Shared Leadership and Effective School Continuous ImprovementBy Kate Tesch, Director of Continuous Improvement and Assessment and Crystal Hintzman, Director of Curriculum and Instruction, School District of Superior What do our students need from us in order to graduate college, career and life ready? The continuous improvement process can often be thought of as a procedural, sometimes dry process, putting data and words on paper each summer hoping (intending) that it will cause change throughout the school year. Chances are, we have all experienced a variety of school improvement plans and by spring we are frustrated that the “year has gotten away from us” and we haven’t had the impact we had hoped for when we created the plan. In the School District of Superior, we have been working to bring continuous improvement to life over the past 6 years and have begun to see our collective work translating to student success. Shared Leadership: People are the foundation of success in any organization, especially ours. We were fortunate that the foundational work to create a well-established Shared Leadership Team (SLT) structure had already happened. This structure allows principals, instructional coaches and teacher leaders to facilitate both building and district level learning. This work of creating and maintaining the teams of lead learners requires an investment and our SLT structure is the foundation of our continuous improvement process. In 2021, our SLT spent time identifying the “why” behind our work, feeling the emotional connection to students we impact on a daily basis. Often when looking at data it is easy to dismiss that which is uncomfortable. During the three days of time in August with our SLTs, we spent time processing our data as a district, especially our graduation data. As of 2020, only 85% of our students were graduating from Superior High School. As we dug deeper, we had to accept the harsh reality that this statistic put us in the bottom 5% of all districts in the State of Wisconsin. Over three days we lead all of the SLT teams from the entire district through the creation of their yearly school continuous improvement plan (CIP). The critical change came in 2021, when we established a district-wide goal of 100% of students graduating from the School District of Superior. Schools worked through the CIP process outlined below, creating actions based on how their data was contributing to the current graduation rate. Continuous Improvement Process:
The plans created over the past four years have impacted the graduation rate each year, and in 2024, 97.7% of our students earned their high school diplomas. We still have work to do, but we have learned that a focused effort district-wide can create CIPs that become more than words on paper, truly impacting student lives. Through clarity, shared responsibility and a commitment to excellence - we believe it is possible that all students will graduate college, career and life ready from the School District of Superior.
|