Post Kinds: Article

This is a quick guide for school and district leaders who want to strengthen student attendance, connection, and belonging from the start of the school year.

If you come into a room full of people you don’t know, and try to have a rich conversation with them, you’ll probably want to get them to shuffle themselves before you do anything else. With this in mind, here are four methods that work equally well with kids and adults:

This article is a Spanish translation of "Improvement as a Journey: Going the Distance with Improvement Science" by Amanda Meyer, translated by Liliana Leiva

The ever-present focus on standardized test scores hides opportunities to recognize and build on important progress that is likely already happening in their schools, and is essential for academic success, as well as the overall success of students, teachers, classrooms, and the larger school community.

A Model Critique is a protocol for quickly studying a high-quality piece of work and identifying the elements of quality that make it “work”. In Continuous Improvement, you should use it when a Networked Improvement Community has identified an effective practice that they want to spread.

A project feels big and ambitious to students because of the audience they’re showing the product to, and the venue where they’ll share it.

This article is an edited excerpt from an episode of the High Tech High Unboxed podcast. You can listen to the full episode here. In this excerpt, Andy Sprakes, co-founder and chief academic officer at the XP School Trust in Britain tells Unboxed editor Alec Patton about the mistake he has never forgotten from his first-ever project, and how that mistake shaped the school’s entire culture.

A learning target is an “I can” statement written in student-friendly language (for example, “I can graph linear equations.”

This collection is called “stories of improvement with tangible results” and we’ve split these stories up by category—chronic absenteeism, on-track rates, and college access—to make it easy for you to find the story you need!

In 1971 I started working at The Group School (TGS), an alternative high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. My connection to TGS started shortly after I ran afoul of the administration at the high school where I had been teaching, for sponsoring an event that included speakers from women’s liberation and gay liberation, and for publicly calling for a school walk-out to protest the escalating war in Vietnam.