What else do we really need?

During the visits to many schools in the region or even working with schools abroad and while meeting different principals we ask to see the school’s improvement plan.

What does this plan include?

The plan includes the initiatives, teaching and instructional procedures, goals, and- the means to achieve those goals. Moreover, it includes the responsible people to do the job and the timeline to accomplish the desired mission. But what is missing there? Are we really meeting real coaches in the schools nowadays? How can we transform normal administrators into real-life coaches that really influence the instruction in order to improve it?

Yes; you as a school manager, meet with your instructional staff, but what are you talking about? What practices are you demonstrating? How are you challenging your staff? What do you want the staff to learn and what are the means you are using to help them learn?

Let us take an example on administrators that are more money-oriented. They say that using coaching doesn’t affect the teaching/learning processes. But if the improvement plan excludes having coaches and only includes “teachers meeting with the principal and reporting to him” then who will evaluate the process and check if it is implemented in the right way or not.

We can see that many organizations include their vision and mission statements in their general plan, in promos and in media but not all of them have a real mission. Yes they have a plan, but where is the strategy? The plan shows the things that should be done, the person in charge and the time to get them done. On the other hand, the strategy is the way needed to accomplish the mission. It includes the narrower points, goals, challenges, opportunities, and a ladder leading people for a better implementation and closer road to success.

Can I ask you why you are investing in education if you don’t know exactly the highest aim and the leading outcomes? Real leaders have a clear road to achieve success which is the strategy with specific steps to help execute the latter. School managers/leaders know the importance of having in improvement plan but they really don’t know how to establish an excellent one, what to do with it, and how to reshape it based on recurrent changes.

Isobel Stevenson showed the mistakes that the typical improvement planning process encourages:

1.    Confusing the product with the process 

2.    Writing plans too quickly  

3.    Making too many assumptions about what will work 

4.    Trying to do too many things at once

5.    Neglecting to clarify who will do what 

6.    Underestimating the urgent need for professional learning 

Least but not last, we are not saying that all organizations are making the same mistakes we have discussed since many have successful educators who create successful plans. But too many schools think of improvement planning as a normal document that should be added to the other documents to enrich their archives.

Yes, we need to plan, but creating a good plan is a must. We should move away from a format that is all about deadlines and responsibility and instead devote our time to creating a strategy and studying how that strategy could be improved.