District Leadership for School Improvement District leaders must limit initiatives to allow for the sustained focus essential to school improvement The School Administrator DuFour 2003 Case Study ID: 770919
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District Leadership for School Improvement
District leaders must limit initiatives to allow for the sustained focus essential to school improvement.
The School Administrator ( DuFour , 2003)
Case Study : The High Cost of Failing to Speak With One Voice
The High Cost of Failing to Speak With One Voice Identify two things Superintendent Ditka did well and two things he should have done differently. What will you do to build shared knowledge around the school designations to ensure your county has one message? What are some things you might do so that school improvement is viewed as a positive effort?
Communication Structure
Ken Blanchard (2007) advises leaders to “spend ten times more energy reinforcing the change they just made than looking for the next great change to try”.
More is not better! Michael Fullan (2001) asserted the problem confronting educators is not the absence of innovation but the “presence of too many disconnected, episodic, piecemeal, and superficially adorned projects”. Reeves (2006) agreed and discovered the size of a district’s strategic plan was actually inversely related to student achievement – the thicker the plan, the lower the results. Richard Elmore (2003) asserted that most districts are engaged in a frenetic amount of unconnected activities and initiatives characterized by volatility (jumping from one initiative to another) and superficiality (choosing initiatives that have little impact on student achievement and implementing them in shallow ways).
WV Standards for High Quality Schools
When Harvard Graduate School of Education and Harvard Business School collaborated in a joint project to develop a district-wide improvement strategy for central office leaders, they concluded that the biggest impediment to improving schools was the unmanageable number of initiatives and total lack of coherence (Olson, 2007).
Barriers to Improvement unmanageable number of initiatives total lack of coherence too many disconnected, episodic, piecemeal, and superficially adorned projects the thicker the strategic plan, the lower the resultsinitiatives characterized by volatility (jumping from one initiative to another in a relatively short period of time) Initiatives characterized by superficiality (choosing initiatives that have little impact on student achievement and implementing them in shallow ways)
It is important to know what you are doing, but it is even more important to know why you are doing what you are doing!
Why are we doing this ? Initiative: techSteps DIBELS Sustained Silent Reading Lexile measures WV Writes SPL WESTEST 2 District Administrators would say: Principals would say: Teachers would say:
KEEP – DROP - CREATE Find the list of initiatives-assessments-instructional tools (Lavender sheet) Divide the list up among the people at your table. Each person writes his/her list on post-it notes – one initiative per post-it. Go to one of the large charts – write the name of the school(s) on the chart.
KEEP – DROP - CREATE As a team… Determine whether the initiative is (1a) Required or (1b)Not Required Required by: (2a) state (2b) county (2c) school Take all of the Not Required items and list them on the Priority Grid Compare each item to every other item in pairs to determine priority items What will we keep and why? What will we drop and why? Do we need to create? What? Why?