What We Do
All kids benefit from great teaching - and for kids who have been impacted by inequitable systems, delivering great teaching is an urgent imperative. Great teaching, though - the kind that can transform life outcomes for our most marginalized kids - is far from easy. It requires deep content knowledge - not just about “how to read” or “how to do the math” - but about the complex science of how children’s brains understand new concepts. It requires both adeptness with the teaching moves that apply in any context and understanding of the practices that are unique to teaching folktales to 2nd graders or functions to 7th graders. No amount of pre-service training can give teachers everything they need - but a school leader, working side-by-side with their teachers every day of the year, can do just that.
Through content knowledge trainings, coaching, modeling, and facilitated practice, we equip school leaders with the knowledge and skills to invest in life-changing teaching.
The Need and the Opportunity
For decades, the American education system has failed to ensure students are mastering the essential
skills that provide access to opportunity. Our communities and our policymakers have essentially accepted
this as immutable reality: the majority of our children simply will not learn what they need to learn in our schools.
At Jounce Partners, we see one approach that aligns teaching to the science of learning with the depth, consistency, and scalability needed to change outcomes for millions of kids: equipping school leaders with the expertise to invest in teacher practice.
A single school leader (a principal or assistant principal) can provide training and coaching to dozens of teachers who reach hundreds of students each year; this training can happen every day for 200 school days each year through professional development sessions and live, in-classroom coaching; and this training can be both grounded in learning science and responsive to day-to-day data in the school.
When school leaders have deep content knowledge and leadership and coaching expertise, student proficiency and understanding takes off.
Our Programs
To support school leaders who can transform student learning outcomes, Jounce leads two programs:
01
Instructional Effectiveness Partnerships
We partner with schools and school networks to improve student outcomes. We expect 8- to 10-point increases in student proficiency each year for three years of partnership; and we know that when schools increase proficiency at this magnitude it means real, meaningful changes in students’ academic and life trajectories.
We tend to partner with schools that are doing a lot of things right: strong plans for student and staff culture, adoption of high quality instructional materials (HQIM), high-functioning financial and operational systems. They have smart, hard-working people running proven plays, but they are hitting a ceiling on student learning. We coach leaders to change teacher practice more quickly and systematically, and - most importantly - we help them use the science behind how people learn in each particular content area to drive breakthrough results.
02
Instructional Leader Fellowship
We recruit committed educators who want to grow into instructional leadership roles (assistant principal, principal, dean of instruction). We hire these aspiring leaders as full-time coaches for two years. During that time, they coach teachers in our partner schools and continue to develop their content knowledge, curriculum knowledge, and instructional management skill set. They have an immediate impact: teachers coached by Instructional Leader Fellows drive stronger student outcomes than their colleagues. They also have a longer term impact when they leave our Fellowship and become school-based leaders with the expertise to drive powerful student learning gains.
The Jounce Instructional Leader Fellowship addresses three problems: a shortage of qualified candidates for school leadership roles in general; a pool of candidates for these roles who have not had the opportunity to develop extensive content-specific pedagogical knowledge; and a pool of candidates that does not reflect the demographics and experiences of schools’ students. The Jounce Fellowship is particularly committed to supporting BIPOC educators - individuals who are so often directed toward school culture or student discipline roles rather than academic leadership - on their path to becoming expert instructional leaders.
Frameworks for content-specific school leadership
Working backward from student learning outcomes, we’ve defined a set of teacher practices and instructional leadership competencies to drive transformative results. These tools are - and will always be - a work in progress as we learn from researchers, our partner schools, our colleagues, and cycles of application and data collection. Feedback, questions, and insights are welcome!