Horace Mann Elementary is a powerful example of a school community of learners and leaders that ensures every student succeeds. The school employs two key strategies to help students develop their potential: a) instilling a growth mindset and explicitly teaching social-emotional skills, and b) empowering students to take charge of their learning as leaders. Horace Mann has a strong instructional focus on strengthening students’ reading comprehension. For the last 20 years, they have steadily improved student achievement by concentrating resources and dedicating their best efforts to improving the quality of teaching. They built collective expertise as a whole school, avoiding distractions from countless initiatives.

Adding to the strength of Horace Mann’s professional learning communities is the site-based staff development provided during collaboration meetings to enhance reading comprehension instruction. They plan training that specifically addresses instructional needs identified by the principal and leadership team during classroom walkthroughs and address specific student needs identified from assessments of student learning. Their best practices include a focus on using high-quality lesson design to teach standards and several reading comprehension strategies, such as reciprocal teaching and Question-Answer Relationship (QAR).