Strategic Planning and Continuous Improvement

The quality movement is making its way into education with remarkable results in a short period of time. The best practice workshops on this topic featured schools that are generating consistent improvement in student achievement over time. Key themes in these workshops were:

• Aligning strategic planning and action at all levels in a school system.
• Creating only a few, sharply FOCUSED strategic goals (2-3), which generate many well focused action items within schools and classrooms.
• Making all goals SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Achievable (but a stretch), Realistic and Time-sensitive.
• Using formative measures that allow teachers and students to track their success all along the way. (It’s too late to make adjustments if you only take measurements at the end of the term.)
• Creating professional learning communities that help teachers share best practices and support one another’s success.
• Engaging in regular cycles of action learning: Plan, implement, measure, adjust, and monitor (the formative assessment piece); this is what helps teachers and students keep themselves on track for achieving their goals.
• Making sure professional development is aligned with goals and offers a direct impact on student achievement.

The Challenge: Positive Relationships and a Positive Environment

Implementing this kind of continuous improvement process in schools (or anywhere) can be a challenge. Fear can block the willingness to take risks, ask questions, and be transparent. No one wants to feel stupid or exposed.  Success hinges on positive relationships–especially between school administration and teachers–a positive environment, and a focus on results.

The creation of a positive environment and positive relationships begins with the administrative leadership. Superintendents, Principals and Vice Principals who encourage learning at all levels make it safe for teachers to be transparent, share what’s working, ask for support, and take risks in the classroom. When leadership encourages everyone to work together to discover what is working, rather than point out failures, learning flourishes.

What would this look like in a teacher conversation?  They might ask, “What’s happening for high achievers that is supporting their success and how can we spread that to all our students?” These kinds of questions generate a distinctly different environment than questions such as, “Why are your kids failing, what are you doing wrong?”As Doug Reeves says, “Go on a treasure hunt, not a witch hunt!”

Learn more about the impact of creating a positive learning environment

Listen to the leading researcher on positive emotions talk about positivity and how it broadens and builds thinking and learning capacity?

Share how your school is improving student success.

Middle school students have aged out of most of the after school and special summer programs and, under current laws, they are too young to work. This leaves them potentially vulnerable and bored. The number of hours they may be without constructive activity over the course of their middle school life (from 3:30 – 6 PM five days a week and 2 ½ months in the summer for three years), is 10,000 hours! (It is ironic that this is the total number of hours that Malcolm Gladwell found were necessary to create mastery in any given area.) Left on their own, without affordable, healthy options, these curious and independent kids are often drawn into drugs, violence, and other risky behavior (not exactly what we want them mastering!).

What Asheville discovered in it’s 85 interviews with a cross section of the school’s student population is that young teens, age 12 – 14, are full of a sense of maturity, independence, and competence. They have great ideas about how they can serve their community and support younger children and 60% of them would like meaningful opportunities for service after school and in the summer. This is the age when children pass into young adulthood and their sense of who they are and how they can contribute to their families and community changes significantly. They hold great promise for most communities—if we can find meaningful ways to engage them.

In Asheville, a team of volunteers interviewed a cross-section of 85 youth in the middle school, facilitated focus groups with 5^th and 9^th graders, interviewed parents and facilitated parent focus groups.  This was followed by a 1½ day Appreciative Inquiry summit. Cheri Torres of Collaborative by Design worked with the Asheville City Schools to design a process that would ensured the following:

• voices of youth were heard
• best practices and strengths found their way into the conversations
• participants collaborated
• shared outcomes and a vision were generated
• collaborative future action was taken

More than 80 community members, including parents, students, service providers, government and school officials, police officers, and business members attended the summit. In just a day and a half, they generated a vision, a commitment to a community collaboration, and formed four Action Teams for moving forward in creating out-of-school programming for middle school youth.  Here is the Listening to Our Teens Network (LTOT Network) vision:

The Listening to Our Teens Network delivers a coordinated menu

of highly experiential and relevant after-school and summer programs

designed and evaluated with student/young teen input.  These

programs are made possible by a collaboration of individuals,

community organizations, businesses, and government pooling

their resources so all middle school youth are empowered by

opportunities to find their voice and realize their potential.

The hallmarks of every LTOT Network program are:

• Fun
• Creativity
• Enrichment
• Service
• Access

The actions team spent the last part of the morning on the second day developing a plan of action for the upcoming month and a follow up meeting was scheduled.  The action teams hard at work this summer are:

• Network Communication and Coordination
• Engaged Community Leadership
• Research for Development
• Mapping Our Current Resources

For those of you interested in the LTOT Network progress, updates on this community collaboration will be posted as they emerge.  As we learn more from our research, we will share it with others.

For further information about the LTOT Network, contact Kate Pett or Hanna Woody at the Asheville City Schools Foundation or Cheri Torres.

For information about how Providence RI has responded to the same need in their community, you can find out about the Providence After School Alliance. You can also view a number of videos about their program at Edutopia.

Another exceptional program that surfaced in our research was Citizen Schools, an apprenticeship program for middle school students.

Collaborative by Design is hoping to surface public/private partnerships from around the world as well as service provider collaborations that offer new and more sustainable practices for serving young people. Please add to this conversation if you are aware of other collaborative community efforts to create meaningful opportunities and programming for middle school youth.

The Utah Health Department, in seeking to address the increasing and alarming rate of STDs in Youth, developed a community coalition on May 13, 2009 joining a diverse set of organizations in a partnership to prevent STDs in Youth.  These groups represented the full spectrum of a value stream: from the conservative Eagle Foundation to the more liberal Planned Parenthood, from church groups to teachers and social service workers.  A united and cooperative coalition emerged in a gathering that was carefully designed to foster collaboration across differences through inquiry and a broad-based focus on a shared and common outcome and value.

The Department of Health contracted with Colette Herrick of Insight Shift, Inc to deliver this program. Cheri Torres of Collaborative by Design worked with Colette to intentionally design a 1-day event that would generate collaborative action. In order to ground the day’s conversations and planning, the 60 attendees first learned of important data and demographics that would open the possibilities for directed action. They were briefed on a variety of statistics and local data which revealed the incidence of STDs among different populations (e.g. homeless, prisons, street address, schools, age groups, and gender).

Following this, participants engaged in one-on-one interviews to surface current successful efforts in the community, best practices, and visions for working together to have a positive impact on the whole community. These interviews were followed by small group discussions and large group interaction that allowed the group to develop (1) a framework for their Collaborative Coalition:

• Design structures for the collaborative action
• Ideas for the vision, mission and principles for collaborating
• Ideas for communication strategies
• Commitments to behaviors to foster positive relational dynamics

(2) A set of principles and ideas that formed the foundation for their projects and programs working with youth and STDS:

• Core factors for successful prevention
• Trends and opportunities
• Ideas for future action

Before the day was over, this motivated group of people had developed action areas, prioritized them, and outlined future actions along timelines. These are their areas for immediate focus:

• Screening and Testing
• Policy Issues
• Our Utah Collaborative Coalition
• Integrating STD and Unintended Pregnancy
• Increased Testing Among Young Men
• Community-based Education

Participants aligned around their own interests and passions for action.  You can learn about the progress this group is making at their website.

If you have collaborative efforts to decrease the incidence of STDs in youth going on in your community, please post what you are learning about collaboration that is supporting your success.