Evaluating a School Improvement Plan

Introduction – Interviewees and Highlights

While looking at the newly revised (and not yet published) Fukuoka International School, school improvement plan, I interviewed two colleagues from the language acquisition department.  My first interviewee was Owen MacFarlane, a current MYP and DP English language acquisition teacher.  Mr. MacFarlane has 15 years of teaching experience.  Next year, he will be the subject area coordinator for MYP language acquisition department.  The other person that I interviewed was Kieko Kanaya.  Ms. Kanaya has about 20 years of teaching experience.  She has worked as an English conversation teacher, assistant language teacher, and now she is a Japanese language acquisition teacher.  She is the current subject area coordinator for elementary Japanese.  

I spoke with Mr. MacFarlane and Ms. Kanaya for just under an hour.  The entire interview can be found at this link.  Some of our key points of the the interview are as follows:

• Over the last six years the school has improved notably in many different ways, particularly in terms of being more inclusive and accessible. 

  
  

• The small size of the school, both the physical location and the student body, has meant that there are certain limitations in terms of the campus and the amount of work that each teacher is required to do (mandatory work outside of teaching: duties, committees, after school activities, events, high-number of preparations).  

  
  

• The school is abundant in human resources, both among the teachers and from the community.  

  
  

Summary of Interview Findings

    At my school, FIS, our school improvement plan is currently outdated and the new version is close to being finalized.  Starting at the beginning of the 2020-2021 school year the head of school has been having frequent meetings with student groups, teachers, the administration, the board of education, parents, and other community members and stakeholders to update the school SIP.  I have been impressed at how inclusive and transparent that this process has been. In many public schools in the United States, this process can as Starr (2019) states “require schools to complete an empty, compliance-driven process” (p. 60).  My colleagues I interviewed and I felt that at FIS, this process has attempted to, as Starr (2019) states, “address things that actually matter to student achievement, such as budgeting decisions, hiring practices, curriculum development, professional learning, discipline reform, and community engagement” (p. 60).   

     When the head of school shared the draft version of the new SIP with me for this project, Mr. MacFarlane, Ms. Kanaya, and I focused on the most pertinent parts of the SIP in terms of teaching and learning - The strategic goals for teaching and learning.  Overall, it was easy to identify strengths at our school and complete the plus side of our plus/delta chart.  However, talking to Mr. Macfarlane and Ms. Kanaya, helped me to identify strengths and areas for improvement that I would not have noticed, if I had attempted to do this process independently.  

    Our school is in the process of transitioning from being a traditional exclusive private school in which language differentiation and learning differences were minimal considerations.  By looking at what FIS is doing well and the areas in which we still need to improve, such as accessibility, and community acceptance and understanding of linguistic and learning differences, we can see that FIS has come a long way towards being more of an inclusive twenty first century international school. However, there is still certainly progress to be made.  After discussing the new SIP and several questions about strengths and shortcomings of the school improvement plan, we completed the ACE Plus/Delta Chart.  In the first step, as Duckworth (2019) states “we identif[ied] where the objectives, standards, or expectations have been met or exceeded.” (para. 7). We then discussed at length the possible area for change.  As Duckworth (2019) states, “this is the step where we [attempted to] identify the parts of performance that need to be changed.” (para. 9).   See Figure One below.  See link to the notes for the complete interview notes.

Conclusion: Teacher Leader Recommendations & Action Steps

One of the key takeaways from the process of evaluating the school improvement plan as a team was the importance of bringing in multiple voices and perspectives to identify strengths and shortcomings and ultimately come up with innovative solutions.  As the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy (2018) concluded in their report of a successful turnaround school, “Research notes the importance of teacher voice and teacher leadership in driving whole school change.”  Teacher leadership can be the voice of driving changes, by leading the way, and by focusing on changes that need to be made and possible actions to take for further improvement, rather than assigning blame.  My team and I know that our school needs to make some improvements in terms of being more accessible for students.  We generated several action students that we could take to help initiate those changes and propel the school in a positive direction:

• Research what other, similar-sized schools have done to make their facilities more accessible for everyone. 

  
  

• Form connections with similar schools to share language acquisition resources.

  
  

• Initiate a resource bank of professionals in the community (to increase community involvement and  support specific culturally relevant learning at FIS)

  
  

• Promote language acquisition as an academically challenging pathway to counteract community misconceptions about the language acquisition pathway being less cognitively challenging than the language and literature pathway..  

  
  

References

​Duckworth, R. (2019, October 12). Duckworth on education: The plus/delta feedback tool. 

https://www.emsworld.com/article/1223328/duckworth-education-plusdelta-feedback-tool

Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy. (2018). Teaming Up for Change: 

Teacher-Driven Transformation at the Mildred Avenue K-8 School. In Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy. Rennie Center for Education Research & Policy.

Starr, J. P. (2019). Planning for equity: School improvement teams should 

focus on what really matters. Phi Delta Kappan, 101(3), 60.