categories and schools better able to respond to learning needs. Students in the pilot schools are outperforming their peers by significant margins, and the gap is increasing over time.

The introduction to the science of reading began by identifying what strong reading instruction actually looked like in the Dominican Republic context:

• What students do when learning improves

• What teachers do to produce those outcomes

• How the system – in the university, at the district – can help make it happen

Key practices were made visible:

• Benchmarks across grades and languages

• Structured feedback routines

• Clear teacher action steps

Critically, this extended beyond classrooms and into routines for coaches and system leaders. They all aligned around the same routines. With data at the centre—not for compliance but for responsiveness–the system was able to activate itself to drive improvement.

Equally important, the university shifted its leader and teacher training to be more practice-based. This included providing models of what the most effective teachers and leaders do, giving time to practice, and providing feedback to help drive improvement.

While we still have a long way to go to raise the literacy level of all young people in the Dominican Republic, there’s now a path forward. Not by adopting another country’s approach, or embracing a global fad, but by strengthening the system to scale what it has already accomplished.

Our learnings?

Depth without breadth is fragile. Breadth without depth is hollow.

But when they are connected, you get something more powerful: systems that can improve and sustain learning.

That sounds obvious. In practice, it is easy to lose.

Schools and systems talk about leadership, professional development, strategy, and accountability. All of that matters. But if they are not improving what happens before, during, and after the classroom lesson, they are too far removed from the learning they are meant to improve.

We’ve referenced the need for system alignment in previous Insights (here), and we’ve also discussed the importance of developing people (here). In this piece we want to spotlight the combination of those two, in what we refer to as Leading through the Layers.

We use Leading through the Layers to describe how the supporting levels of a system need to strengthen teaching and learning. Ministers and Superintendents support senior officials and district chiefs. They in turn support regional directors or principal managers, who support principals. Principals develop their leadership teams, who then strengthen middle leaders or instructional coaches. Middle leaders support teachers. Teachers shape what students experience every day in classrooms.

In that sense, Leading through the Layers is not about leadership in the abstract. It is about whether the system is organized in a coherent way to improve student learning.

This has been a central focus in our work with Oasis Community Learning, a multi-academy trust in the UK. We are helping to train their 56 school leadership teams, primary and secondary, to implement a Leading through the Layers model. We are also providing deeper support to 26 schools through in-person visits and coaching calls. In this coaching-on-coaching model, we engage with the Regional Directors as they support school leaders, who in turn support middle leaders and teachers. By working with all layers, we make clear that each is expected to strengthen the next. The point is not to train one role and hope the rest follow. The point is to build aligned routines across the network that focus leadership attention squarely on teaching and learning.

Why does this matter?

Because stronger student learning does not come from better intentions. It comes from stronger teaching. And stronger teaching depends heavily on what happens before, during, and after the lesson.

Before the lesson, teachers need to internalize what they are going to teach. That means more than reading through a plan. It means understanding the content, the key questions, the likely misconceptions, the level of rigor required, and what successful student thinking should look like.

During the lesson, teachers need to respond to student thinking in real time. They need to notice who is secure, who needs more support, what patterns are emerging, and whether students are doing the cognitive work the lesson demands.

After the lesson, teachers and leaders need to look at the evidence. What did students actually learn? What does their work show? What needs to be retaught, adjusted, or strengthened next?

That is the grain size each layer has to stay focused on. Not whether a meeting happened. Not whether a form was completed. Not whether a training deck was delivered. Rather, is what we’ve done helping to improve the quality of teaching and learning?

That is why middle leaders, instructional coaches, and others who directly support teachers matter so much.

In strong schools, instructional coaches do not simply manage a subject or grade level. They help teachers prepare for stronger instruction. They lead planning conversations that clarify what students need to know, what they need to be able to do, where they are likely to struggle, what high-quality responses could sound like, and how the lesson should unfold. They keep the focus on student learning, not just pacing, coverage, or task completion.

But for that to happen consistently, instructional coaches need strong support from the layers above them.

