A 4-Step School Improvement Process That Works

School administrators are both leaders and managers. The management part of the job is relatively easy and can be learned over time. Creating a schedule, hiring staff, running meetings, and ensuring compliance with district policies are all management tasks that can be figured out and completed by most administrators, even those in the early part of their career. The more complicated role that a school administrator must play is that of leader: someone who sets the tone and direction for an entire school community.

This is particularly true when leading a school improvement process. Consider the many stakeholders whose needs and wants should to be taken into account: Students, parents, staff, superintendents, and community members will all have their own ideas about what school should be and where your particular school should be headed. The many variables (staffing changes?), unknowns (changes in government?), and distractions (a pandemic, a teacher strike?) that come up in any given year make this an even more challenging task. It is important for administrators to have a clear system for setting direction and tracking progress.

Here is a four-step process for school improvement that I’ve had some success with.

Step 1: Where are you now?

Start by using data to find patterns. Report cards, suspension rates, office referrals, demographic data, special education tracking, anecdotal data, parent input, student surveys, and other sources will be important. Be sure to use multiple sources and types of data to tell the story of your school, and resist the urge to discard anything that seems negative or doesn’t fit with what you might have hoped you would find.

Additionally, having data that shows trends over several years is especially useful. A low-performing school that is getting better on a yearly basis is still on the right track, for example. Make sure that your data analysis includes the opportunity to “zoom out” and evaluate your school not only compared with other schools, but also compared with itself, over time.

Addressing parent concerns. In my previous school, my school improvement process included a simple survey to parents each year, with three requests:

• Please comment on your child’s classroom experiences.
• Please comment on your interactions with office staff, including secretaries, the VP, and the principal.
• If you are a member of a marginalized group, please share any feedback on your experiences at our school.

I added an option for parents to share their contact info in case they were willing to talk about their feedback more.

I used the collected data in two ways: First, I made sure to share positive comments with any individual staff members. This built staff morale and goodwill between the teachers and parents. Second, any negative feedback provided me with an opportunity to identify and work with parents in my community who had concerns. I always made a point of personally calling or meeting with every parent who had a concern.

If there was a common theme, I addressed it at parent council. In most cases, however, the parents simply needed more information about an issue or had been misinformed. In other, more rare cases, I met with parents and we planned school initiatives together in order to address their concerns. Over time, the parent community came to understand that I was genuinely interested in incorporating their experiences and their feedback into our plans for the school.

Step 2: Where do you want to go?

Once you have a good picture of who your students are and how they are doing academically and socially, invite a small committee of teachers and parents to review data and help you in your work to find the trends and trajectories of your school. I use the questions below to keep everyone focused on students and their needs:

• What is the data telling us?
• Which groups of students are not doing as well as they should?
• What would progress look like for these students?
• How will it be measured?

Remember that school improvement is about centering student experience and student outcomes. Your final plan will almost certainly be full of things for teachers to learn or do differently, but all of it will be designed to benefit the students, who should always be at the center. As you consolidate your plans, be sure to get staff and parent buy-in via email updates and presentations at meetings.

Specific goals with numbers in them (e.g., improve reading fluency by 5 percent) are easiest to measure and track. Less well-defined goals without numbers may leave you unable to measure the impact of your work at the end of the school improvement cycle.

It is also worth remembering that schools are busy places, and having too many goals will result in diluted effort and energy across the school. I recommend that administrators consider small moves: a single, intentional change to teaching practice that will be implemented, tracked, and reflected on over the course of the year. This may be a teaching practice that has simply never been fully implemented, like doing a picture walk before a read-aloud or providing a particular manipulative for a math lesson. Picking one thing will be manageable from a teaching and a resources standpoint, and will allow you to evaluate well the effectiveness of your chosen intervention.

Step 3: How will you get there?

Gather your team and look into what changes or initiatives are required. Be clear in your plans around what resources (time, tech, professional development) you need in order to change professional practice. Most important, ask yourselves what you might need to stop doing in order to focus on your goals. In too many schools, each new school improvement plan simply adds to teacher workload without making room for new approaches and initiatives.

Accomplishing your goals does not always require huge expenses or investments. In many cases, a well-supported “small move” such as a research-based instructional strategy implemented across the division is as good as or better than a massive dump of technology or a completely new reading program. Chances are, your best teachers have ideas about which small move could make a big difference. I often remind teachers and myself that “the answer is in the building.” It’s quite likely that you don’t need to call in experts or pay for outside help in order to pursue school improvement. In the past, I have used the school budget to bring in substitutes and free up my most competent teachers to lead professional learning community meetings on literacy, special education, and other topics.

Step 4: How will you measure and share progress?

Finally, plan to reflect on your work in the spring. This might include redoing the initial surveys from earlier on in the year. Debrief the impact of your work at a staff meeting or end-of-year parent council meeting. A review of your data should make it clear which students were impacted and how they improved. I always end my school year with a meeting where we decide which initiatives to start, stop, or continue. This helps us to declutter the list of things that we attempt as a school each year and keeps us focused on the main goal: positive outcomes and growth for our students. The insights that you gain over the course of this process become the starting point for the next year’s school improvement cycle.