Doug Lemov's field notes

Harmony Public Schools keeps moving forward.

We ultimately measure the success of our partnerships by what happens after our work with a school, district, or network has ended. Do key leader and teacher actions continue (and get even better)? Is student achievement strong and continuing to improve? By those measures, Harmony Public Schools is one of our most successful partnerships.

In Winter 2023-2024, we published a 4-part blog series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4) to share lessons learned from our 30-month partnership with Harmony Public Schools that had concluded that fall. In the opening of the first post in the series, we shared this data:

As we prepared to post the series, Doug shared with us, “That’s encouraging data. Now if that trend continues over multiple years, that’s really a story…”

Here’s the updated data:

In the 2023-2024 School Year we were not working directly with Harmony and they had their highest performance to date: 2639 scale score average across all state tests, outperforming the scale score state average by 63. In 2024-2025, Harmony secured a new grant that enabled us to collaborate for one additional year and improvement continued: 2654 scale score average across all state tests, outperforming the state average by 67.

During our time collaborating with the Harmony team, our work included:

• Development of an instructional Arc of the Year–a tool that outlines measurable student actions to be achieved at different points in the year. It guides instructional leader priorities and teacher actions to achieve the student outcomes.​
• Identifying and supporting the development of their “Core 4” Leadership Activities–Lesson Prep Coaching, Observation & Feedback, Student Work Analysis, and Practice-based PD Training–via trainings, checklists, planning guides, and collection and study of video and artifact Bright Spots
• Site visits to study progress together
• Support for the network’s Curriculum Team to align leadership and curriculum activities
• Building capacity in Harmony’s 7 regions (districts) to study local trends and create responsive leader training

What has enabled Harmony to make such consistent and sustained growth? We think it’s best for our colleague at Harmony, Dr. Burak Yilmaz, who steered all of the work to share his insights with you directly:

At Harmony, the Arc of the Year has become our instructional north star. It defines what excellence in the classroom looks like and helps every leader and teacher align around that shared vision. 

The Harmony Core4 practices give us the ‘how’—a clear, practical methodology for achieving that vision through lesson preparation, observation and feedback, student work analysis, and practice-based professional learning. With TLAC support, we invested so much into building capacity with our coaches and school leaders to sharpen their Core4 skills. Through this work we’ve been able to ground every conversation—whether in a coaching session, a team meeting, or a classroom walkthrough—around the Arc of the Year and the Harmony Core4. That consistency is what’s allowed us to sustain growth across years and across campuses in such a large state-wide network. – Dr. Burak Yilmaz, Director of Instruction

We titled our first post, the overview of the series, “Lasting Change at Scale: Lessons from Our Work with Harmony Public Schools.” We are delighted that the title has proved to be accurate. 

In the first post, we also wrote:  Schools are such complex organizations that growth in student achievement in a single school or large district is always the result of multiple factors. Although TLAC contributed to Harmony’s sustained success, the credit goes to the leaders and teachers across the organization. It is their collective effort that has yielded such impressive results. We are grateful for their commitment to their students and families, and look forward to sharing all that we’ve learned from our work together with our current and future partners.

Want to learn more or partner with us? We’d love to connect! Contact us here. 

Our previous Harmony Public Schools series:

• https://teachlikeachampion.org/blog/lasting-change-at-scale-lessons-from-our-work-with-harmony-public-schools/
• https://teachlikeachampion.org/blog/the-protocol-paradox-scaling-effectiveness-and-authenticity-at-harmony-public-schools/
• https://teachlikeachampion.org/blog/seeing-change-harmonys-artifact-study-system/
• https://teachlikeachampion.org/blog/lesson-delivery-models-and-lesson-prep/