Kelly's Curriculum Corner

The luau, once called the aha aina, was an event that was designed to unite the participants and foster good will, thanks and praise. The purpose of the luau could have been to celebrate accomplishments, honor heroes or gods, or commemorate important events. While some ancient foods represented strength or virility, other foods might symbolize virtues or goals the participants hoped to achieve (from To-Hawaii.com) A luau, in other words, is all about reflection. What is going well? What are the next steps? This is exactly what our school improvement teams did last week. They reflected on the level of implementation of their plan and the level of effectiveness. Participants spent the morning going through their plans goal by goal – looking back toward accomplishments and looking forward to next steps. We over-laid these discussions with information on managing and effectively facilitating change. We read Implications for School Leaders Facilitating Change , which is from H...

I recently posted the Five Reasons School Improvement Plans Fail , a cautionary tale featuring the dark side of school improvement. While I think the post offers a good analysis on the common pitfalls of school reform – thanks to DuFour and Eaker, I am not entirely comfortable with the post. It highlighted pitfalls without shaping strategies for avoiding them. The first strategy that came to mind is the 80/20 Rule also known as Pareto’s Principle. The 80/20 Rule - “20 percent of something is always responsible for 80 percent of the results.” Think about how school teams spend their time. How many hours do they spend writing the plan? How many school improvement team meetings do they have after the plan is completed? In my experience teams spend about 80% of their time writing school improvement plans and 20% of their time implementing them. Reframing School Improvement Pareto’s Principle would suggest the inverse. Teams should be focusing 20% of their effort on id...

Our intermediate unit hosted a joint meeting between our Special Education and Curriculum Advisory Councils on January 9, 2009.  We gave groups of administrators planning documents required by the PA Department of Education such as Strategic Plan, Professional Education Plan, Induction Plan, Technology Plan, Special Education Plan, School Improvement Plan...etc... These plans were from real schools in PA. We asked the teams to count up the number of initiatives listed across the plans and to evaluate the alignment between the plans. Their analysis was telling. While some plans had alignment, others did not. One group counted 87 initiatives within the document. This did not include any grants the district had. With scare resources such as time, money and personnel... can schools realistically achieve 87 goals? What about 50? What about 20? Myself, I think the answer lies closer to three or four. There are plenty of reasons why their is so much misalignment in plans.... multi...