How School Leaders Can Empower Teachers to Deliver Personalized Instruction

As a principal, I’m always looking to meet the diverse needs of the students in my building. Few initiatives have been as effective in this regard as our school’s implementation of “WINN”—What I Need Now—a daily class period designed to deliver personalized instruction for all learners.

Catherine E. Doyle Elementary School, where I’ve been principal since 2021, first instituted WINN during the 2022–23 school year. It’s since empowered teachers to address students’ individual needs, while fostering a culture rooted in equity and growth.

The concept here is simple: During the WINN period, every student receives targeted learnings, whether through remediation, reinforcement, or enrichment. Our teachers leverage this time with small group instruction while interventionists and specialists also collaborate in furtherance of students’ goals. For example, a group of seven students might work on mastering their multiplication facts while another group of nine students develop their writing abilities. A set of younger students might engage in phonics reinforcement while others participate in STEM enrichment activities.

The results of WINN have been extraordinary at our school. Students are thriving and more engaged, achievement gaps are closing, and our staff feels reenergized. Jennifer Hynes, a third-grade teacher with 19 years of classroom experience, told me that WINN time has been a game-changer. “Students absolutely love showing me how far they have come in reaching their personalized goals,” she said. Another teacher, Antonia Hahn, told me, “The flexibility to group students dynamically, and the collaboration across disciplines, make this one of the most meaningful parts of our day.”

These testimonials underscore WINN’s potential and how it can reshape instruction. If you’re a school leader considering WINN, here’s how to get started and what to expect along the way.

Start With a Clear Definition and Vision

In overarching terms, WINN time is personalized instruction for every student during a designated, daily 30-minute period. For you as a leader, it’s vital to first clearly communicate to your staff why personalization is so important. I recommend collecting and sharing WINN success stories from other schools and detailing your own WINN aspirations. We’ve also held professional development sessions where teachers have explored WINN models and shared their ideas.

At the Doyle School, we first piloted WINN in our third-grade classrooms. We quickly saw promising signs, including improved student outcomes and positive teacher feedback. The following school year, we expanded the program to all of our grades. This phased rollout not only ensured a smoother implementation, but also helped establish teacher buy-in. The rest of our staff heard about WINN from colleagues who participated in the pilot program.

Use Data for Scheduling and Grouping

The most significant challenges—and opportunities—around WINN come from logistics and planning.

Our top priority in the early stages of WINN implementation was to ensure that core instructional time wouldn’t be compromised. During our pilot program, we landed on 30 minutes per day for WINN. This timeline allowed us to test the concept without overwhelming existing schedules.

Once we saw promising results from the third-grade pilot program, we expanded to a schoolwide model, which required further coordination to ensure consistency across grades. Data-driven WINN groupings became a critical component of our process. I recommend sifting through your school’s assessment tools (we use a combination of Savvas Benchmarks, DIBELS, and LinkIt) to identify students’ academic needs.

By the time we implemented WINN schoolwide, we had refined our approach based on insights gained during the pilot phase. We now administer WINN pre-assessments at the start of each four-to-six-week grading cycle; teachers work in tandem with interventionists and enrichment specialists to establish groups, which are dynamic and change regularly based on student progress. Flexibility is key—as students advance, their needs evolve, so WINN empowers us to adapt seamlessly. After each cycle, we administer a post-assessment to track student growth.

We experimented with running WINN for all our grades at the same time, thinking that it would unite our school. However, this inadvertently limited our specialists’ ability to pull students, since they were all busy during the same time slots. Now we stagger WINN times across grade levels, allowing specialists and related/support services to work with more students while still maintaining their own structured schedules.

Foster Collaboration Across Disciplines

One of the most extraordinary aspects of WINN is how it unites educators from all disciplines. In addition to classroom teachers, our media specialist uses WINN to provide coding lessons, and our visual and performing arts teachers pull students for creative extensions. In practice, this means a student’s WINN time might be spent learning how to code animations in Scratch with a group of eight students, or receiving private instrument lessons with a group of six students, or learning perspective drawing techniques with a class of 10 students.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach enriches students’ learning experiences and strengthens collaboration among staff members who may not otherwise have opportunities to work together. Frequent team meetings and shared planning tools, such as Google Docs and Sheets, help keep everyone on the same page.

There are also certain services that we make sure always occur during WINN, so that students who receive specialized instruction still participate in this personalized period. For instance, speech, occupational, and physical therapies are grouped together during WINN, as are support services like counseling, English as a second language, and gifted and talented. These students are fully part of the WINN experience, as the period is personalized to meet their individual needs just like their peers’.

However, because some services and therapies do not occur every day, a student may receive speech therapy during WINN on Mondays but participate in separate WINN activities on other days. We’ve found that using shared Google Sheets helps our staff members track schedules and see when students are receiving different services, which prevents conflicts and ensures that every student’s needs are met.

Support Professional Growth Through Learning Walks

In the spirit of further collaboration, we’ve invited staff to participate in learning walks: short, nonjudgmental classroom observations of instructional strategies during WINN. Teachers watch their peers across grade levels and domains, take notes, obtain resources, and engage in debrief sessions to share insights and ideas.

These walks are truly invaluable. As one of our first-grade teachers, Keri Mills, told me, “Seeing how my colleagues structure their WINN time gave me new ideas I could implement immediately with my own students.”

Anticipate Challenges and Stay Flexible

Adopting WINN is not without some challenges, as is usually the case with anything new. You may encounter resistance to change from some staff members, as well as logistical obstacles or perhaps unanticipated gaps in resources.

During our initial implementation, some teachers worried that WINN would add to their full workloads or disrupt their established classroom routines. Additionally, some staff were concerned about the effectiveness of personalized instruction without more time to prep. The key to overcoming these hurdles is to approach them with a mindset of flexibility and problem-solving. We listen to staff concerns and have adjusted as we’ve gone along, streamlining certain processes and giving teachers more time to plan collaboratively.

Over time, our staff has encountered fewer and fewer WINN-related obstacles. We’ve also noticed more growth in all the facets that matter: academically, socially, and emotionally. For other school leaders, I can’t endorse WINN enough.