That is where the work of leaders becomes critical. Their job is not simply to line manage instructional coaches. It is to sharpen how coaches support teachers. Leaders attend planning meetings, walk classrooms, and stay connected to see the impact on teaching and student learning. They look at student work. They reflect on what is improving, what is not, and what needs to happen next. They model strong planning conversations, help coaches refine their feedback, and make sure the routines are aligned and coherent with a school’s instructional priorities.

In other words, the meeting is not the point. The point is whether the meeting improves what happens before, during, and after the lesson.

That same principle matters at every layer. Senior officials and superintendents monitor progress in classrooms and schools. Regional directors ground their conversations with principals in teaching and learning, not just operations. Principals build shared ownership of the instructional agenda through their leadership teams, who work with middle leaders and other teacher-facing leaders as instructional partners, helping them strengthen teachers’ classroom practice. Each layer leads in a way that helps the next layer improve what students actually experience.

The research points in the same direction. Goldring and colleagues found that principal supervisors are more effective when they are positioned to coach principals on instructional leadership rather than compliance alone. Kraft, Blazar, and Hogan found that coaching is more likely to change practice when it is sustained, individualized, intensive, and tied to clear skills. Saunders, Goldenberg, and Gallimore found that stronger implementation came when the work included school-based leadership teams, explicit protocols, and coherent support, rather than focusing on principals in isolation. Together, those findings reinforce a simple point: improvement is less likely when one layer is trained alone and more likely when the layers learn, practice, observe, monitor, and embed shared routines together.

That is also what we are seeing in practice.

One example comes from Oasis Academy Coulsdon, a secondary school in Couldson, England which serves over 900 students in years 7-11 . Catrin Green, the school leader, has framed Leading through the Layers as The Excellence Project. What is striking is not just the name, but the discipline of the approach. After weekly planning sessions, the leadership team meets to reflect on what landed well in the subject areas they support, what they noticed in classrooms, and what they will refine in their next sessions with middle leaders. That is Leading through the Layers in practice. The work moves from planning, to classroom observation, to reflection, to refinement. It does not stay in one meeting or with one person. It travels through the layers with student learning at the center.

That is also why monitoring has to be defined carefully.

Too often, monitoring becomes a compliance exercise. Did the meeting happen? Was the visit done? Was the document completed?

Those are necessary questions to answer. They are also too shallow.

In a Leading through the Layers approach, monitoring stays tied to student learning. Are teachers internalizing lessons more effectively? Are coaches identifying what students need to know and do? Are leaders using planning meetings, classroom observations, and follow-up support to help coaches sharpen their support of teachers? Are leaders looking at student work and using it to refine the next step? Are the routines before, during, and after the lesson becoming stronger and more aligned?

Those are harder questions. They are also the right ones.

In the Oasis model, that logic is explicit. In the short term, leaders are meant to grow clearer about their role, use shared planning, observation, and feedback tools more consistently, and identify priorities based on classroom and student evidence. Over time, Regional Directors will anchor conversations with principals in classroom evidence, and school leaders and teacher-facing leaders will run stronger planning meetings, use walkthroughs and student work to refine priorities, and give more specific feedback to teachers. The intended result is more aligned support for teachers and, ultimately, stronger student learning.

There is nothing flashy about this.

It is not one new framework. It is not one inspiring training day. It is not one heroic leader.

It is clarity. Practice. Observation. Feedback. Monitoring. Follow-through.

It is each layer understanding what it must do to help the next layer do its job well. And it is every layer staying close enough to the classroom that their work can be judged by its impact on student learning.

We were in a room with a dozen leaders from a network of academy schools in England. It was a day out of the office for strategic planning, and they were excited for the chance to step back, monitor progress, and consider adjustments for the rest of the year. We’re big believers in leadership teams getting away from the day-to-day, and we were excited to help them make the most of it.

But we also wanted to keep it real.

Those who work outside of the schoolhouse are important to school performance, but also far removed from the classroom. Unlike a teacher, who students see daily and know well – and who determine so much of a young person’s K-12 education experience – those working in the system are often unknown. If they’re sick or on vacation, math class doesn’t change. Neither does music, recess, or tutoring.

A critical question for education systems is how to make the most of the resources they spend to support schools. Too often we see it go badly.

The system becomes entrenched in its own existence – a bureaucracy burdened by to-do lists, slow and cumbersome, marching towards compliance.

We’ve been in similar rooms with the “middle tier” many times. Principal managers and coaches in a network of schools in India. System-level advisors in South Africa. School support coaches in Tajikistan. The settings were different, but the provocations were similar:

• This is an expensive meeting

• For it to be worth the cost, we have to use it to improve classrooms

• To do that, we need to understand how the system fits together, and how the decisions we make in this room can impact schools

To help with that thinking, we’ve developed a Schema for Success. It’s a simple overview of how the vast pieces of a system’s puzzle work together to do the most important work of education: improve student learning and provide students with experiences of rigour + joy.

Building backwards from student outcomes, the four key elements of the Schema include:

1. Student Experiences: the reason k-12 education exists – to provide young people meaningful opportunities to learn and grow, both in their relationships to society and others, and also as students acquiring knowledge and skills; everything else needs to be in service of this goal

   1. We explore these ideas more in previous posts, here and here

2. Systems Alignment: when education systems align themselves to enable classrooms to be their best, positive change can endure; the myriad tools and frameworks a system designs – whether for academics or operations – are an important piece of the puzzle of leadership

   1. For more, visit here and here

3. People Development: education is a people business, and for schools to improve adults need to learn and grow; systems work hard to provide formal training, coaching, and communities of practice, all of which are essential; how well the adults embrace their own continuous improvement is key

   1. For more, visit here

4. High Performing Executive Teams: furthest removed from the classroom and often overlooked as an element of success, the leadership team that sets the vision, determines the strategic priorities, hires and fires key personnel, and ultimately decides how resources are spent is where it all starts; strong teams have the chance to make a difference; weak teams rarely do

   1. For more, visit here and here

Having a shared mental model can help system-level actors – whether they be instructional coaches, principal managers, finance directors, IT departments, or district superintendents – remember where they fit. From there they can remind themselves of the importance of their role and how essential it is to remember that their efforts are ultimately in service of the classroom.

But this assumption overlooks a critical factor: the role being played by people behind the scenes. The extent to which school, network, and system leadership teams function as cohesive units aligning vision, systems, and strategy, has a profound impact on whether strong teaching practices can take root and lead to meaningful gains in student learning.

As experienced educators, we have come to believe that three ideas are essential to understanding how meaningful and sustained improvement happens.

1. The classroom is the primary unit of change in formal education systems. The magic of learning happens between teacher and students.

2. The enabling conditions within a school, network, and system have a significant impact on student outcomes. They define how easily the magic can happen and how transformative it is.

3. Creating strong institutions for learning is a team effort. Strong leadership teams allow for the magic to scale. They create the coherence for great teaching to happen, not once but in every classroom, every day.

If the magic of learning happens in classrooms and leadership teams are responsible for creating the conditions for it to flourish, then one question becomes unavoidable: how well are our leadership teams functioning as teams? Too often the answer is not very well. And yet this matters greatly.

Why?

As author Patrick Lencioni outlines in his book The Advantage, high performing teams help ensure an organization gets the most out of its resources. “Not finance. Not strategy. Not technology. It is teamwork that remains the ultimate competitive advantage, both because it is so powerful and so rare.”

For more than two decades we’ve been using Lencioni’s framework, the 5 Dysfunctions of a Team. It’s everything a framework should be: simple, accessible, memorable – and most importantly, resonant with lived experience.

Consider, for example, the decisions a leadership team makes and the ripple effect for each: hiring, budgeting, planning. Whether in a school or a district, a network or a province, the leadership team sets the tone, the expectations, the priorities, and the measures of success. They decide how to spend the two most important resources: time and money. They decide what gets measured and how. Who leads what and where.

A school’s timetable? The books students read? The technology they can access? The extra-curricular offerings? Field trips, assemblies, fine arts and foreign languages? All of them are influenced by the school’s leadership team. Which is itself influenced by the decisions made at the district level, which in turn are influenced by the decisions made by the leadership team at the top of the system.

A strong team should make 2+2 equal more than 5 – its effectiveness more than what each individual can do on their own.

In our experience, establishing and maintaining a high performing team requires a handful of essential focus areas:

• Leadership: Someone is the leader. They’re responsible for the team being effective. Part of their role is explicitly to analyze and respond to how the team works together. Not 100%, but more than the others. Consider a team of 5 people. We’d say the leader is 25% responsible, the other four 18% each.

• Common Language: We like Lencioni’s framework; there are lots of other good ones as well. The point is to have a shared mental model, common language, and norms for engagement.

• Discipline: Consistency, sticking with it, caring about the little things. Good meetings. Transparent monitoring of strategic priorities.

• Relational Trust: There’s a reason trust sits at the base of the 5 Dysfunctions. Without it, teams are unable to grapple effectively with key decisions, which inevitably leads to underperformance over time.

None of this is theoretical. When leadership teams are aligned, disciplined, and grounded in trust their work moves from transactional and isolated to transformational and far-reaching. Decisions are clearer and priorities are sharper. Systems cease to compete and begin to enhance each other. Most importantly, teachers receive what they need to best support students—that is when meaningful change endures.

From where we sit, it’s clear: if we want our students to thrive, our leadership teams must thrive as cohesive, high functioning teams. There is no way around it.

Developing people, therefore, is not simply about an individual’s personal growth trajectory. It is about how people within a system - in this case teachers - increase their efficacy in the face of the non-linear change and growing inter-dependencies typical of classrooms.

Adult behaviour change in such systems isn’t straightforward. Outside the physical sciences, “non-linear systems are the rule rather than the exception”, as Robert May argues in his work on complex dynamics. Actions do not produce proportional reactions, and improvements in one part of the system can generate new pressures elsewhere. Top down decisions interact with bottom up practice.

Professional development efforts that fail to account for how education systems function, will ultimately fail to achieve their intended outcome.

One World’s Development Continuum was developed to help education leaders frame professional development conversations within this reality. The framework draws on research from Kraft and Papay on teacher growth over time, Guskey on professional learning and change, and Cochran-Smith and colleagues on the implications of complexity theory for teacher education. It draws, too, on the work of system leaders like Tom Rees, Jen Barker and their former colleagues at Ambition Institute.

Repeated testing of the framework in the field has told us how much it resonates with practitioners, from the work of Zenobia Williams at Common Good in South Africa, to that of Matt Dunne and his team at Lift Schools in the UK, to that of Victor Liria and the training his team does at ISFODOSU in the Dominican Republic.

Time and again, when we have presented it to groups of teachers and leaders, they have recognised their own experience in it – field evidence that the model captures something real about how development feels and unfolds in practice.

With that in mind, let’s consider the Development Continuum’s application for a classroom teacher.

Phase 1: Know and Want

Development begins with clarity and motivation. If I do not understand why a change is necessary, and if I do not see value in it, sustained improvement is unlikely. This is not about compliance. It is about alignment between system expectations and individual purpose. Leaders play a decisive role here. They define the problem to be solved, articulate the rationale for change, and create the conditions in which commitment can form.

Phase 2: Practice in Isolation

The steepest part of the learning curve sits here. New practices require repeated, focused rehearsal. The emphasis is on narrow application, not wide adaptation. At this stage, individuals are building fluency. Kraft and Papay’s work challenges the idea of an inevitable performance plateau and shows that professional environments shape the trajectory of improvement. Guskey’s research suggests that experiencing success accelerates further growth. That success depends on conditions of structured support, feedback and time.

The importance of this phase is often underestimated. Systems frequently attempt to move too quickly to scale before individuals have secured competence. When that happens, the appearance of implementation masks fragility.

Phase 3: Transfer and Adapt

Once fluency is established, application broadens. The teacher begins to deploy strategies across different contexts: year groups, subjects, student profiles. The critical shift here is from mechanistic use to considered judgment. Teachers respond to student work and select from their repertoire with discrimination. Crucially, they also decide when not to deploy a strategy.

What emerges at this stage is adaptive expertise. Classrooms become skillfully managed complex systems. As Cochran Smith and colleagues argue, complexity is not an obstacle to be removed but a condition to be navigated. Patterns stabilise, but they remain dynamic.

Phase 4: Innovate Autonomously

In effective systems, skilled practice gives rise to new questions. Novel student responses, changing curriculum demands and evolving community contexts generate fresh problems. Innovation, at this stage, is a response to what emerges from the system, rather than an expression of personal flair.

Some of these innovations will remain local. Others will be codified and become the practices that earlier phase practitioners adopt. In this way, development at the individual level feeds back into system evolution.

A few implications follow.

• Skipping phase one weakens the rest. Without clarity of purpose, effort dissipates.

• Phase two requires deliberate design. Time and support are structural conditions, not optional extras.

• Individuals in early phases are rarely well placed to train others in later phases. Expertise and motivation develop together.

• The entire process unfolds within system constraints. Incentives, workload, leadership coherence and relational trust all influence progression.

Growth remains possible across a career – and in fact, we would argue, essential. Especially in today’s ever-changing world of technology, public policy, and societal expectations, educators must adapt and grow over time.

The challenge is ensuring that leaders understand the pathway and design for it. Development does not happen because we declare it important. It happens when systems align expectations, support practice and allow expertise to mature in response to the complexity they contain.

Moving from unaligned to aligned requires commitment and an understanding of the complexities a transformation journey presents and, even then, the level of coordination can be intense.

According to research from McKinsey only 30% of large change management projects succeed. One necessary step found in successful transformations was having a clear analysis of where organizational gaps lie.

Based on our decade of supporting education change projects around the world, we created a framework to help with this initial analysis. We call it the 5 Misalignments.

These are the levers that often hinder reform efforts. While contexts may vary, we’ve found these five have stood the test of time, place, and circumstance.

The 5 Misalignments are:

• Aspirations: How aligned are key stakeholders on what success looks like, and is that vision achievable in the current context?

• Culture: How aligned is the organization’s culture? How healthy are the relationships, how effective are the teams, do they have the mindsets to persevere?

• Coherence: How aligned are the organization’s resources, structures, and accountability systems to support designing interventions that will lead to success?

• Capacity: How aligned is the talent on the team? Are the people suited for the work, and do they have the knowledge and skills required to implement the change?

• Implementation:How aligned are the people and processes to monitor progress and ensure effective adjustments along the way?

We know from experience that it is rarely a clean division between culture or vision, implementation or coherence. However, understanding how to name and prioritize the misalignments helps reveal the relationships among them, which in turn allows for the most effective diagnoses.

We’ve used the 5Ms in a wide range of projects. A global network wanting to revisit how it supports its schools. A ministry of education analyzing the progress of a statewide intervention. A national network embarking on a new strategic plan. In each case we invited the participants to score their organization against each of the Misalignments.

When leaders identify misalignments and deliberately address them, change accelerates. We’ve seen it time and again, in single schools and school networks, throughout ministries of education and with ed-tech companies. On five continents and across twenty countries.

There is no single answer to improving performance in one of the 5 areas. Solutions are contextual and nuanced, driven by real leaders, real classrooms, and the thousands of decisions made every day in service to more effective education systems.

To give these transformations the best chance to succeed, it’s important to shine a light on the places where they get stuck most often. Our 5 Misalignments can help do exactly that.

In each instance, the goal has been to improve schools for young people – irrespective of the intervention. Whole school improvement. Early grade reading. Principal managers and their leadership of school teams. Instructional coaching. All of it matters, and any of it can make a big difference.

However, we have learned of the importance of alignment in designing, implementing, and sustaining meaningful change.

The classroom sits inside the school, which sits inside a cluster, which sits inside a network or region, which itself sits inside the bigger system. Layer upon layer, each with its own people, with their own incentives, navigating their own opportunities and challenges.

With this in mind, we developed our Alignment Framework. From unaligned – where what happens in classrooms is divorced from what schools or clusters or networks are trying to do – to aligned – where the enabling conditions from one layer support and accelerate efforts in the next – there are vast differences.

We use this visual in workshops to gauge how stakeholders in a school system or network see themselves along the continuum. Most often, it’s in the middle – aligning. The team from the ministry of education in Tblisi, Georgia felt that way, as did the leadership team of a multi-academy trust in northern England. Fair enough. The middle suggests we have key pieces in place, but they don’t flow as well as they should.

