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The Way Back Forward

A principal called me a few weeks ago.

She had recently become the leader of a school that, just five years earlier, had been one of the highest-performing schools in the area.

She wanted to understand what had changed.

Years ago, classrooms were alive with explicit teaching followed by time for students to apply their learning in authentic reading and writing. Teachers conferred with students every day, met with small groups, and adjusted instruction based on what they noticed. Daily 5 and CAFE were how teachers organized responsive instruction.

Then leadership changed.

A new initiative arrived with new expectations. Teachers were asked to stay on the same page of the same manual at the same time. Lessons grew longer. Independent practice became shorter. Conferring faded. Small groups disappeared. Over time, the practices that once defined the school quietly slipped away.

Student achievement slipped with them.

The new principal gathered her staff, shared the data and asked one simple question.

What do you need now?

The room was silent.

When they finally began to speak, there was remarkable agreement.

They wanted explicit teaching back.

They wanted students to have time to apply new learning in their own reading and writing.

They wanted to confer again so they could see what students understood and what they needed and respond in the moment.

They wanted Daily 5 and CAFE back. They wanted to relearn the practices themselves and teach them to the new teachers who had never experienced them.

I couldn't stop thinking about that conversation.

The knowledge had never disappeared. It had simply been buried beneath years of competing initiatives and changing expectations.

When teachers are trusted to reflect on their own practice, they often know what helps students learn. This is one of the reasons I remain so hopeful about education.

Teachers carry tremendous professional wisdom. Sometimes they simply need the opportunity, and the permission, to bring it forward again.

That is why this principal reached out. She wasn't asking whether teachers should return to these practices. Her teachers had already answered that question. She wanted to know how to help them rebuild.

Today we understand even more about why those practices worked. Research on high-impact teaching, responsive instruction, and student learning has strengthened what many teachers experienced firsthand years ago. We aren't returning to the past. We're building on it with greater clarity, stronger evidence, and a deeper understanding of how students learn.

That's the purpose of The Teaching Practice and The Coaching Practice.

Not to replace what teachers know.

To strengthen it.

Because sometimes the most important step forward is remembering what worked all along.

Gail

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