📑 Stop Wasting Your Time on School Improvement Plans That Don’t Work. Try This Instead

Peter DeWitt discusses the importance of a theory of action to guide the development of an improvement plan. In addition to a ‘theory of learning’, DeWitt suggests that it is important that plans are also practical.

When working on a school improvement plan, or what some schools may refer to as an academic plan, it’s important for its creators to make sure that it is useful. How do we do that? We do that by:

• Making sure that we do not have too many priorities;
• Taking time to reflect on how many actions and activities we should engage in;
• Including teachers and staff in the discussion and not just creating the document in isolation;
• Not storing them away only to look at next year when we have to create our next school improvement plan; and
• Making the document workable and based on our needs.

I wonder about the user of the How Might We question to frame this theory?

After this we returned to our original groups and worked through the ‘How Might We’ task. This involves completing a prompt: how might we ACTION WHAT for WHOM in order to CHANGE SOMETHING. The purpose of this was to come up with a clearer guide for our moonshot.

It also has me thinking about the IOI Process in providing a structure to not only understand the intricacies of context, but help map out a path to change and innovation.