The challenge? Getting to aligned is hard. Staying aligned or advancing from there is harder.

To be clear, alignment is not a finish line. Like sailors on a ship who balance wind and waves alongside the imperfections of sails and rudders, education leaders have to balance dynamic variables in uncertain conditions. It’s a constant interplay of creativity, resiliency, and determination.

We’re not alone in our thinking. The researcher Michael Fullan has written extensively about whole system reform (here) and the importance of alignment in Ontario, as has Tony Bryk (here) in profiling Chicago’s successes in the previous decade.

Too often we’ve seen interventions focus only on one or two of the layers. When the intervention is inevitably removed and the change doesn’t stick, people are disappointed and surprised.

Our take? We’d have been surprised if it had worked.

Large-scale USAID projects were often designed this way. 90% of the effort was on the classroom and the system, with a little left over for school leaders and their supervisors. Five years and $50 million USD later, very little changed. Not a recipe for success.

School networks and districts around the world face similar challenges. The new math curriculum? The new teacher evaluation program? The new special education initiative? Without considering all the layers of the system and what alignment might look like at each layer, the intervention will fail.

Even external partners trying to support the system at different levels – an ed tech company, a leadership training NGO – need to take into account where and how they fit into the broader question of alignment. Absent that, their product or service will fall short of impacting student learning, even if they profit along the way. Recent research on ed-tech makes that painfully clear (here).

It’s hard work aligning a system. It’s also essential.

In our next piece we’ll explore the 5 Misalignments – areas that need to be considered for change efforts to succeed.

The debate is of course artificial. We need to do both well. We need classrooms that are rigorous and joyful and we need them at scale.

At One World we balance the tension with our Breadth vs. Depth framework. For systems-level reform to have an impact, we have to know what works – truly works – in the local context. That requires going deep in small and focused ways to learn. Those learnings can then be shared more broadly until the next wave of depth learning occurs. Wash, rinse, repeat. It’s continuous improvement at its best.

What’s the ideal scale for implementing change? What’s the sweet spot that gets the breadth + depth improvement cycle humming fastest?

We think it’s a geographically based networks of schools.

By network we mean a relatively small collection of 10-15 schools with geographic proximity and shared management approaches and structures. It’s why we’re strong proponents of academies in England, charters in the US, Chile, Colombia, and low/no fee private schools throughout the world.

John Hattie’s meta-analysis identified the collective efficacy of teachers as having the greatest effect size on student achievement. His work built on Albert Bandura’s research (here) on self efficacy, which he defined as “a group’s shared belief in the conjoint capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action required to produce given levels of attainment.”What he said.

We’ve learned that Bandura’s insight applies to schools as well. While the best principals get the most from their teachers by making 2+2 equal more than 4, the best principal supervisors do the same. They create both structures and a culture that gets the most from their principals. The powerful blend of collaboration and competition, working together and wanting to be the best, helps push schools to improve performance.

In my own experience at the Academy for Urban School Leadership in Chicago and then again at Ark Schools in England, we benefited tremendously from schools working together. Financially there were powerful economies of scale, and programmatically there were huge benefits. Sharing staff, promoting leaders, analyzing data, creating communities of practice. A small group of schools, working together, making improvements quickly, celebrating and holding each other accountable.

The network is the Goldilocks for driving education reform: not too big, not too small. Enough scale to have the resources and talent pool to establish meaningful systems for continuous improvement and enough scale to earn external credibility, yet small enough to know the context and respond as needed.

Research supports the idea. Stanford University’s 2023 CREDO study (here) found that geographically based charter networks outperformed all other public schools – charter and district – in reading and math by a healthy margin (27 days in reading, 23 in math). Studies in low and middle income countries also highlight the efficacy of networks of schools. Alianza Educativa (here) demonstrated higher scores for student achievement and teacher effectiveness, and in sub-Saharan Africa the NGO PEAS (here) has demonstrated results equal to and better than comparison schools for less funding per pupil.

Why?

Whether public or private, government or charter, we think a collection of schools, effectively led and well managed, can be the critical ingredient for success. Big enough to have resources, small enough to be nimble, a network of schools can be one of the most effective means of accelerating student learning.

