Adaptive leadership theory places a strong emphasis on overcoming challenges to achieve success in an organization. For school leaders, this means helping stakeholders navigate new and challenging situations that occur in the context of school improvement efforts. School leaders who strive to adopt an adaptive approach should consider the…

School improvement plans based on a year-long cycle are problematic; this approach often leads to efforts toward improvement being frustrated and goals not being met. Jackson explains why creating a 90-day plan focused on attacking one root problem at a time leads to greater improvement, giving an example of a struggling school she helped improve…

School leaders often neglect a key mechanism for empowerment: The school-improvement plan. In this article, researchers Coby Meyers and Bryan VanGronigen discuss five fundamentals of improvement planning that school leaders can use to ensure their plans are useful, effective, and on-track.

Schools must isolate patterns of inequity by disagreggating various formative assessment data by race, gender, or other characteristics. Such a lens often uncovers disparities in outcomes and can point to unconscious biases affecting how teacher respond to different student groups. Learn how to bring an equity focus into your school improvement…

Leaders have three classic responses to discord. Authors Robert Feirsen and Seth Weitzman call them the 3 "A's"--avoidance, attack, and addressing. They make the case that the third one--addressing conflict--is the healthiest way for leaders to solve problems and promote a positive school culture.

Douglas Reeves, school leadership expert and founder of the Equity and Excellence Institute, describes how we can use lessons from the pandemic to reshape teacher learning.

How can we guarantee the time and effort we invest in professional learning will lead to meaningful and enduring improvements? Thomas R. Guskey, professor emeritus at the University of Kentucky, shares six steps to evidence-based professional learning that makes a difference.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy to come from COVID-related distance learning would be "not" learning from this experience to improve teaching when teachers and students physically return to classrooms. A robust discussion of the evidence of success during this pandemic school could be a major boost to the process of teaching and learning.…

COVID-19 has turned schooling into a universal large-scale experiment. Education systems, schools, and classrooms have had to stop many old practices and invent new ones. These changes were difficult and undertaken in a period of social crisis. However, as teachers return to school this fall, it would be a great mistake to slip back into…

One of the most important relationships a principal has is with his or her instructional coach (or coaches). The strength of this partnership directly impacts student outcomes because it builds collective teacher efficacy. In this article, Student-Centered Coaching experts Diana Sweeney and Ann Mausbach share three practices to elevate the work of…

The logic behind "continuous improvement" sounds simple--but it takes a skillful leader to make the process pay off. While the logic behind the popular "continuous improvement" process seems simple, the authors' study of schools using approaches based on continuous improvement revealed that skilled leadership is as important as…

Authors William H. Parrett and Kathleen M. Budge, who work with high-poverty schools and have researched their success, share key elements of such schools' "transformational journeys." Even during the pandemic and its aftermath, some high-poverty schools have kept building their staff's capacity and confidence and gradually lifted…

High school instructional leaders describe how they reframed professional learning around autonomy with structured support. The new system, guided by trust and teacher inquiry, sparked innovation that proved critical during the pandemic.

Nearly every modern instructional planning model, differentiation approach, and personalized learning system incorporates some form of re-assessment. Yet there's scant research evidence that teachers use pre-assessment in ways that improve learning, according to Guskey and McTighe. To increase the likelihood that pre-assessment will be worth the…

This article shares what "Educational Leadership" authors have to say about doing data right, which is the theme of this issue. The following questions are addressed in this article: (1) Are you using data to guide improvement?; (2) Are you looking at the right kinds of data?; (3) Are you using data to motivate students?; and (4) Are you…