Leading Continuous Improvement In Schools
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Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools
This volume provides a set of principles and systematic methods for improvement to help district and school leaders achieve the continuous improvement goals embedded in the Professional Standard for Educational Leadership (PSEL) and the National Educational Leadership Program (NELP) standards. Bringing the PSEL Standard 10 to life, this book tackles the why, how, and what of continuous improvement through an equity lens. In the first section, Leading Continuous Improvement in Schools provides an overall introduction to and rationale for continuous improvement, situating current approaches to continuous improvement, situating current approaches to continuous improvement in education within broader historical and sectoral contexts. The second section highlights how the tenets of improvement science – such as making iterative, incremental, evidence-based advancements; utilizing practical measurements; and acknowledging variability – position school and system leaders to adaptively integrate systematic and evidence-based approaches to change as part of ongoing organizational processes. The book concludes with a section that invites readers to consider leadership approaches that forward improvement work, how leaders can build internal capacity to engage in improvement, and how policy can support efforts to build and sustain the capacity for continuous improvement. Special features include beginning-of-chapter highlights, end-of-chapter connections to standards, and action inventories through each chapter. Overall, the volume provides a focus on the continuous improvement aspects of the NELP and PSEL standards that serves as a bridge, supporting students preparing to become educational leaders in their journey from learning about continuous improvement to learning how to lead continuous, equity-oriented improvement work in their own contexts.
Learning to Improve
Author: Anthony S. Bryk
language: en
Publisher: Harvard Education Press
Release Date: 2015-03-01
As a field, education has largely failed to learn from experience. Time after time, promising education reforms fall short of their goals and are abandoned as other promising ideas take their place. In Learning to Improve, the authors argue for a new approach. Rather than “implementing fast and learning slow,” they believe educators should adopt a more rigorous approach to improvement that allows the field to “learn fast to implement well.” Using ideas borrowed from improvement science, the authors show how a process of disciplined inquiry can be combined with the use of networks to identify, adapt, and successfully scale up promising interventions in education. Organized around six core principles, the book shows how “networked improvement communities” can bring together researchers and practitioners to accelerate learning in key areas of education. Examples include efforts to address the high rates of failure among students in community college remedial math courses and strategies for improving feedback to novice teachers. Learning to Improve offers a new paradigm for research and development in education that promises to be a powerful driver of improvement for the nation’s schools and colleges.
Trust in Schools
Author: Anthony Bryk
language: en
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Release Date: 2002-09-05
Most Americans agree on the necessity of education reform, but there is little consensus about how this goal might be achieved. The rhetoric of standards and vouchers has occupied center stage, polarizing public opinion and affording little room for reflection on the intangible conditions that make for good schools. Trust in Schools engages this debate with a compelling examination of the importance of social relationships in the successful implementation of school reform. Over the course of three years, Bryk and Schneider, together with a diverse team of other researchers and school practitioners, studied reform in twelve Chicago elementary schools. Each school was undergoing extensive reorganization in response to the Chicago School Reform Act of 1988, which called for greater involvement of parents and local community leaders in their neighborhood schools. Drawing on years longitudinal survey and achievement data, as well as in-depth interviews with principals, teachers, parents, and local community leaders, the authors develop a thorough account of how effective social relationships—which they term relational trust—can serve as a prime resource for school improvement. Using case studies of the network of relationships that make up the school community, Bryk and Schneider examine how the myriad social exchanges that make up daily life in a school community generate, or fail to generate, a successful educational environment. The personal dynamics among teachers, students, and their parents, for example, influence whether students regularly attend school and sustain their efforts in the difficult task of learning. In schools characterized by high relational trust, educators were more likely to experiment with new practices and work together with parents to advance improvements. As a result, these schools were also more likely to demonstrate marked gains in student learning. In contrast, schools with weak trust relations saw virtually no improvement in their reading or mathematics scores. Trust in Schools demonstrates convincingly that the quality of social relationships operating in and around schools is central to their functioning, and strongly predicts positive student outcomes. This book offer insights into how trust can be built and sustained in school communities, and identifies some features of public school systems that can impede such development. Bryk and Schneider show how a broad base of trust across a school community can provide a critical resource as education professional and parents embark on major school reforms. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology