How Marlborough Public Schools is building leadership capacity, empowering teams, and creating the structures to put its Portrait of a Learner and Strategic Plan 2030 into practice.
The challenge: Turning a strategic plan into daily practice
How do you build a strategic plan that reflects the people who will carry it forward? How do you make sure the plan becomes part of daily work rather than another document on a shelf? And once the plan is in place, how do you give school teams the clarity, roles, routines, and capacity to actually use it?
Those questions shaped Marlborough’s work with Focused Schools.
The district needed to:
The challenge was building the infrastructure around the plan so people could carry it into their daily work.
First, we built the North Star.
Marlborough spent 8 months developing its Portrait of a Learner and Strategic Plan 2030.
The process intentionally included voices from across the school community—not just district and school leaders and teachers, but paraeducators, behavior technicians, support staff, custodians, cafeteria staff, parents, community members, and others who contributed through listening sessions and surveys.
The district used data analysis, community listening sessions, a stakeholder survey, one-to-one conversations with school committee members, administrator dinners, steering committee meetings, and listening sessions with multiple stakeholder groups.
The result was a shared North Star built with the people who would be responsible for bringing it to life.
Then, we made the plan usable.
Marlborough made a deliberate choice: The plan needed to be used.
The district created:
A plan that expects to show up in daily life looks different from a plan that expects to be approved.
Next, we built the capacity to carry it forward.
With the plan in place, Marlborough turned its attention to implementation.
At an August district leadership retreat, the district launched the Portrait of a Learner and Strategic Plan 2030 in the morning. In the afternoon, teams took an honest read of themselves, named the one thing they would strengthen first, assigned roles, and drafted their first working agenda before leaving the room.
The district is now dedicating a full year to implementation and monitoring support, with resources focused on:
Now, implementation begins.
One of the most important aspects of Marlborough’s approach is how responsibility for the work is distributed.
The superintendent set the conditions only leadership can set. Then he handed teams the conditions only teams can set for themselves.
District leadership is creating the alignment, capacity, and structures needed at the district level while school teams are building the roles, routines, and ownership needed to carry the work forward in their schools.
Marlborough hasn’t reached L3 yet. The work is just beginning.
But the district has made an important shift:
The strategic plan is no longer something that sits alongside the work. It is becoming part of how the work gets done.
What comes next
Focused Schools will continue working alongside Marlborough Public Schools as the district moves through its year of implementation and monitoring.
Marlborough is one example of what this approach can look like in practice. To understand the thinking behind the work, and how you can apply the same framework to your own school or district, read “We Know What to Do. So Why Isn’t It Sticking?”.
This is the first in an ongoing series of impact stories highlighting the work happening inside this district. If you’d like to follow along as Marlborough puts its Portrait of a Learner and Strategic Plan 2030 into practice, subscribe to our monthly newsletter and we’ll send the next installment straight to your inbox.
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