Principals are responsible for planning school improvement efforts at the school level to leverage increases in student achievement. Recent research underscores how principals engage in satisficing behaviors that result in low-quality school improvement plans (SIPs). To disrupt compliance-based planning practices and produce high-quality SIPs,…

Over the past decade, the intentional promotion of student and staff wellbeing (i.e., positive states of psychological, cognitive, social and physical being) has become recognized as an essential dimension of quality schooling. This development has coincided with a growing body of research that demonstrates significant correlations between…

This study examines teachers' perceptions of the influence professional networks have on their sense as teacher leaders for school improvement. The Model for Collaborative Evaluations (MCE) was used to examine the potential for the inclusion of teacher professional networks in school improvement efforts. Findings indicate teachers within these…

To offer the greatest value to society, the next government needs to deliver a single, strategic approach to research, innovation and higher education so that universities can be better in a decade than they are today. This report offers recommendations to better universities by: (1) supporting students to succeed; (2) putting universities at the…

One of the greatest challenges for schools is to identify effective and ineffective teachers in a classroom. Teacher evaluation is an expensive process in both time and resources. It is important that evaluations provide data to improve teaching and learning. Therefore, each evaluation needs to communicate opportunities for growth. This…

In this column, the author revisits who we are as assessment professionals, how we are trained, what our role is, and what our responsibilities are--to ourselves as a community, to our colleagues in education, at our institution, and to those we serve-- especially from an equity lens. They also share a few strategies to address the gaps they see.

In March 2022, Child Trends contracted with the Minnesota Department of Human Services (DHS) to conduct an independent evaluation of Parent Aware, Minnesota's quality rating and improvement system (QRIS) for early care and education (ECE) programs. The evaluation, required by the 2021 Minnesota Legislature, includes several research activities…

Instructional coaching is used as a form of professional development to support teaching and learning in many school districts. To address the needs of the teacher relevant to improving instructional practices, instructional coaches employ the coaching model. The coach model serves as a strategy to determine the approach needed to support teacher…

Contemporary leadership scholars have been challenged by the need to develop well-educated citizens capable of tackling climate change and social and environmental sustainability. Across the levels of education, leadership has been applied largely to strategic and governance contexts. That is, dominant models of leadership comprise position-based…

Districts and schools constantly troubleshoot and mitigate new and ongoing challenges. Rather than addressing each challenge ad hoc, they are looking to adopt a systematic, repeatable process proven to diagnose and respond to challenges efficiently and effectively. One such approach with wide application and use in education is a Networked…

To be successful in producing improvement, assessment must be "part of a larger set of conditions that promote change" (Astin et al. 1992). To identify the enduring principles likely to produce the specific conditions to promote change, the author turned to two sources: (1) W. Edwards Deming's classic 1982 book, "Out of the Crisis:…

This article explains how UCL used micro-secondments to enable central registry and departmental staff to work together in the context of an on-going project to improve the student system, specifically to improve the processing of assessment results and calculation of progression and award outcomes and to improve module selection processes. This…

In education, the details are the daily practices in every classroom and every office, what the teachers, leaders, and support staff do in their roles to pursue the school's goals. A school's goals express the collective desires for each of its students, what the students know, what they are able to do, how they behave, and how they manage their…

Today, schools' climates impact every student across the globe (Thapa et al., 2013). "A positive school climate is critically related to school success" (National Center for Safe and Supportive Learning, 2021, para. 2). School climate consists of the many aspects of an educational atmosphere including the physical environment,…

Coaching is a popular and high-leverage instrument for instructional reform. Coaching holds potential to accelerate teacher learning and school improvement. Linking results from current research, we portray how coaching benefits from robust infrastructure. This article offers three design recommendations that leaders can implement to optimize…