The Slow Build: How Taft High Created Instructional Coherence, One Year at a Time

Creating a shared instructional focus is difficult in any school, but it can be especially challenging at the high school level. A math teacher and an English teacher may have very different ideas about what strong instruction looks like in their classrooms, and getting departments to see value in cross departmental collaboration can be an uphill climb.

At Taft High School, Principal MaryAlice Finn has spent the past four years proving that this challenge can be met with the right approach. Rather than imposing a single instructional model from the top down, she has worked alongside her staff to identify common priorities that transcend content area: instructional clarity, student engagement, and assessment. The result has been a School Leadership Team and a staff as a whole who share a common language and a common vision for what excellent instruction looks like at Taft, regardless of subject.

Meeting Teachers Where They Are

One of the most notable aspects of MaryAlice's leadership is her intentionality about pacing and framing. She knows her staff well enough to recognize when to push for more and when an initiative risks feeling like one more disconnected task on an already full plate. Rather than layering new initiatives on top of existing work, her strategy has consistently been to implement new priorities aligned with what teachers are already doing, so the work feels like a natural extension of their practice rather than an addition.

This past year offers a clear example. As the school turned its attention to tiered supports, MaryAlice did not roll out a formal system all at once. Instead, teachers were asked to reflect on their practice organically and document strategies for supporting students. The information was shared in department meetings and then with the School Leadership Team. The school-wide data on how students were being supported informed decision-making about school-wide supports serving as the foundation for more structured tier two practices, introduced gradually and grounded in what teachers were already observing in their own classrooms.

Four Years of Intentional Progress

The path to this year's focus did not happen overnight. Three years ago, MaryAlice and her staff began examining the school's testing culture, with the goal of building greater student accountability. That work led teachers to reflect on a critical question: what should happen for students who do not yet grasp a concept? Those reflections became the starting point for introducing differentiated practices across the building.

This year, the focus has shifted again, this time towards aligning assessment practices to ensure that systems built over the past several years work together as a coherent whole rather than as separate initiatives and result in student learning.

What is perhaps most striking about this progression is how deeply the common vision has become embedded into collaborative teams across the building. What began as a School Leadership Team priority has become embedded in the everyday practice of departments and teacher teams throughout Taft High School.

Buy In Through the Work Itself

MaryAlice has been candid about her philosophy on staff buy-in. She is far less concerned with what an initiative is called than with whether teachers feel genuinely connected to the work itself. Initiatives introduced with a memorable name but little connection to teachers' daily reality rarely stick. Initiatives that grow out of teachers' existing practice, reflection, and observations tend to take hold because staff can see themselves in the work from the very beginning.

This approach raises an important question for any instructional leader working toward continuous improvement: How do you keep staff with you throughout the process, year after year, without the work feeling like a series of disconnected initiatives? MaryAlice's focus and collaboration with staff at Taft High School offer a compelling answer. Build slowly. Ground new priorities in what staff are already doing. Gather data through organic reflection rather than compliance. And above all, keep the focus on the work itself, trusting that a genuine common vision of excellence, once built, does not need a catchy name to sustain itself.