A Message to the DSST Community: Reflections from the Fall Network Listening & Learning Tour

DSST Community,

Thank you for the thoughtfulness, candor, and professionalism you brought to this fall’s Network Listening & Learning Tour. Across schools and teams, staff engaged deeply and honestly—naming both where we are making progress and where the work continues to feel heavy. That willingness to speak with clarity and care reflects the strength of this community and your shared commitment to students.

While each campus experience is distinct, several consistent themes emerged across the network.

What We Heard

1. Sustainability and Retention Remain Central
   Staff across roles and campuses described the tension between high expectations and limited time. Workload, pace of change, compensation, and access to meaningful planning and recovery time surfaced repeatedly as factors influencing long-term sustainability. Many of you named a desire not to lower standards, but to ensure expectations are matched with the time, staffing, and support required to meet them well.
2. Alignment and Coherence Matter
   Across schools and roles, we heard a clear desire for stronger alignment between curriculum expectations, instructional practices, and assessment systems. Staff shared that when coherence is strong, it supports both instructional confidence and student learning; when it is unclear, it can contribute to uneven implementation and increased workload. There is particular interest in clearer guidance around adaptation, differentiation, and professional judgment–particularly in classrooms serving diverse learners so that instructional materials function as tools in service of learning rather than compliance requirements.
3. Culture, Joy, and Belonging Are Not “Extra”
   Staff consistently named the importance of joy, recognition, and connection - for students and adults alike. You highlighted the need for more consistent traditions, specific and authentic recognition, inclusive celebrations, and time to build relationships. Many underscored that joy must be purposefully designed and appropriately resourced, rather than added as an expectation on already constrained capacity.

Important Context

We are in a period of significant transition - academic redesign, staffing shifts, fiscal constraints, and evolving student needs. These changes are intended to strengthen long-term outcomes, but we recognize that the cumulative impact can feel destabilizing in the short term. Your feedback makes clear how we implement change matters as much as what we implement.

What We Will Do Next

In response to what we heard, we are taking several measured steps:

• Create More Space for the Work That Matters Most
  We have adjusted how early-release Wednesdays are used this year to increase dedicated work time for planning, grading, and collaboration. School leaders will have flexibility to design this time in ways that best meet staff needs locally. 
• Improve Coherence and Communication
  We will continue refining how curriculum, coaching, and professional learning connect—clarifying expectations, reducing redundancy, and strengthening feedback loops with schools before major shifts are finalized.
• Strengthen Recognition and Connection
  We are advancing work to make appreciation, celebration, and peer recognition more visible, consistent, and meaningful across the network—supporting both student belonging and adult sustainability—while being intentional about pacing and rollout.
• Disciplined Focus on Our Highest-Impact Priorities
  We will be more deliberate about prioritization, being clearer about what is most important now, what can wait, and where we must slow down to ensure quality and sustainability. Your feedback is already helping to shape our annual planning process for the ‘26-27 school year. 

Closing

This fall’s Listening Tour reinforced a core truth: our ambitions for students must be matched by our responsibility to sustain the people who make that success possible. Your perspectives are helping us calibrate our approach as we move forward.

As we move into Spring NLLT, we will shift from identifying themes to working in partnership with schools on a small number of high-leverage problems of practice.

Thank you for your partnership, your commitment to students, and the professionalism you bring to this work every day. We remain committed to learning alongside you and to taking thoughtful, responsible action grounded in what we are hearing.