SamTastic Weekly Tip: 7/13/26 - Welcome the New School Year by Sharing the SAM Process

This week’s Tip: Welcome the New School Year by Sharing the SAM Process

July marks the start of the new school year with some districts welcoming students as soon as the end of the month.  Now is a great time to share the SAM process with colleagues and friends.

The NSIP Board received the 2026 SAM Team Progress Report last week. The report shows SAM principals spent three times more time engaged in work to improve teaching practice than non-SAM colleagues.  Impressive, especially considering the enormous pressure school leaders encountered: decreased funding, staffing shortages, and unprecedented political turmoil impacting policy and curriculum. Leaders who advanced to the highest rubric level in the SAM Process spent 72% of their time instructionally engaged in school year 2025-26.  You can access the full NSIP 2026 SAM Team Performance Report at this link:  https://bit.ly/44pYH44    NSIP Board President’s Bert Hendee’s meeting report is below in yellow.

Why not help your colleagues get the same results you achieved?  We will be doing in-person training for new SAM teams in the six cities below:

Dallas, August 4

Houston, August 5

Minneapolis, August 6

San Francisco, August 7

Kansas City, August 11

Columbia, Missouri, August 13 & 14

We have limited space for additional teams in each of the August training cities.  We’ll announce more in-person training locations for September, including New York and Atlanta.  Of course, online training is also available.

Schedule training: https://bit.ly/NSIP_Training

Schedule an online meeting to discuss:   https://bit.ly/NSIP_Meeting

Best for a SamTastic week,

Mark

Mark Shellinger, Director

National SAM Innovation Project

---

From Bert Hendee, President NSIP Board of Directors:

Your NSIP Board of Directors’ most recent meeting was held July 7, 2026, Traverse City, Michigan.

As we have shared with you before but like to remind everyone, the NSIP Board of Directors meets two times a year in person.  One meeting is held in conjunction with the National Conference and one in the summer either June or July.  Two other virtual meetings may be held each year as well.  At each meeting we have updates from each member of the board and the executive director.  We are passionate about this work and always work towards improvements in our performance and support of NSIP.

During this most recent board meeting we focused on several important things:

1. Reviewed the results of the annual SAM Teams Rubric Assessments and were so very impressed that once again 100% of the teams submitted their assessment.  92.27% of you were able to connect your time use to improved teacher practice and 91.74% were able to connect your time use to improved student performance.  Impressive!!  What adds to this impressive number is that specific evidence was shared to support these numbers.  All Board members will be sharing their thoughts about the assessment results in the coming weeks.

2. Reviewed the results of our Board self-evaluation and set goals for the coming year.  We also did a shared learning activity.

3. Reviewed, as we do at every meeting, our policies, vision and mission

4. Received an update regarding services, supports, finances and the national SAM conference from our Executive Director Mark Shellinger. 

Mission:  Provide a comprehensive process and set of tools to develop effective instructional leaders resulting in greater student success.

Vision:  Increase principal time spent improving teacher practice and student outcomes

If you have questions please feel free to reach out to any board member at any time.  Our contact information is on the NSIP website.