Reflecting forward: developing, implementing, and monitoring a school improvement plan

Farley-Ripple, Elizabeth N.Education policy is placing increased demands on under performing schools to improve their educational practices. Now more than ever, it is important for school leaders to have knowledge of and understand what effective school improvement practices successfully change a school. This Educational Leadership Portfolio (ELP) presents my journey as a brand new building principal tasked with improving student outcomes in a school that had a long history of under performing. ☐ Before my arrival, the school had gone through multiple unsuccessful school improvement cycles. I learned from reviewing the previous school improvement plans that best practices had not been implemented. I decided to select specific school improvement strategies based on research to develop, implement, and monitor the plan to help the school be successful with the process. Artifacts included in this ELP detail the strategies selected for each phase of the school improvement process. ☐ The results from these selected strategies suggest that they did begin to change school systems, though the change was not significant enough to remove the school’s improvement status. The most significant finding from this ELP is identifying that school leaders must have a strong knowledge base of school improvement research and techniques in order to successfully lead change. Reading research alone is not enough, nor is simply leading the work. School leaders must combine research-based best practices with school improvement and leadership experience to make decisions that will lead to systemic changes not just in under performing schools, but in all schools. ☐ Traditional school improvement strategies have school leaders identify the school’s problems, identify strategies to address them, and develop a plan to guide the work that need to be done. Those strategies, however, have the potential to set schools up to do work that will not improve student achievement if the school’s leaders do not have thorough enough knowledge of school improvement strategies. After completing one cycle of school improvement, this ELP offers the following recommendations. First, districts need to develop school profiles that provide a starting point for schools undergoing improvement. These school profiles should list highly effective educational practices, each of which should contain a rubric that a school can use to determine the level at which they are currently implementing that practice. The school would then use the school profile to create its school improvement plan. Districts also need to develop leadership profiles to identify the level of knowledge each leader has with the highly effective practices listed in the school profiles. Districts then should use these leadership profiles to support school leaders’ professional growth with regard to practices that highly effective schools embrace.University of Delaware, School of EducationD.Ed