ENACTING TRANSFORMATIVE INSTRUCTIONAL IMPROVEMENT IN A HIGH DIVERSITY METROPOLITAN SCHOOL DISTRICT:

Addressing the unique social and academic learning development and support needs of the growing populations of immigrant students entering K-12 school districts in the United States within the past decade is an acute challenge currently facing instructional improvement leaders working in elementary and secondary campus settings. This article profiles how one high school principal and his instructional equity–centered intervention task force colleagues working in a high-diversity metropolitan school district leveraged the power of multileveled data analysis investigative techniques in conjunction with design-based intervention program development strategies anchored in the education improvement science literature to develop and implement a multi-week, immersive learning intervention program for multiple grade-level teams of core content area teachers, Spanish heritage language teachers, and other bilingual education–certified teachers. The immersive learning intervention program implemented by these change agent leaders focused on providing grade-level teams of teachers on their high school campus with structured opportunities to: 1) reexamine their own deficit thinking pedagogical mindsets and constrained instructional planning behaviors in response to the perceived learning capabilities of the culturally and linguistically diverse students in their classrooms through internalizing new literature-supported content knowledge and instructional planning strategies for addressing the unique social and academic development support needs of multilingual learners; and 2) directly apply the newly acquired multilingual instructional planning content knowledge and skills through engaging together in a series of multilingual, cross-curricular instructional unit planning project development and classroom implementation activities in conjunction with peer-to-peer observation/coaching and collegial mentoring cycles designed to enable teachers to refocus and revitalize their overall instructional teaming practices. The article concludes with a literature-based discussion of how campus-based instructional leaders can utilize multileveled data analytic procedures in tandem with design-based intervention methods as powerful change agency tools for nurturing and sustaining a positive culture of transformative instructional improvement for multilingual learners in high-diversity school districts.