Wednesday, November 15, 2006

From the article, School Improvement Processes and Practices by Spillane and Louis.
I found many of the ideas in this article relevant to our supervision goals and working with teachers to improve instruction in the classroom.

Some thoughts from the article (along with some questions to help generate some comments):

The school improvement process is closely linked to classroom instruction. Classroom instruction consists of three elements: the teacher, the students and the medium (materials). Instructional capacity (I love that phrase!) is determined by the interactions among the three elements. All work together to form their own (not so little) system. Because they function as a system, interventions to improve instruction will be more likely to have an effect if they focus on more than one of the three elements.

Conditions for school improvement:

1. shared instructional vision
2. a school culture that is conducive to conversations about improvement
3. materials for improvement (materials, time, support and compensation)
4. support of teacher growth and developement
5. formative and summative monitoring of instruction and of the implementation of innovation that focuses on the collective responsibility for student learning

Based on these conditions, how primed are we for improvement in Salisbury?

“Changing instruction requires enabling teachers to take charge of their own practice, providing opportunities for them to examine and reconstruct not only that practice but also the beliefs and justifications that support it.”

How often do we really get teachers (and ourselves) to challenge beliefs? How hard is that?

Professional community can have a strong impact on conversations within the school pertaining to school improvement, classroom practice and student achievement.

Research shows that organizational learning (systems thinking) may be a powerful vehicle for school improvement. Components of the model including anchoring leaders’ work in learning and teaching, promoting distributed leadership, nurturing social trust, and facilitating the development of professional networks.

Does technology fit into the school improvement picture? How?

Posted by Randy Ziegenfuss in • Articles
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