SCALING CURRICULUM-BASED PROFESSIONAL LEARNING

Feedback Strengthens District Instructional Materials & Service Coherence

The Scaling Curriculum-Based Professional Learning (Scaling CBPL) project brings together 13 partnerships between curriculum publishers and training providers. Each partnership has created a combined “bundled” offering that pairs strong instructional materials with aligned professional learning.

The goal of these combined “bundled” offerings is to make it easier for districts to purchase, implement, and sustain high-quality instructional materials by providing coordinated curriculum, professional learning, and implementation support from trusted partners.

Curriculum Adoption:
A Potentially Fragmented Experience

When districts adopt new curriculum, they need support across many areas — materials, training, leadership, and classroom use. But too often, curriculum and training are bought and delivered separately, leaving districts, schools, teachers, and students with a disconnected experience.

The Challenge

Fragmented Supports Limit Impact

A district purchases curriculum from a publisher and professional learning from a separate provider.

Each organization works independently, with different strategies, timelines, coaching priorities, and success measures.

Instructional staff (e.g., teachers, coaches) receive potential conflicting guidance about how to use the curriculum, leaders must coordinate between vendors, and implementation becomes fragmented, increasing burden while reducing the likelihood of consistent instructional practice.

The Solution

Combined Bundled Offering

Connected System

In a connected system, districts experience curriculum, professional learning, and implementation support as one coordinated effort rather than a collection of separate products and services.

Publishers and professional learning providers intentionally align their planning, communication, and support so the district, school leaders, and/or teachers receive consistent guidance throughout implementation.

The result is a more coherent experience that reduces burden on district staff and increases the likelihood of successful, sustained use of high-quality instructional materials.

Feedback Loops

Maintaining a coherent system depends on feedback loops to continuously improve aspects of the combined offering. Partnerships use structured feedback loops, such as recurring alignment meetings, walkthrough debriefs, coaching conversations, partner check-ins, and joint data review, to connect information across the different levels of the bundled offering.

These routines help the partnership identify what was working, surface implementation challenges, coordinate next steps, and make timely adjustments to the instructional materials and the curriculum-aligned professional learning supports districts and educators receive.

Finding One

Fast, structured feedback loops led to quick changes

Example of an effective feedback loop

Publisher/PL provider partners described feedback loops as most useful when they were regular, specific, and action oriented.

Finding Two

Joint data review helped partners make more coherent decisions

Partners reported that looking across multiple data sources helped them reduce duplication, better understand implementation trends, and coordinate next steps.

Spring 2025

74%

Spring 2026

84%

of partner survey respondents agreed or strongly agreed that information sharing had been enhanced through the partnership

Finding Three

Feedback from districts and educators helped partners adapt supports

District and educator feedback shaped both local implementation and external partner supports. When districts signaled that professional learning felt like “too much PD,” partners described scaling back and adjusting support to better match district needs.

In this way, feedback loops helped the bundled offering remain responsive rather than static, allowing partners to adapt the timing, dosage, focus, and format of supports as implementation realities became clearer.

“In those ongoing meetings with one another, we’re able to both preview what’s coming up next and also debrief and share data about what happened last week in implementation.

So let’s say there was a PL last week that one of our organizations led—we’re able to look at the results of that, understand what did we learn about the efficacy of what we did, what did we learn about the state of educator practice, and then how does that inform what we’re doing next?”

Connected supports make implementation easier.

Regular feedback loops help publishers, professional learning providers, and districts keep curriculum, professional learning, and implementation support connected—giving educators more consistent support and helping districts successfully implement high-quality instructional materials.

“Any of the things that I wouldn’t say are weaknesses, but things that we would like or want improved, we’ve had such great communication between the consultants and our teachers to be able to say, ‘Hey, this is something we would like better if they fix it’ and they add it right then, it’s just been a great partnership.”

— District leader

“She [the professional learning consultant] has always left herself open… to sort of debrief… ‘Anything we should do differently tomorrow? What should we add?’ And so we’ve been able to make suggestions and tweaks.”