Purpose: School improvement planning has been a central part of school improvement initiatives for decades. Evidence suggests, however, that traditional planning processes are regularly superficial. In the USA, some principals have begun developing short-cycle planning designed to encourage school leadership teams and staff to develop, monitor and…

This chapter introduces the Borough of Manhattan Community College's Institutional Effectiveness Assessment Plan and the Shults Dorimé-Williams Taxonomy as resources for the enhancement of assessment within administrative, educational, and student support units.

Creating and sustaining an organizational culture that contributes to high academic achievement is frequently a problem in schools. This basic qualitative study explored measures implemented in thriving campus cultures and effective leadership on those campuses by interviewing principals and teachers in Blue Ribbon Schools. The study focused on…

This paper explores participation trends in interventions that promote self-evaluation exercises on the effective use of digital technologies in schools. We use a unique dataset consisting of 83,185 respondents from 924 Spanish schools that used SELFIE, a tool based on self-reflection questionnaires that capture different dimensions of school's…

Teaching assistants (TAs) have a notable role in supporting individual students, groups, and classes in learning and in daily practices, both in mainstream and special education at the primary and secondary school levels. To enhance teaching assistants' learning, they should be integrated members of schools' professional learning communities.…

This quantitative study was conducted to investigate possible relationships between psychological safety, collaborative capacity, and school climate in middle level schools in order to identify specific leadership behaviors to increase collective efficacy. School leaders' knowledge of the positive effect collective efficacy has on student learning…

California has long maintained ambitious goals for arts education. The state Education Code requires schools to offer courses of study in four arts disciplines to all California K-12 students. In 2005/06, with support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, SRI Education researchers conducted a study of arts education in California. The…

The Whole of Community Engagement (WCE) initiative sought to identify barriers and enablers in Aboriginal students' pathways to post-compulsory education, in six remote communities in Arnhem Land and central Australia. It identified known factors like colonial history, low English literacy, job prospects and cultural difference. Responses often…

Kappan's editor talks with education historian Larry Cuban about the various ways Americans have judged the quality of schools and the success of various efforts to improve schools. For much of the 20th century, efficiency was the watchword, as schools adopted scientific management techniques from the business sector. By the mid-1960s, that goal…

The "Vision 2030" agenda was recently adopted as a roadmap and methodology for developmental and economic action throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. "Vision 2030" includes support for universities' academic and administrative operations through the collection, rigorous analysis, and reporting of a wide range of data.…

Collaboration between the school governing body (SGB) and the school management team (SMT) in underperforming schools remains the crest for successful action taken to turn around performance as envisaged in the South African Schools Act 84 of 1996 (Republic of South Africa, 1996). Their interaction is crucial in advancing the course of performance…

The objectives of this research were 1) to examine the causal relationship model of factors affecting the effectiveness of primary schools which was developed through empirical data, 2) to study the factors that have direct, indirect and overall influence on the effectiveness of primary schools in Khon Kaen. The samples were 640 school…

This report examines campus-level contributors to student academic gains. Using student factors, curriculum and programming indicators, and campus features (e.g., staff retention and support programs) as inputs, the results indicate that changes in campus and teacher leadership scores are important and significant predictors of improvements in…

Dramatically improve schooling by harnessing the collective power of the High Reliability Schools™ (HRS) model and the PLC at Work® process. Featuring some of America's best educators, this anthology includes information, insights, and practical suggestions for both PLCs and HRS. The overarching purpose is to demonstrate how these two approaches…

The COVID-19 pandemic confronted practitioners with many challenges. For those of us working in early years and key stage 1, it also provided opportunities to sustain child-centred and play-based approaches to learning for longer than is usually the case. This reflective article draws on direct experience to argue for the importance of such…