As educators we hear the words “school improvement” a lot. Often the conversations about school improvement are centered around compliance jargon, what schools are doing wrong, or funding sources.
School improvement is a plan created to improve academic achievement and improve leadership, systems, and processes within a school.
School Improvement efforts often fail because the typical school improvement playbook does not account for the fact that schools are organic, imperfect, and subject to significant change during implementation. School improvement efforts are traditionally overly-complicated, compliance-driven, and based on outdated or inaccurate data. They often fail to address knowledge gaps and pay insufficient attention to adult learning culture.
At Education Elements, we believe that there are many things to focus on as part of school improvement - but ultimately they all focus on leadership and learning:
We believe that leadership can be found everywhere, not just with the school leader. School improvement efforts must engage all leaders to build systems and processes. With excellent leadership, we ensure that our work permeates every level, everyone feels connected, and that new norms are sustainable.
We believe that learning is not just for students, but also for adults. Learning new knowledge and skill requires space, scaffolding, and psychological safety and requires the use of high-quality materials and research-proven approaches. Learning requires consistent evaluation of the norms and systems in place.
Based on our experience working with over 1700 schools and 320 districts across the US. , we have created this guide to provide a curated set of resources and literature about school improvement in K-12 settings, alongside many of the tools and resources that we have internally developed to help our district partners launch an effective school improvement plans.