{"id":7182,"date":"2017-03-02T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-03-02T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/blog\/cw_post\/how-schools-improve\/"},"modified":"2020-02-27T14:47:29","modified_gmt":"2020-02-27T19:47:29","slug":"how-schools-improve","status":"publish","type":"cw_post","link":"https:\/\/aurora-institute.org\/cw_post\/how-schools-improve\/","title":{"rendered":"How Schools Improve"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Improve\"One of the concerns I have about how competency education is developing is that I don\u2019t hear many districts or schools talk about continuous improvement that is based on looking at processes, data, and unpacking with the five Ys. (Our low income students aren\u2019t progressing as much as upper income students \u2014 Why<\/b>? They are missing pre-requisite skills? Why<\/b>? They were passed on from eighth grade without them? Why?<\/b> The middle school principals don’t have enough control over their budgets to create adequate summer programming? Why?<\/b> The district has a policy that they manage summer school? So if we allow schools to organize or coordinate among themselves to determine the amount and type of summer school programming, more students will have all their foundational skills by the time we get to high school!\u00a0\u00a0\u2014 nothing is ever this simple of course, but you get the drift.) It may be that there is something about education and the learning process that may make some aspects of schools hard to break into processes, but I\u2019m not sure we have tried enough to know that. I\u2019m sharing this piece by Getting Smart\u2019s Tom Vander Ark (February 9, 2017<\/a>) to open this conversation. If you do use some type of school improvement process to fine tune your competency-based district or school, we\u2019d like to hear about it.<\/em><\/p>\n

Frustrated by the lack of widely used improvement frameworks in schools, a colleague emailed some questions. Following is a quick attempt to outline approaches to improvement and innovation.<\/p>\n

I see teachers sitting around the table with reports and then deciding to do a program or do more PD. How can we develop a more formal improvement framework that would drive effectiveness and efficiency?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

There are five important steps to developing or adapting an improvement framework.<\/p>\n

1. Prioritize outcomes.<\/strong> Hold community conversations about what graduates should know and be able to do\u2013like those in\u00a0<\/a>El Paso<\/a>,\u00a0Houston<\/a>, and\u00a0Marion, Ohio<\/a>. An updated graduate profile can help create role and goal clarity by identifying priority student learning outcomes and ways of measuring (or estimating) those outcomes.<\/p>\n

2. Do the research.<\/strong> Create a shared vision of what good practice looks. Unless you\u2019re inventing a new set of practices, that picture should be research-based. BrightBytes<\/a>\u00a0is a decision support tool used by almost 1500 districts that allows teams to compare their outcomes with research recommendations.<\/p>\n

3. Build a learning model.<\/strong> A common approach to\u00a0supporting powerful learner experiences may include shared<\/p>\n