A South Carolina Principal Builds Leadership Across His School

At Furman Middle School in South Carolina’s Sumter School District, Principal J. Tanner Curry believes improving instruction takes more than one instructional leader. It takes a school full of educators prepared to lead alongside him. Since beginning a partnership with NIET, Tanner Curry has focused on building a shared understanding of strong instruction and ensuring professional learning translates into classroom practice.

“For us, this work was never about ‘fixing’ teachers; it was about building capacity in ourselves and in our staff so that we could better serve our children,” Tanner Curry said.

Building a Shared Foundation for Strong Instruction

Furman’s faculty includes teachers who bring deep content knowledge and professional experience. Tanner Curry recognized an opportunity to unite that expertise around a common understanding of effective teaching using South Carolina’s SCTS 4.0 teaching rubric which describes effective practice across a range of domains and indicators such as “questioning” and “academic feedback”.

The instructional leadership team started by assessing its own skills, identifying opportunities to deepen their shared knowledge of strong instructional practices and evaluate instruction more consistently. 

That foundation guides weekly instructional leadership team meetings and extends to teacher collaborative professional learning meetings. 

Bringing Professional Learning Into Classrooms

In the classroom, Tanner Curry and his leadership team reinforce professional learning by planning and teaching alongside teachers and maintaining a regular classroom presence. Across a faculty of approximately 45 teachers, the team conducts more than 40 learning walks each week to provide timely feedback and recognize strong practice.

Those walks have shown evidence of professional learning in more than 90% of classrooms.

“The greatest credit belongs to our teachers,” Tanner Curry said. “We have a faculty that is committed to learning, willing to refine its practice, and increasingly comfortable opening classroom doors so that growth can become something we experience together rather than something we evaluate from a distance.”

The investment in teachers has translated to student achievement. According to Tanner Curry, sixth-grade science proficiency doubled from the previous year after concentrated support for planning and teacher practice, reaching its highest level in over a decade. English language arts and mathematics proficiency also reached their highest levels in more than ten years.

For Tanner Curry, sustaining improvement means building leadership across the campus.

“We often hear that the principal should be the instructional leader of the building; I believe the greater responsibility is to build instructional leaders throughout the building,” Tanner Curry said.

Through its partnership with NIET, Furman is strengthening leadership capacity and ongoing support that help turn professional learning into stronger instruction and higher student achievement.