I believe in school improvement. If we are going to maintain relevancy in public education, we have to have continual renewal. However, we must make sure that we are actually writing plans which promote actual improvement which includes long term retention of learned material. Many of these SIP plans look like dissertations, and they are essentially unusable as such. They are cumbersome, wordy, and often full of old data. They are full of acronyms. Their goals are boring, risk little, and are short sighted. This is going to sound like blasphemy, but I don’t think that SIPs need to be primarily data driven, at least not in the way that we currently do that with norm referenced assessments.
So how do we write school improvement plans that can actually be utilized by admin and their faculty? Well, the first thing we need to do is to stop with the paralysis by analysis. I literally pull my hair out at these meetings. The amount of data that we use is insanity. Of the self-inflicted time sucks that we have created in education, I am not sure there is another one that is worse. Improving a school is going to take work. It might not always be fun. However, the process should feel like there is an endpoint which is the significant improvement of meaningful student learning.
So, back to the question, “How do we write school improvement plans which can be utilized?” I believe we do this by creating schools which have a clear, inspiring direction and are staffed with excellent teachers. Do that, and the plan will almost write itself. Again, many of our schools have become places which lack inspiring instructional delivery, and worse, they lack inspiring assessments which assess student learning in a meaningful way. I believe we have massively outdated assessment systems in most states. In Tennessee, TCAP is stressful and the content is about as exciting as watching paint dry. If this stale standardized assessment drives instruction, then it is certainly driving the uninspiring school improvement plans.
So the answer, and it is revolutionary is this. We need to stop letting TCAP(or whatever normed assessment your system uses) drive SIPs. I often criticize educational professionals for throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but maybe this is a case where that should happen. It is time to re-imagine(I use that word a lot) how we write SIPs. This is what worries me. I don’t think many in education know how to write an improvement plan without the mounds of data which now inundate our school systems.
How do we write a school improvement plan which will have buy-in by families, students, and paid educational staff? I think that answer is going to originate in what types of schools that we want, and are we willing to write plans which are bold and exciting. If we are tired of data, data, data, and more data….then we need to stop letting it drive our planning processes. If you are bored when just writing the SIP plan, imagine how the reader feels while reading it. We need to get back to letting great, inspiring instruction drive our planning. When I am trying to grow awesome vegetables in my garden, I don’t go measure those vegetables every week. That is just a colossal waste of time. Nope. In fact, I make sure they are getting proper nutrients – I feed them. I use my eyes to gauge their health, and with experience, I know what to change in order to maximize their yield. We need to feed our students knowledge, and we do that with great instruction. We need to quite measuring at every step. Our SIP plans need to reflect that. I believe a SIP plan needs to be one page in length. If it is longer than that, nobody is going to read it other than the writers.
More tomorrow…..
Pro Tip: We must believe emphatically that what we are doing is working. Teachers must believe it. Students must believe it. Families must believe it. The goals which we set must be gaudy and big. They must be interesting and keep the attention of those who seek to attain them.
