Medford schools join DESE acceleration network and rebrand staff PD as 'Mustang University'

Medford Public Schools announced March 2 that the district will participate in the state's Learning Acceleration Network to focus instructional improvement in ELA for grades 3'8 at McGlynn Elementary and that the central office has rebranded staff professional development resources as "Mustang University." Dr. Kimberly Talbot, assistant superintendent for academics and instruction, described the three-year partnership with DESE and consultants (including TNTP), saying the program helps districts set a concrete instructional priority, support teachers and build capacity through coaching, observations and progress monitoring.

"The participants work with consultants, in this case TNTP, to identify a high-leverage improvement priority and design a strategy to improve the quality of instruction in a specific subject area," Talbot said, describing classroom observations and planning meetings already under way. She said the district's focus is supporting the intellectual preparation teachers need to engage learners with grade-level texts and tasks.

Talbot also described "Mustang University," a rebrand of the district's staff-facing website and professional-learning tools that moves course reimbursement, preapproval and PD feedback to electronic systems so the district can track trends and tailor future offerings. "We rebranded the staff portion of our Medford Public Schools website to Mustang University," she said. "We wanted to communicate to staff how much we are investing in them."

Committee members asked how a narrowly focused ELA effort would affect other subjects. Talbot responded that the work is intentionally framed as intellectual preparation and skills that transfer across disciplines. "Even though our focus is embedded in ELA as like a frame, the actual focus is supporting teachers in the intellectual preparation required to leverage grade-level content and tasks," she said, adding that the team includes ELA and EL directors, coaches and classroom teachers.

Talbot said the district is digitizing PD feedback and using automated tools to surface themes, with human review and safeguards for identifying data. "We use data-informed practices and a little help from our generative AI friends to come up with themes in the data," she said, and later clarified that humans retain the final review step to comply with policy and ethical standards.

Why it matters: the DESE partnership and the PD tracking changes aim to concentrate resources and coaching where district data show the greatest need and to create scalable practices that can be applied across schools and grade levels. Next steps include classroom observations, ongoing huddles with the consultant and sharing the presentation slides with the committee on request.

The presentation ran as part of the district-wide update; the committee did not take a vote on the DESE partnership during this meeting.