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As educators, trying to improve a school or bring it to the next level starts with a school improvement plan.\u00a0 To create that plan, you and your team will use a lot of energy and expertise. You will invest your time, your passion, and your political capital in crafting specific strategies and approaches. In many cases, you will also engaged outside experts and partners to help create your plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But creating a plan and then distributing it to the team (or even worse putting it on the shelf) isn’t enough. The really hard work starts with implementation.\u00a0 And for underperforming schools, the pressure to produce is even greater because the clock is ticking.<\/p>\n
Most plans that fail don\u2019t fail because of the plan itself.\u00a0 Most plans fail because the essential links between planning, implementation and student outcomes is broken.\u00a0 As educators we are really good about setting goals and defining the strategies that we’re using in service of those goals. But, then school happens. The day to day realities of life in a district or a school take over and the connection between our strategic \/ tactical efforts and student impacts break. So we find ourselves at the end of the semester or the end of the year looking back and trying to work out what parts of our plan we implemented, what parts we didn’t, and if the plan had any impact at all<\/p>\n
What best practices are required for successfully implementing school improvement once the school or district improvement plan is completed? In our experience, addressing 3 areas is critical; 1) implementation, 2) progress management, and 3) course correction.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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The first step is for the School Improvement team to share, set, and communicate the goals of the plan and to specify the tactics required.\u00a0 This means you need to think beyond goals.\u00a0 You need to be very specific about:<\/p>\n
You need to change the inputs of your team to change the results. By changing the inputs and connecting those inputs to student outcomes and specific goals you will have the desired impact on student outcomes.<\/p>\n
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The second step is oversight.\u00a0 Oversight is all about consistent reporting.\u00a0 Most of the time, updates about improvement plans are ad hoc. They’re provided informally in different formats by different people and they may even just be hallway chats or emails.\u00a0 Reporting needs to be formalized, consistent, and simple.\u00a0 You need a software that manages this reporting.\u00a0 You need to set a time that reporting needs to be completed.\u00a0 That software needs to be easy to use and school improvement leaders need to set a time weekly or bi-weekly to review that reporting.<\/p>\n
Next, you need to track actions and their impact.\u00a0 To do this, you need metrics. Metrics can describe anything that needs to be managed or kept front of mind. Metrics could be student outcome metrics, academic intervention metrics, social emotional learning metrics, or metrics about specific interventions. Really anything that you need insight into, to make sure that your improvement plan is moving forward. Metrics all need a clear description and a clear owner.\u00a0 Finally, they need defined Green, Yellow, and Red thresholds.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What you see below is a screenshot example of a defined metric.\u00a0\u00a0 Tasks and actions tied to specific outcomes provide the entire team with a clear picture of the plan, what is being done to support the plan, and what the outcomes of those actions are.<\/p>\n
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This process saves time in the long run.\u00a0 With reporting and metric tracking in place, your staff meetings are no longer consumed by reporting.\u00a0 They become focused on problem solving and collaboration because all the \u201creport outs\u201d have already happened.\u00a0 A software sets you up for real fact-based conversations based on efficacy.<\/p>\n
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