Principals’ perspectives on the shift to short-cycle school improvement planning

Abstract

Principals are responsible for planning school improvement efforts at the school level to leverage increases in student achievement. Recent research underscores how principals engage in satisficing behaviors that result in low-quality school improvement plans (SIPs). To disrupt compliance-based planning practices and produce high-quality SIPs, some districts have shifted from yearlong planning to short-cycle planning. Districts need to establish a coherent understanding of improvement planning to motivate and sustain new principal planning practices. Through the coherence framework, this qualitative study explored one large urban district's shift from yearlong planning processes to short-cycle planning processes to understand principals’ perspectives on improvement planning and the potential shift to short-cycle planning. Researchers examined eight principals’ short-cycle plans. Principals who participated in a two-year partnership with a University System Leadership Program (USLP) for school-level support for school improvement were interviewed. Principal interviews, USLP site lead feedback, and principal supervisors’ interview data to triangulate the short-cycle plans. Data analysis revealed the existence of a perverse coherence that impeded principals’ shift to short-cycle planning. Findings suggest that districts examine their internal practices and processes influencing principals’ improvement planning practices and attend to principals’ understanding and practice of improvement planning by providing continuous professional learning and feedback.

Promises and pitfalls: principals using short-cycle school improvement plans to optimize organizational change

“…Recall that Lewin (1947) suggests that the first step of change is for “shell of complacency” (p. 229) or current equilibrium to be disrupted. In a complementary study (Aaron et al ., 2022), we reported that principals commonly lack confidence in traditional annual planning processes and believe engagement in more frequent planning processes could be beneficial. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the principals in this study seem willing—and perhaps even eager—to try something new.…”

The Design and Characteristics of School Improvement Plan Templates

“…Although these actions are certainly important, they may result in a SIP being what we term “frontloaded”—meaning a considerable amount of work went into developing a rich understanding of a school’s needs, but less time was spent discussing that understanding and then laying out the actual step-by-step work to address those needs. Consequently, educators may be left with few concrete strategies and action steps in their SIPs that can be readily implemented during the school year (see Aaron et al, in press).…”