Through all of the changes and shrinking budgets, you’ve conducted many school improvement planning processes, provided professional development, and maybe even implemented new curricula and assessment systems that promised to deliver greater student achievement results.
Despite all of this, you see that student achievement results didn’t improve nearly as much as your goals predicted—in fact, some even went down. It’s defeating and discouraging.
The strategies and techniques that used to work, even just a couple years ago, just aren’t working anymore.
We all acknowledge that change takes time, but it is important to put systems in place that allow for the examination of signals along the change horizon that help ensure your decisions along that horizon lead to improvement, result in some early wins, and ultimately ensure a good use of human and fiscal resources.
There are three primary questions to consider that will help clarify decisions among the ever-changing education policy landscape and lead to consistent improvement with fewer dollars spent:
Despite best efforts, most school-improvement initiatives—especially in high-needs, disadvantaged schools—fail or show little improvement, as evidenced by the recent findings from the USDOE School Improvement Grants. Some estimates show failure as high as 70% for strategic initiatives in for-profit companies, and the challenge is even greater with school-improvement efforts.
Given the pressing challenges educators face each day, it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day fires and priorities and lose sight of where you’re trying to get. Unfortunately, good intentions are not enough when it comes to driving and sustaining growth. So where do school leaders begin?
Research is clear about the primary factors influencing student achievement results. The single largest school-based determinant is the effectiveness of the teacher. Next, and just as important, is the effectiveness of building principalswho influence teacher retention and school climate.
If we assume a 30% success rate of “bad-to-great” turnaround efforts regardless of industry, the cards are stacked heavily against even the most adept and inspired leadership teams. Therefore, our theory of action asserts that schools improve when leaders implement well.
In the following eBook, we’ll learn about the keys to successfully creating school improvement, including how an investment in your teachers and school leaders leads to student achievement.
There are three drivers that need to be in place for school improvement efforts to succeed, including ensuring fidelity of implementation and sustainable long-term results.
We’ve identified three levers that research and on-the-ground experience tell us create systems for investing in teachers and school leaders—and get results for increasing student achievement.
Learn about the essential elements that make for a successful implementation of the key levers.
With implementation science research in mind, there are three drivers that need to be in place for school improvement efforts to succeed, including ensuring fidelity of implementation and sustainable long-term results.
Driver 1. Human Capital (or Competency)
Principals with site-based hiring responsibility make no decision of greater consequence than the educators selected to join the school’s faculty. This driver focuses on selecting, developing, improving, and sustaining the school and its staff's ability to implement an intervention as intended in order to benefit students.
Tools include:
Driver 2. Organization
This driver helps schools build a conducive environment for launching the improvement effort in the short term, and sustaining improved schools in the long term. These drivers are differentiated by what the school has direct control over and those things that are controlled centrally.
Tools include:
Driver 3. Leadership
This driver emphasizes the technical and adaptive aspects of leadership, since they are believed to impact student achievement the most. There are two types of leadership.
While there are many factors that go into successful school improvement, we’ve identified three levers that research and on-the-ground experience tell us create systems for investing in teachers and school leaders—and get results for increasing student achievement.
The three levers include:
Continue reading below for details on the levers.
We know that a healthy leadership team is the key to gaining traction and sustaining a thriving organization. The instructional leadership team (ILT) is the key driver of the school-improvement process. They cultivate the “Implementer’s mindset"—focus, discipline, and accountability—within every staff member, and see that concrete actions are taken toward goals every day.
In practice, strong leadership teams always get two things right:
Each team is composed of school leadership (principal and vice principal), instructional coaches, and select teachers. A key component of a successful ILT is making sure that each team has both "visionaries" and "integrators."
We recommend using survey tools, interviews, and common sense to construct the leadership team capable of driving rapid school improvement. Each leadership team member should have the sensitivity, grit, and knowledge to lead the school to a greatly improved state.
Team members will agree to the following:
Reflection Questions for ILTs
As you consider establishing and/or developing your ILT, here are a few questions to reflect upon:
Coaching provides the differentiation, support, and accountability that can help teachers and leaders get to that next level and create a larger impact on their organization.
Dr. Atul Gawande, an acclaimed surgeon and research scientist, wrote in a 2011 New Yorker article, “Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance.” In contemplating his own professional development, Gawande researched instructional coaches—providers of job-embedded support—and found compelling evidence of the positive impact that coaching can have on growth in any industry.
Coaching for Teachers
Recently, a group of researchers—Matthew Kraft and Dylan Hogan of Brown University and David Blazar of Harvard University—released a compelling study examining the impact of coaching on instruction and student achievement. Not surprisingly, they learned that there is, indeed, a positive effect of one-on-one coaching on a teacher's instructional practice.
According to their paper, effective coaching must be:
Reflection Questions for Coaching Teachers
Coaching for School and District Leaders
To be an effective agent of change today in districts requires leaders to have unique expertise in a wide variety of areas, including strategic planning, research and analysis, fiscal management, board and community engagement, implementation planning, communication and training, professional learning design, curriculum, and coaching.
This is why leaders in the business community have relied on executive coaching for decades to increase productivity, refine organizational systems, reach goals, and provide clarity in their work. As one consultant from the Alliance for Strategic Leadership puts it, coaching provides “the opportunity for feedback and guidance in real time” and “develops leaders in the context of their current jobs, without removing them from their day-to-day responsibilities.”
