School districts expend considerable resources to establish effective staff development opportunities that lead to increased student achievement. This study focused on a school based staff development project built around four distinct instructional elements: teacher instructional practices, student engagement, stating the objective, and developing a literacy rich environment. Specifically, the study addressed the following questions: Did teachers instructional practices change as a result of participating in the professional development program? and If teachers adopted the new instructional practices, did the changes have an impact on student performance as calculated on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment? The results verified: 1.that teachers adopted key instructional practices; 2.students actual mean growth rates on MAP assessment exceeded projected growth rates in reading and language; 3.and students whose teachers demonstrated high skill levels in instructional practices and student engagement outperformed their peers whose teachers did not demonstrate the same skill levels in those two areas.