Effective School Leadership

Our December quarterly benchmark meetings are complete. What a great week of focused leadership and a strong deployment of the SDW improvement planning process (SAIL). After each site presentation, it was clear that everyone is working hard to "keep the main thing, the main thing."
Our main thing is maximizing student achievement.

Crafting your school into a purposeful community is a necessary condition for an effective leadership team. Each of our unique schools have much to celebrate!
How are you able to build a purposeful community as one that has the collective efficacy and capacity to develop sustainable goals that matter to everyone?

Are your Vision and Goals (L1), now a part of your embedded community?

Have the High Leverage Practices (L2) in your school improvement plan been clearly communicated and can teachers articulate what those are? The good news is that these high leverage practices are tighter and more common across our PreK-12 system than they have ever been. It is also great to see that the coordinator and department focus, compliment site goals and school improvement work.

How are we Cultivating Learning (L3) so that each teacher's collective actions around these practices can enhance the academic achievement of all our students? Professional collaboration is becoming a major component of successful school improvement efforts. Schools with strong PLC's and those that have established an ongoing culture of learning and support are reaping the benefits.

Ensuring Excellence (L4) is something we have all tried to do with fidelity over time. I think we can all acknowledge though, that the sense of urgency around ensuring excellence has never been more important than it is now. Our learners need this. Our schools have clear, focused processes for ensuring excellence. I think we are also learning that less is more when it comes to digging in and really focusing and monitoring the vital few.

Data and Communication (L5) focuses on specific feedback as it relates to each schools' L4 data. There is a clearer readiness level to move into an attention to equity, subgroup populations, and taking student achievement and moving this focus to the next level in our data analysis and communication efforts.

Thank you for your focus on maximizing student achievement and trusting one another on our journey to continuous improvement! Every day you come to school, you impact a life!