Helping ensure those choices are good ones should be one of the driving goals of education systems. It sounds simple. But it’s often forgotten.

Frequently the system – well-intentioned folks trying to solve problems from afar – oversimplifies the realities of a classroom. Structured pedagogy and its curricular resource cousins are a great example. The thinking often goes something like this:

• We recognize that classrooms are complex

• We need to provide teachers with the resources needed to provide a reasonably good learning experience

• If we give them step-by-step guides for what to do and say, along with the materials to show and share, they will deliver the content better than they would otherwise

• Students will learn more, better, faster

Such resources can be helpful, especially when introducing change at scale. They provide a baseline for teaching which, in turn, can help learning. Necessary, but not sufficient.

What’s often missing are the crucial next steps to optimize these resources. For that we need to equip teachers with:

• the knowledge and skills required to utilize them effectively

• the awareness and agility to respond to their students

Jon Saphier describes this process well in his seminal book The Skillful Teacher. The best teachers, he argues, have a repertoire that allows them to match the moment with the right move. More recently he’s outlined the importance in the system alignment to support teachers. Doug Lemov and his team have also written extensively about the importance of teachers having a set of deeply ingrained practices that free them to focus on the strategic choices that impact learning. In Practice Perfect, they emphasize this need for teachers to have fluency, and they outline how they can get there – practice, rehearsal, feedback.

Unfortunately, it’s the “getting there” that ambitious change initiatives often skip.

Where it goes wrong is thinking that the classroom is like a theatrical or musical performance – if the actors or musicians all do their part as written, art will be made.

But that’s not a classroom. The teacher says or does something, and students respond. Unscripted and unrehearsed, students make classrooms like performing improv. Perhaps more accurately, classrooms unfold organically, much like a sports match on a playing field.

We had a powerful experience at One World recently that illustrates the point. We were working with an NGO and ministry of education that were partnering to implement a new literacy program. When we visited classrooms we saw teachers using the resources, teaching the material, working hard. Their fidelity to the program was strong. Students, equally, were on board. Leaning in, doing as asked, trying to please their teachers. But not much learning was happening.

Why? The teachers were prepared to deliver the program as written, but they weren’t ready to respond to wrong answers. In that sense, they were ready to present, but they weren’t ready to teach. And if they weren’t teaching, then we shouldn’t be surprised that the students weren’t learning. This shift from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning is an essential part of the change.

How can the system help?

Appreciate that everything that happens outside the classroom – whether at the school, cluster, network, district, or national level – should be in service of helping teachers make as many good decisions as possible each day.

Perhaps it makes sense that when we think about improving the quality of public education, we focus on the adults. The more we can change their experience – what they do, how they do it, when they do it – the better our systems will be. And the more we create accountability structures that reinforce these adult behaviors, the better the student outcomes our systems should produce.

It’s sensible. But it’s wrong.

Why? The logic bypasses what we’ve learned matters most: the student experience.

Want to know the quality of a school? Watch the students. In the classroom, what are they doing? How engaged are they? Are they having to think? Is the thinking meaningful, relevant, and rigorous? Are they talking, reading, and writing? Same goes in the corridors, cafeterias, and playgrounds, auditoriums and sports fields. Are students talking to each other? To their teachers? Are they smiling, laughing?

Regardless of the pedagogical approach of a classroom or school – whether direct instruction, project-based learning or all that’s in between – students can have amazing learning experiences. We’ve seen it happen in more traditional settings like Akanksha in Pune, India and more progressive ones like Lumiar in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

We’ve also seen the opposite. Traditional classrooms where students are bored. Progressive classrooms where students are off-task. Disinterested at best, disruptive at worst, students respond rationally to what the adults offer. Voting with their feet, students in OECD countries are attending school less than they did pre-Covid. Time and again we see schools experiment with elaborate interventions to reverse course, all well intentioned.

An even better solution to improve attendance? A more engaging student experience.

