Spotlight on Burbank Unified

Burbank Unified School District continues to scale and spread their work with California Education Partners (Ed Partners) On Track Collaboration to remove barriers to students’ post-secondary opportunities.  After participating in a multi-year Ed Partners collaboration beginning in 2017, they improved outcomes for 9th grade math students – but their efforts didn’t stop there.  Director Robyn Anders and other district leaders maintain a sense of urgency, recognizing that improving student learning requires sustaining and scaling the approach they began in 2017 across grade levels, departments, and school sites.

Burbank is now in year two of a second On Track collaboration with Ed Partners and the district started a multi-department grading cohort. Specific improvements across teams look quite different – the math team focuses on improving formative assessments and professional learning communities (PLCs) while the English team is focusing on institutional attachment to literary novels. Members of both the English and math teams are on the new grading team.

Robyn and his leadership team are developing coherence and collaborating with staff to ensure alignment. They engage teachers in understanding the depth and rigor of standards to inform better assessments.  They recognize the PLC as the primary engine for deepening instructional practices and ensure PLCs are well-structured and led by capable leaders.  Finally, they deeply understand the need for students to have multiple opportunities to demonstrate their learning and for staff to dedicate time to aligning grading practices.

Burbank works to organically and systematically scale efforts by building the capacity and influence of teacher leaders and innovators as well as by providing substitute pullouts for collaboration times.  Coherence is further supported by breaking down the traditional silos of secondary departments – in fact math lead Gregory Everhart joined the English team to leverage his experience in the On Track work and support coherence. 

All three of Burbank’s sub-teams (English, math and grading) convened recently to share progress, dive deeper into the strengths and gaps of their district systems, and generate next steps together.  This convening, which included attendance from the superintendent and a school board member, was a testament to Burbank’s continued dedication to collaboration as a driver of improving student outcomes.