Schools to Watch
Organizational Structures and Processes: High-performing schools with middle grades are learning organizations that establish norms, structures, and organizational arrangements to support and sustain their trajectory toward excellence.• A shared vision of what a high-performing school is and does drives every facet of school change. Shared and sustained leadership propels the school forward and preserves its institutional memory and purpose.
• Someone in the school has the responsibility and authority to hold the school-improvement enterprise together, including day-to-day know-how, coordination, strategic planning, and communication.
• The school is a community of practice in which learning, experimentation, and reflection are the norm. Expectations of continuous improvement permeate the school. The school devotes resources to ensure that teachers have time and opportunity to reflect on their classroom practice and learn from one another. At school everyone’s job is to learn.
• The school devotes resources to content-rich professional development, which is connected to reaching and sustaining the school vision. Professional development is intensive, of high quality, and ongoing.
• The school’s not an island unto itself. It draws upon others’ experience, research, and wisdom; it enters into relationships such as networks and community partnerships that benefit students’ and teachers’ development and learning.
• The school holds itself accountable for its students’ success rather than blaming others for its shortcomings, The school collects, analyzes, and uses data as a basis for making decisions. The school grapples with school-generated evaluation data to identify areas for more extensive and intensive improvement. It delineates benchmarks, and insists upon evidence and results. The school intentionally and explicitly reconsiders its vision and practices when data call them into question.
• Key people possess and cultivate the collective will to persevere and overcome barriers, believing it is their business to produce increased achievement and enhance development for all students.
• The school works with colleges and universities to recruit, prepare, and mentor novice and experienced teachers. It insists on having teachers who promote young adolescents’ intellectual, social, emotional, physical, and ethical growth. It recruits a faculty that is culturally and linguistically diverse.
• The school includes families and community members in setting and supporting the school’s trajectory toward high performance. The school informs families and community members about its goals for students and students’ responsibility for meeting them. It engages all stakeholders in ongoing and reflective conversation, consensus building, and decision making about governance to promote school improvement.
