School Improvement Process
by Tom Mulligan
August 09, 2007
School Improvement Process – Process for Strategic Development (2.1 and 2.2)
Overall Requirements of the Process
• Describe how your organization determines its strategic challenges and advantages
• Describe how the organization establishes strategy and strategic objectives to address those challenges and enhance advantages
• Summarize key strategic objectives and their related goals
• Describe how your organization converts its strategic objectives into action plans
• Summarize action plans and key performance measures or indicators
• Project future performance relative to key comparisons on these Performance Measures and Indicators
Key Stakeholders – Parents, Teachers, Board Members, and Administrators
Key Requirements for Strategic Development:
• Clearly written district and building strategic objectives and goals that are measurable
• Established Measures
ü both end measures (designed to determine if we met the goal)
ü in-process measures (designed to measure on-going process)
• Well defined action plans that include timelines, financial impact and clear responsibilities
• Goals and actions lead to increase in student achievement
• Clear expectations
• Goals and actions lead to positive changes in the classroom
• Process requires efficient use on allotted time for school improvement
• Process leads to the enhancement of professional learning communities
• Teacher ownership in the process for improvement
• Consistent deployment in each building
Key Performance Measures:
• Written goals and action plans
• Action Plan Products
Process Steps:
Step 1: Administrative team reviews data; Determines strengths, weaknesses, trends, opportunities, and strategic challenges; and Sets District Strategic Objectives based on Data and Alignment to the District Strategic Plan (SWOT analysis). The administrative team will also use projection data to determine future performance on strategic objectives
• Strategic Objectives will be measurable and benchmarked for comparison and aligned to strategic challenges
• Strategic Objectives should have performance projections
Example of a Strategic Challenge: Special Education - The growing increase in the numbers of special education students and lack of reading achievement of the special education students
Example of a District Strategic Objective: The percentage of all students in the district that meet or exceed in reading on the ISAT and PSAE tests will increase from 70% to75% (state average for district reading is 73%). The lowest performing groups of students are the special education students.
Step 2: Each building leadership team will solicit feedback for building level goals
Step 3: The leadership team will meet to review district goals; discuss expectations for agendas, minutes, template for action plans, etc,; and
Leadership team by building reviews district strategic objectives, reviews building level data, and develops building level goals that are aligned to district objectives and measures. They will also develop leadership team goals and an action plan
Example of Building Level Goal: The percentage of special education students that meet or exceed in reading on the ISAT test will increase from 30% to 35% (state average for elementary schools is 35%)
*all activities that relate to school improvement must be part of an action plan even if it is administrator led.
Step 4: Building level goals are approved by administrative leadership team
Step 5: Leadership team by building determines needs for project teams and/or task teams that will accomplish the actions to meet the goals. These teams can be year-long teams (project teams) or can be short task-oriented teams (task teams).
Example of Project Team: Reading Assessment
Example of Task Team: ISAT Kickoff Team – plan for kicking off the ISAT week
Step 6: School Board approves District Goals
Step 7: Project teams or task teams will develop team goals, actions, measures, and benchmark assessments that align to building goals and measures
Examples: One project team goal may include the implementation of the Dibels Assessment, with a special focus on monitoring the on-going progress of our special education students on this assessment.
Step 8: Project teams’ goals, actions and measures approved by building level leadership teams. The leadership team will evaluate goals for measurable and will also look at the sufficiency of the activities related to each building level goal. (end of August)
Step 9: The superintendent will develop a strategy matrix using the information from building level goals and action plans. (mid-September)
Step 10: The administrative team will meet to determine to analyze the strategy matrix and will determine workforce capability (does our current staff have the knowledge and skills to complete the plans) and capacity (do we have enough staff to complete the plans). If no, determine how to fix the problem. (end of September)
Step 11: On-going communication between project team leaders and leadership team in the building
• Each project team will be required to communicate to staff, parents/community after every project team meeting (the focus of the communication should be on the affect on classroom practices and student achievement)
Step 12: On-going communication between all three building level leadership teams
Step 13: Review and evaluate the school improvement process to make changes to process for next school year based on findings
Visual Representation
Process developed in August, 2002 – last revision on 5/23/07 from the process improvement meeting held on 6/19/07. This is the 5th cycle of review for the process.
