Texas Instructional Leadership

Spring Update

What is Texas Instructional Leadership?

Texas Instructional Leadership is a program through which we provide training and support to campus and district leaders on their ability to build the capacity of educators that they manage. It consists of a suite of trainings intended to foster continuous improvement by helping campus and district instructional staff grow concrete instructional leadership skills in the areas of lesson alignment, formative assessment, observation and feedback, student culture, and data driven instruction.

TIL trainings are aligned with many of the best practices described in the Effective Schools Framework, and ESCs that offer TIL trainings are among the approved vendors for schools seeking support in capacity building and executing campus improvement.


Join us virtually for more information about TIL on May 25th or June 3rd from 9:00-11:30. You can find these sessions in our online calendar of events.

TIL Summer Schedule

Contact Us

Join us for the summer TIL content trainings! See descriptions below.

Student Culture Routines

Tuesday, June 8th, 9am to Wednesday, June 9th, 4pm

This is an online event.

Culture is not formed by motivational speeches or statements of values. It is formed by the repeated practice of good habits. Leaders of schools with strong student culture don’t achieve it through sheer force of personality. They develop a vision for each part of the school day, and then bring their vision for excellence to life by building systems that enable teachers, students, and anyone else on their campus to know what they should be doing and when at all parts of the day with a high level of detail. They lead with their consistency and by calmly modeling for staff how to maintain emotional constancy and reset expectations when procedures break down.

TIL Student Culture is based on the work of Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in Leverage Leadership 2.0 and trains leaders to develop their cultural vision and the systems to bring that vision to reality, monitor it throughout the year, and how to intervene when necessary to ensure it stays strong.


Includes 2 days of training.

June 8th and June 9th (must attend both days of training)

Lesson Alignment

Tuesday, July 13th, 9am to Thursday, July 15th, 4pm

This is an online event.

In Leverage Leadership 2.0, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo says that planning is a leadership lever that can help in every sort of school, from the lowest performing to the highest. Focusing on lesson alignment ensures there is a shared understanding around what makes for quality instructional planning, and is a natural extension of data-driven instruction: teach students what they need, not what they already know. Strong plans link together all of a student’s learning to make it rigorous, meaningful, and memorable, and they start with assessment. Assessments help to define standards and ensure that lesson plans match the level of rigor of the aligned assessment, at a minimum.

TIL Lesson Planning is based on the work of Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in Leverage Leadership 2.0 and trains leaders how to guide their teachers to build effective daily lesson plans that will drive student learning, as well as how to monitor that planning to see which parts are working and which aren’t, and how to coach teachers to master the skills they need to make their planning consistently effective.


Includes 3 days of training

June 13, 14, and 15 (must attend all three days of training)

Formative Assessment

Monday, July 19th, 9am

This is an online event.

In Leverage Leadership 2.0, Paul Bambrick-Santoyo says that lesson plans are meaningless until we define how we’ll assess the student learning. In that case, a core piece of ensuring high quality planning is locking in effective daily and weekly formative assessments. Too often, curriculum plans and assessment writers are totally separate. This is a top pitfall in planning for effective instruction, and it can limit effectiveness of even the most well written curriculum. Without clarity on and alignment to the rigor of the assessment, you risk every teacher interpreting the rigor of the curriculum differently.

TIL Formative Assessment is based on the work of Paul Bambrick-Santoyo in Leverage Leadership 2.0 and trains leaders how to guide their teachers to craft rigorous and aligned daily and weekly assessments that will support analysis of student mastery and gaps, and how to coach their teachers to master the skills of assessment writing and analysis to ensure their continuous improvement in designing formative assessments.


Includes 3 days of training

Dates of training are July 19, July 21, July 23 (Must attend all three days of training)

Observation/Feedback

Tuesday, Aug. 3rd, 9pm

This is an online event.

Observation and Feedback is intended to provide campus and district leaders opportunities to develop proficiency in establishing and coaching toward effective instructional practices in every classroom. Toward that end, it blends the practices and principles in Paul Bambrick-Santoyo’s Get Better Faster: A 90-Day Plan for Coaching New Teachers with the T-TESS appraisal framework.

It introduces a paradigm shift in the way we view teacher observation, and suggests that the primary purpose of observation and feedback is not to evaluate a teacher but to develop them. In Observation/Feedback, you grow educators by letting them See It, Name It, and Do It – see a model of success, name the bite-size steps that lead to growth, and practice actually doing those steps to sharpen skills.


Includes 2 Days of Training

August 3 and August 5 (Must attend both days of training)

Data Driven Instruction

Tuesday, Aug. 10th, 9am

This is an online event.

Data-Driven Instruction is a highly effective, research-based training that guides teachers and administrators to spend less time teaching their students what they already know and more time on what their students need. It also answers the questions, “How do I know if my students are learning? And if they aren’t, what do I do? Based on the protocol developed by Paul Bambrick-Santoyo and described in his books Driven by Data 2.0 and Leverage Leadership 2.0, TIL DDI advocates for a deeper analysis of student work.

First – teachers develop content knowledge by unpacking standards and analyzing aligned assessment items. Then they look at actual student responses, not just percent mastery, to identify the gap between what students show and what they need to know. Finally they create and practice a targeted reteach plan focused solely on their students’ gaps. Campuses that have engaged in this training have seen huge increases in student mastery.


Includes 2 Days of Training.

August 10th and August 12th (must attend both days)