Our One World team gathers annually for an in person retreat in Chicago. This past year we visited an art exhibition by Paul Pfeiffer, whose provocative series portrayed athletic events in unique ways, removing sounds and surrounding imagery. A boxing match with only the shuffling of feet and thumping of punches? Basketball players alone on the court, mid-air with no ball? Familiar scenes, but from new angles.

Try the same in a classroom. Block out the teacher’s voice and focus only on the students. Watch and listen. Review their written work. Ask them what they’re doing and why, what piece of work they’re most proud of, what happens when they struggle with a concept?

Then shift to the adults. Watch and listen to them and begin to analyze the systems and structures they’ve built to create the student experience. The teacher, the school leaders, the regional leaders, the system leaders.

We call it leading through the layers. Each plays a role that cascades into the classroom and ultimately leads to the student experience. Ideally for the better, though sometimes for the worse.

The OECD has been trying to capture the student experience through PISA surveys for more than two decades, though it’s not clear what system policies or classroom practices have changed as a result. Closer to the action, the UChicago Impact developed Cultivate, a student survey that teachers and school leaders can use to make adjustments and improve experiences for students. It’s promising, as are the many others being created for similar purposes.

The implications could be profound, for practitioners and policy makers alike.

By focusing on the student experience first, we’re confident the adults will begin to rethink much of what they’ve built and begin to reimagine what should be.

High expectations manifest themselves in many ways. We’ve seen:

• Inspirational language to shift mindsets and motivate behaviors

• Curriculum and assessment standards at or above developmentally appropriate levels

• Meaningful support to achieve academic goals and nurture growth

• Effective and consistent follow through on policies and procedures

High expectations are more than an idea – they are a way of engaging with classrooms and schools. Often described as no-nonsense nurturing, or warm-strict, or even tough love, teachers and leaders with high expectations embody the “care personally and challenge directly” ethos that Kim Scott articulates so powerfully in her book Radical Candor. Over a millennia ago, Aristotle described the need for a similar balance, with the virtuous teacher providing discipline and care for learners.

In a classroom, high expectations are about an individual teacher believing her students can excel, and then doing whatever is required to help make that happen. Creativity, personalization, motivation, and lots of targeted interventions are core characteristics of these teachers. Teach for All has done a fabulous job capturing examples around the world with their Teaching as Collective Leadership Framework.

At a school level it looks like a leadership team that establishes the bar for excellence and then creates the systems and structures, routines and rituals that ensure all adults in the building do the same. And it includes teachers and leaders working with parents and caregivers so similar beliefs and messages are reinforced at home. Apex High School in Cape Town, one of the highest performing no-fee government schools in the province, is a fantastic example. Leaders and teachers work together to motivate students in and out of the classroom. Lift Kingswood and Oasis Southbank, both English secondary schools, also exemplify a culture of high expectations with rigorous lessons and strong student supports.

The bigger challenge is replicating high expectations at scale. In our experience, it’s an often overlooked aspect of change efforts. Consider the Center for Global Development’s research that found the billions spent by USAID on early grade reading in the global south from 2011-2021 resulted in only three extra words per minute on oral reading fluency. We worked on several USAID education projects. Helping to instill high expectations wasn’t part of any of the plans for transformation. On the flip side, when people talk about the amazing gains that have happened in Sobral, Brazil, or Mississippi, USA, it’s clear that their success was fueled in part by the adults believing their students really could learn to read. Creating that culture of achievement was essential. Not everyone was there at first, but early gains led to tipping points, and over time high expectations became the new normal.

Setting ambitious targets – what Jim Collins refers to as Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs) – and then monitoring progress towards them is essential to establishing a high expectations culture. Without a shared definition of success, systems embrace localized limitations and achievement suffers. One need look no further than the decline in US NAEP scores in the last decade for a reminder.

At One World, we believe that school improvement starts with high expectations. Combined with a warm-strict approach to relationships and learning, real change can happen. Without it, no amount of training or technology, policy reform or accountability alignment, will make a difference.

We’re a small team of experienced educators committed to helping schools provide joyful and rigorous learning for students around the world. We support teachers and leaders in more than 20 countries across 5 continents within low, middle, and high income contexts.

Our goal in writing Implementation Insights is to share our learnings from the field and engage in broader conversations on how to make classrooms better for students and staff alike.