"We had fifteen tools and no agreement on what we expect to see in every classroom. Once we had one shared definition — and one place to put it to work — all the feedback and support pointed in the same direction."
In most districts, instructional walks, coaching, and professional development run on separate tracks. Different forms, different vocabularies, different people. They rarely point in the same direction.
In the School District of University City in Missouri, that's no longer true. Today, every observation, every coaching cycle, and every PD session runs on the same 21 indicators. Principals and coaches use one shared form. When a pattern surfaces in walkthrough data, PD addresses it. When a teacher hasn't yet demonstrated a commitment, coaching picks it up. The loop closes without anyone having to manually coordinate it.
Getting there required dismantling fifteen separate observation tools. But the harder work wasn't consolidation. It was getting the district to agree — formally, collectively — on what every classroom should have in common.
That was the work Dr. Elizabeth Gardner, Director of Learning Strategy, Engagement and Continuous Improvement, brought to the leadership team last March.
The fifteen tools had grown organically. Each one reflected something real the district cared about, and each one had a good reason to exist. But when Gardner started asking why teachers were getting conflicting feedback, why some classrooms saw observers constantly and others almost never, and why a new assistant principal could not get a straight answer to "which tool do I use," she landed on a bigger problem underneath them. The district had never formally agreed on what every classroom should have in common.
That was the work Gardner brought to the leadership team last March. She framed it as three connected issues:
Grounded in TNTP's Opportunity Myth and Opportunity Makers research, the team agreed the work was worth doing.
Gardner convened a guiding coalition of around fifteen people: one from each campus, with three principals, a couple of instructional coaches, and a group of teacher leaders. Their job was to look across everything the district was already doing and ask what mattered most.
They reviewed the research. They cross-referenced the strategic plan. They drew on the TNTP Core Rubric, the district's three pillars of human, personalized, and problematized instruction, and the Sheltered Instruction work they had been piloting with multilingual learners. The criterion for each indicator was deliberately tight: could you walk into a classroom and observe it in the moment, yes or no?
By July, the final twenty-one were ready. They called them the Learning Core Commitments, a word choice that signaled shared ownership rather than top-down mandate.
When the spring needs assessment asked teachers how committed they were to the framework, 98% said yes.
The framework was the philosophical work. The operational alignment was where it became real.
In KickUp Foundations, Gardner built one shared observation form around the 21 commitments. Every principal and instructional coach used that same form to collect evidence across every classroom in their building. Permissions were set so coaches and principals could see each other's data within a school, while Gardner could see patterns across the district. The data tab became the working surface for building teams, used almost like a gradebook to track who had been observed on which commitments.
The same 21 indicators carried over into coaching. When a teacher had not yet demonstrated a particular commitment, that became the focus of a coaching cycle, tagged to the same indicator the walks were tracking. PD ran on the same tags. When language objectives surfaced as one of the lowest-observed practices early in the year, the next month's PD addressed it, and the following round of walks looked for it. The loop closed without anyone having to coordinate it manually.
Dashboards tied it together at the leadership level. What used to mean pulling data manually from multiple forms now happened in one view, where Gardner could surface trends across the district and bring concrete patterns to her conversations with cabinet and the board.
The biggest shift was not the framework. It was who delivered it.
From the start, Gardner made a deliberate decision: central office would build the system, but principals and instructional coaches would run it. Building leaders facilitated the walks, led the data conversations, delivered the PD, and ran the coaching cycles. Central office stayed in the background and focused on fostering calibration on the tool.
The district set a goal of 80% of teachers demonstrating 80% of the Learning Core Commitments. They finished at 82%.
The bigger story was in coaching volume and teacher voice. The district logged more than 200 coaching cycles last year, a level of activity that simply had not existed in any comparable form the year before. And in the spring needs assessment, the question of who teachers identified as their instructional coach produced a striking shift. The prior year, most named someone from central office. This year, 90% named either their principal or a building-level coach.
University City is keeping the 21 commitments intact for year two. The next layer is integration: connecting the Learning Core Commitments with the district's curriculum implementation walks so that what is observed at the baseline level and what is coached at the excellence level operate as one connected system rather than two parallel ones. She is also exploring how AI-supported coaching can carry the framework into the classroom in real time, surfacing context from prior observations and helping coaches translate notes into next steps.
For district leaders watching this work, the takeaway is less about the specific framework and more about the discipline behind it. The Learning Core Commitments worked because Gardner named the problems precisely, built the framework with the people who would use it, and anchored every existing system to the same set of indicators. Coherence, not capacity, was the unlock.
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