It’s September. Classes are back in full swing. Already, there are more items on educators’ and leaders’ to-do lists than even a superhuman can accomplish. Strategically prioritizing how we spend our time, energy, and resources is a necessity, but how do we know what is most important? The stakes are high: Millions of students depend on their schools to get it right.
These critical decisions are made easier when districts take the lead on reviewing data–not just standardized test scores, but multiple sources of data, including:
- attendance
- discipline
- graduation rates
- survey responses, etc.
to set districtwide goals to drive continuous improvement. When schools and teams within a district work together towards common goals, this alignment maximizes the impact of everyone’s efforts. Think about it: your team is more likely to be victorious in a tug-of-war match when you’re all pulling in the same direction. This is true for businesses, organizations, communities, and school districts, too.
Not only does a common direction strengthen the impact of our efforts, it is also an operational necessity. In school districts, our resources are limited: finances, personnel/talent, materials, time, etc. We cannot afford to waste these precious resources by trying to accomplish everything all at once or trying to go in several different directions simultaneously. At Focused Schools, we use the graphic below to capture the impact of alignment of efforts in a school district, which is made possible by setting districtwide goals.
To be impactful, districtwide goals must be rooted in data. Annual district goals often also stem from a district’s strategic plan (or similar plan). If a district has a strategic plan, the team may start their annual goal setting process by asking, “Based on the promises we set as a district in the plan we crafted in collaboration with our stakeholders and our current reality, as detailed by our data, what is our goal for this year?”
This is not to suggest that districts need to take a “top-down” approach or that schools shouldn’t have a degree of autonomy in their goal-setting. However, to have the most significant impacts on student outcomes, school districts must operate within a system of bounded autonomy.
The Work in Practice:
In one school district we partnered with recently, the district developed a comprehensive strategic plan in partnership with hundreds of stakeholders, informed by an extensive review of their data. This five-year plan set a long-term direction for the district to ground its day-to-day work. The plan identified the most critical non-negotiable goal that all schools and teams would pursue during the first year of implementation, as well as a number of long-term goals the district would work towards over the life of the plan. Then, school teams had the autonomy to identify which one of the shared long-term goals was most urgent for their school to pursue. Next, they incorporated this goal into their School Improvement Plans as focus areas for the year. This structure ensured alignment of efforts while empowering school teams to shape their paths toward improvement, and it all began with districtwide goal-setting.
Resources for you:
If you’re looking for a tool to begin your own districtwide goal setting process, check out this resource with guiding questions we use with some of our district partners. These can help to guide your team’s data analysis and narrow your focus as you set goals to move your work forward.
Are you ready to craft a vision and set goals to move your district forward? Reach out to us at hello@focusedschools.com. Together, we can #IgniteTransformativeChange.
