Spark Spotlight shines a light on an educator making a meaningful impact in their classroom and community. Together, we celebrate their creativity, inspiring stories, and unwavering dedication to SFUSD students’ success. 

This month, Spark spoke with Ana Maria Olivar, an instructional coach at Dolores Huerta Elementary, to hear about her commitment to supporting teaching excellence. 

The voices of students’ at play - laughing, screeching, yelling- welcome us as we pass the entrance gate of Dolores Huerta Elementary. It is recess and we are meeting with Ana Maria Olivar to hear about her work as an instructional coach. 

Olivar was born and raised in San Francisco. She studied psychology at Davis and thought she was going to be a social worker before deciding to work in education. She started teaching at SFUSD in 2005 and taught in Spanish biliteracy and Spanish immersion programs as well as in the general education pathway. She spent the first 15 years of her career in Potrero Hill -at Starr King and Daniel Webster - and after some time in Chinatown, she was hired to be a K-through-5 teacher and the English Language Development program lead at Dolores Huerta Elementary.

Every school Olivar taught at had an instructional coach and she knew the positive impact coaching had on her teaching. She also had some opportunities for teacher leadership throughout her career: she was a mentor teacher for USF students -3 of which are now working at Dolores Huerta- and also participated in a program called Teacher Leader Fellowship, a 4-year commitment that focuses on adult learning. So when she heard that SFUSD’s instructional coaching network was going to be expanded, she made the leap and decided to leave the classroom completely : “It’s been really nice to shift the lens and still keep a lot of what I am passionate about - such as working on interrupting patterns that we see in academic progress, especially for multilingual learners, our Spanish speakers,” Olivar shared.

When asked to elaborate on the academic challenges she notices, Olivar notes that in the 19 years she has been working in education, some things have not really shifted for many of SFUSD’s targeted population: “There are many factors at play. I don’t know if we have gotten to the root and I know some schools have had some success. I think about John Muir and their lesson study program, what they’ve done for math scores for their students for example, but that speaks to the alignment they have across their whole site. I often think about that and how we can replicate something like that to start interrupting patterns and trends we keep seeing over and over again regardless of what curriculum we are using. What can we do? How can we identify some of these root causes? What are some of the things that we can implement as a school site? What are the steps we can take?”

SFUSD, Olivar shared, has engaged in a district-wide transformation to shift patterns and improve student outcomes. The first element of this transformation is adopting a district-wide literacy curriculum. “Adopting Into Reading and adopting Arriba La Lectura!, which is its Spanish counterpart, has been a good thing for us as a school,” Olivar mentions. “We needed alignment in terms of what everybody is doing. A couple folks were using a workshop model, others were using another curriculum called Benchmark. There were successes in the classroom but things were segmented and we were not aligned in terms of the terminology or types of resources we were using.” Implementing small group instruction is another step to reach more students and Olivar has been instrumental in helping new teachers to implement small group instruction. 

For Olivar, the implementation of instructional coaches throughout the district is an essential action step in working toward improving student outcomes throughout the district. ”Helping envision how to build out systems and teacher leadership through our ILT committee has been a big part of my job. Myself, the principal and our social worker don’t have to hold all the information. Our teachers carry the most experience and that’s the leverage we want. Elevating the extensive knowledge that we already have will lead to the students’ outcome that we’re hoping to see. Just because we are implementing a new curriculum doesn’t erase the experience the teachers hold so how do we bring that forward to learn something new and help students be successful?”

A large part of Olivar’s role is to reach out to individual teachers to observe, model, or co-teach in their classroom. “I shift my focus depending on the needs. Right now, one of the needs is our new teachers. I’m in the second grade classroom quite a bit, making sure I’m supporting quietly, reinforcing classroom management, things like that.” She also facilitates a new teacher study team. Although she has already completed the four-year fellowship, Olivar was invited to continue her practice to develop satellite teams. The majority of her time is spent in classrooms with kids and teachers. “Because of the relationship that I hold with staff, I feel very comfortable just popping in the classroom and teachers are incredibly welcoming. We have a very loving community that just cares -from teachers, to families to our office staff. Our school is very loving. That’s what has permitted me to come in and look at our learning.” 

When asked about what she loves most about her role, Olivar beams: “I don’t ever think of myself as the expert, I’m definitely always a learner, that’s part of my teaching philosophy. I never assume that I hold the knowledge, I always think that we hold the knowledge as a collective to make things work for us and for our students. We always come back to what our students need and how we are able to use our collective knowledge to create and modify lessons or make them work.” 

“I hold a lot of respect for every single person that works here,” Olivar adds. “We hope to make true change and interrupt patterns. We are not going to see it now but I’m hoping we can develop these long term systems that are more sustainable.” 

In addition to the Literacy Institutes that started over the summer to introduce teachers and instructional coaches to the new curriculum, instructional coaches meet once a month for a full day. “At these coaches meetings, the humanities department organizes a presentation on a different component of Into Reading or Arriba La Lectura! They format it and then model it for us. Then we bring it back to our school site. Sometimes we have to make a few changes so that they work for our site but they are very useful because I don’t have to create anything. We also have one other virtual meeting, with a smaller group of coaches where we can share what we are presenting and give feedback.”

What Olivar particularly appreciates is being constantly engaged in a learning process: “[SFUSD] thinks of us as intellectuals. We get to think about what it is like to work with adult learners. What do we need to think about as coaches? We want to respect and highlight people’s intelligence and brilliance. That’s a big piece.”

“The instructional coaching system is really well thought out. The planning around our coaches network has been one of the best things I have seen. It addresses a lot of schools so they make a general template for all of us but they also consider that some of us are also language pathways, so I feel very fortunate that there’s always a Spanish component. The way it’s structured from whole group to small group to sites is very organized. In addition to that, we also fill out a coaches’ log every week so they are constantly capturing our feedback and we discuss the feedback at our next meeting and go from there. Every time we come back to the next coaches’ meetings, I feel it’s getting a little more refined.” 

Although Olivar shares that, three months into implementing these changes, it is too early to see an impact on student outcomes, she hopes to see an impact in students’ foundational skills. “The new curriculum covers different components -phonics, phonemic awareness, spelling, high frequency words and there is also a fluency piece. The first four have been the most impactful so far that teachers are responding positively to, because it was absent in the previous years. The grammar piece was also missing for the last decade and I hear teachers are excited about that piece as well.”

She adds that the new curriculum comes with workbooks, and consumables: “It’s nice to have practices that are already designed for us, that are connected to the lesson, that we can easily pull out and don’t have to recreate or translate. That’s been a major benefit this year. As I work with the curriculum and get to know it more, there are also a lot of printable resources that we can use.” 

Olivar is excited about the changes happening at SFUSD: “Part of transformation is envisioning long-term sustainable systems. Instructional coaching is in its first year as a fully-developed, thoughtfully-designed network of “we”: It’s a collective of teachers working together, with departments, and bringing that work back to more teachers. This ongoing cycle of co-creation helps build impactful systems that ultimately drive the outcomes we aspire to for our students, particularly those who are central to our goals.”