SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT GUIDE 

A Comprehensive School Improvement Guide for Educators, Administrators, and Parents 

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 School improvement efforts are traditionally overly-complicated, compliance-driven, and based on outdated or inaccurate data.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. 

You will learn:

• Components of the School Improvement Process

• Why every school needs a school improvement plan 

• Who should be on your school improvement team 

• Common goals for school improvement

• Steps to include in a school improvement plan

• Strategies for sustaining school improvement

You will find:

• Tools, frameworks, guides, reports, videos, case studies and white papers that can help you in your school improvement journey, whether you're considering it, launching it, supporting it, sustaining it or scaling it in your school or district.

• Information and ideas that are actionable and will shape your work moving forward.

• School Administrators: Principals and other school leaders play a crucial role in driving improvement efforts and should be actively involved in the planning and implementation process.
• Teachers: Including a representative group of teachers from different grade levels and subject areas ensures that the perspectives of those directly involved in classroom instruction are considered.
• Support Staff: It can be beneficial to involve support staff members such as counselors, librarians, special education coordinators, and other specialists who contribute to the overall school environment and student success.
• Parents/Guardians: Engaging parents or guardians in the improvement process is essential, as they bring valuable insights and can provide input on behalf of the student community. This can be done through parent representatives, parent-teacher organizations (PTOs), or other parent engagement initiatives.
• Students: If appropriate, involving student representatives can provide insights into the student experience and allow their voices to be heard in the improvement planning process. This can be done through student councils or other student leadership structures.
• District-level Personnel: Collaborating with district-level administrators and instructional specialists canCommunity Members: Depending on the specific goals and needs of the school, including representatives from the local community, such as business leaders, community organizations, or civic leaders, can help foster partnerships and support for the improvement efforts.
• Education Specialists/Consultants: In some cases, it may be valuable to include external education specialists or consultants who can provide expertise, guidance, and fresh perspectives to the improvement planning process. provide additional resources, guidance, and alignment with broader district goals.

It is important to ensure that the team is inclusive, representative, and diverse, encompassing a range of perspectives and backgrounds. Collaboration, open communication, and shared decision-making should be encouraged among team members to foster a sense of ownership and commitment to the improvement plan.

Research behind school improvement efforts generally point to the presence of these core components:

• Leadership Focused on Teaching & Learning - persistent, public focus at all levels of the educational system on improving the quality of instruction.

• Guaranteed & Viable Curriculum - districts have identified essential content and skills necessary for all students to learn in specific courses and grade levels, and the guaranteed curriculum can be taught in the time available.

• Challenging Goals & Effective Feedback - Challenging goals should be set at a level of difficulty so that the student has to put forth effort but are still attainable. Effective feedback is specific and personalized, transparent, addressable, timely, ongoing, content-rich, clear, purposeful, and compatible with students’ existing knowledge, while providing little threat to self-esteem. Effective feedback supports students to know where and how to improve, and it can support their motivation to invest effort in making improvements. 

• Parent & Community Involvement - All families have home environments to support children as students; School-to-home and home-to-school communications are effective; families help and support through volunteer efforts; families know to help students at home with homework and other curriculum-related activities, decisions, and planning; families are included in school decisions; resources and services from the community are integrated to strengthen school programs, family practices, and student learning and development.

• Safe & Orderly Environment - Environment where teaching and learning are not distracted; disruptions are minimized; violence, drugs, bullying and fear are not present; students are not discriminated against; expectations for behavior are clearly communicated; and consequences for infractions are consistently and fairly applied. 

• Collegiality & Professionalism - Environment where ​​teachers talk together about students; work together to develop curriculum; observe one another teach; teach one another; and teachers and administrators work together on educational issues.

• Student Engagement & Motivation -  Students’ active involvement in, and commitment to, academic and social activities in their school.

• Sustained Professional Development - Process of learning that includes rigorous content for each learner and a continuous process for assessing learning needs.

Most state school improvement frameworks incorporate aspects of all these components, though they may use different language.

School improvement researchers that are often cited in state frameworks include John Kotter, Robert Marzano, Michael Fullan, and John Hattie.

Sources: AIR District and School Improvement Center, Wallace Center’s Leading School Improvement - What Research Says, Marzano School Improvement Resources, The Wallace Foundation Practice of Learning-focused Leadership, John Hattie - Effective Feedback, Barry Zimmerman & Goal Setting, Epstein - Family Involvement Framework, Roland Barth- Faculty Collegiality, Learning Forward Standards of Professional Learning

Case Study: Targeted School Improvement Support in Texas

Klein Independent School District (Klein ISD) in the suburbs of Houston, Texas serves more than 52,000 students across 51 schools. In 2020, Education Elements partnered with individual campuses awarded Transformation Grants to build the capacity of campus leaders, especially specialists, and support each campus to achieve their specific goals as laid out in their Campus Improvement Plan (CIP) and Effective Schools Framework (ESF) plan. Our focus areas for the work were training specialists to deepen their understanding of personalized learning, lead retrospectives to reflect on personalized learning implementation, and build capacity to personalize professional development. Klein ISD believed Education Elements was the right partner for this work given the team’s deep experience in change management, capacity building, school transformation, and leadership development. We provided an intensive summer of customized, consulting support for intermediate and elementary campuses, which included:

• Leading a retrospective on the 2020-2021 back-to-school onboarding, particularly around the campus’ implementation of personalized learning.
• Refining an action plan, clear roles, and a project roadmap to achieve personalized learning milestones
• Modeling effective project management and action planning to build the capacity of campus leaders, especially specialists
• Providing on-demand resources as needed in preparation for professional development
• Delivering webinar content that specialists can turnkey to teachers virtually and/or in person (e.g. how to go deeper into campus-identified personalized learning focus tenets)

By the end of the project, each school had an action plan and project roadmap for personalized learning and CIP implementation, project management process for specialists to use with teachers, and a Personalized Learning Tenet Toolkit. In the 2021-2022 school year, the elementary campus we supported moved to an overall “B” rating, with an “A” in school progress. 

Improved schools demonstrate components proven by the research and identified by the state’s framework, and likely include:

• High expectations for staff and students

• Focus on instruction

• Aligned standards, curriculum, and assessments

• Targeted professional development

• Distributed leadership and clearly defined roles and responsibilities

• Strategic allocation of resources

• Sustain improvement efforts

Measuring success goes beyond academic metrics and should also consider the overall school climate, culture, and the fulfillment of the broader goals of the improvement plan.

We believe that involving students, parents, families, and the community into the process of school improvement is not only important but crucial to create a sustained school improvement. One common way to involve these constituents is through high-impact surveys that give each school and district targeted data for moving forward. Take advantage of our easy-to-use surveys that contain research based best practices. More specifically, we help you to monitor information across a variety of critical areas: leadership, curriculum, instructional practices, student social/emotional health and family connections.

Office of Elementary & Secondary Education 

National Education Association Guide

Department of Education Continuous Improvement

Culturally Responsive Leadership in the School Improvement Process

What is School Improvement Really?