Coaching for school and district leaders provides:
Reflection questions for coaching for school and district leaders
Resources for Coaching Teachers
Resources for Coaching Leaders
Effective school leaders must provide the time and resources to proactively address problems of practice and develop solutions that will ultimately change outcomes for students.
Improvement is both a technical and a social process. Superior technique alone is insufficient to bring about improvement. Teachers, like doctors and other practice-based professionals, are most willing to try something new when someone they trust recommends it.
Professional learning communities (PLCs) have tremendous potential to improve teaching. In PLCs, teachers can work with one another to discover and develop new practices to help their students succeed. Teachers in PLCs can develop trust among colleagues who support their efforts to improve.
However, it isn’t guaranteed that this will happen. Most school system administrators who have had experience with PLCs know that they differ widely in their ability to transform teaching practice. Often, they only help individual teachers improve, and very few help schools themselves improve.
In recent years, districts have realized the importance of ensuring job-embedded professional development is in place, which means professional learning occurs during the workday, in the workplace, and is linked to the goals set for students.
According to the book The Learning Educator: A New Era for Professional Learning, this type of professional development results in increased collaboration among staff, makes common goals more tangible to staff, and reveals higher-quality solutions to instructional problems.
In all schools, there are some teachers whose students consistently outperform their peers. These teachers’ students succeed in the same schools, under the same conditions, and facing the same problems as struggling students.
While we know that these teachers exist, they seldom get the recognition they deserve, and, all too often, their expertise—what they know and are able to do better than most—remains an untapped resource.
In our own attempt to answer these challenges, we developed the Supporting Teacher Effectiveness Project (STEP) framework, a systemic, data-driven PLC structure now implemented in schools around the world.
STEP guides educators in identifying the bright spots—assets—that can be leveraged and scaled toward greater improvement and replication.
Developed in partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, American Institutes for Research, and other key organizations, the STEP framework helps teachers solve problems through discovering, testing, and sharing better practices.
Reflection Questions for PLCs:
Resources for PLCs:
The three levers should not be merely a collection of disconnected events. They should be a part of coherent, focused program that drives toward particular outcomes for each staff member and serves the overall vision for the school or district.
To provide cohesion to the three levers above, there are several essential things that will support and ensure success:
1. Adopt and act on the implementer’s mindset.
Foundational to any major initiative, the implementer’s mindset—focus, discipline, and accountability—is a key part of ensuring that whatever initiatives you implement are successfully implemented. The mindset is an attitude that strong implementers hold about what it takes to be successful. A precursor to action, this attitude is not a strategy or tactic but rather a heightened sense of awareness about implementation, and it is necessary for all ILT and PLC members.
2. Ensure alignment between your instructional initiatives (the levers) and your school or district’s strategic plan.
A strategic plan serves as an essential foundation and roadmap for all improvement efforts in your school or district. It ensures that all educators are on the same page and serves as a "living document" that is referenced throughout the year to check on progress and to ensure that all initiatives are in direct alignment with the plan.
Misalignment or lack of alignment between a strategic plan and additional initiatives (such as the three levers) not in the plan can lead to confusion among staff, extra burdens on teachers as priorities may conflict, questions from school boards about approving funding for initiatives that are not clearly aligned to strategic goals and initiatives, and ultimately lack of progress towards student achievement.
If you haven't developed a strategic plan yet or it has been a while since you updated yours, consider doing a planning process that includes:
The key to getting traction towards your vision and goals is ensuring that your ILTs are regularly referring back to the strategic plan and maintaining progress through short-term projects (or rocks) that will ultimately lead to the bigger win by the end of the year.
3. Conduct an instructional needs analysis or quality school reviews at the beginning and end of every school year.
To make progress, school and district leadership must have a full and accurate understanding of staff needs and areas of opportunity identified through:
To get an objective perspective and to identify how new initiatives are impacting student achievement goals, we recommend working with a third-party organization (such as Insight) who can provide some helpful observations and recommendations to inform your improvement plans and priorities.
4. Join or create a networked improvement community.
Teaching and leading can be isolating, whether you’re an educator in a large or small school or district. In today’s world, schools and districts should not accept geographic isolation but instead leverage technology to forge partnerships with districts, charter management organizations, and schools across states with a similar needs, goals, and philosophies. This is where the power of Networked Improvement Communities (NIC) lies.
Stemming originally from Douglas Engelbart of SRI International and then further developed by the Carnegie Foundation, a NIC is a distinct group that arranges human and technical resources so that the community is capable of getting better at getting better and can be that critical force needed to the key levers to grab hold within a school or district.
The NIC also provides principals, assistant principals, teacher leaders, and teachers with a broader network of peers for meaningful, job-specific collaboration and provides systemic pathways for effectiveness and successes to permeate across (not just within) schools.
One of the big lessons we’ve learned in our own work as leaders is that it is easy to get caught up in so many priorities that when you get to the end of the year, you don’t see results. At this point, it’s important to take some time to reflect on what’s getting in the way of gaining traction.
As a leader, creating effective systems requires upfront investment of time; however, the return on that investment can be significant such as:
If you want to avoid getting caught up in doing too many things, build in regular time for reflection for you and your ILTs to unpack what’s really working and what should be taken off the table.
The three levers described above provide a helpful and focused framework for improving instruction across your schools and district. Why not give them a try?
Complete the form below if you're interested in talking with us about how the three levers could work in your school or district.