Solve Scenario School Improvement Strategies in Order

Solve Scenario

School Improvement Strategies

In order to facilitate academic achievement for all students in the school three things need to happen; the school's culture must reflect the best practices in education through the development of a professional learning community, instruction must be differentiated in order to meet the needs of all students, and teacher expectations must be high in order to facilitate all student's learning.

The potential advantages and benefits of developing a professional learning community at a school are enormous. Applying these principles to education creates opportunities to explore new and creative ways to solve problems and enhance the educational achievement of students as well as develop and strengthen instructional teacher competencies. A supportive organizational culture is essential to sustaining the tenets of a learning organization. The culture should be humane, psychologically comfortable, and professionally supportive; a place where people have the tools and the training they need, and where they have opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other. It is essential that members of a learning community recognize that they must work together to achieve their collective purpose. The organization must have challenging but achievable goals. A shared vision has the capacity to be uplifting, encourage experimentation and innovation, and foster a sense of the future. Research identifies three components that drive schools that practice the professional learning community model. The first is to ensure that all students learn. In order to accomplish this schools must constantly ask themselves, what do want students to learn, how will we know when each student has learned it, and how will we respond when a student experiences difficulty in learning? The second is a school must foster a culture of collaboration in order to achieve their collective purpose of learning for all. Finally, professional learning communities judge their effectiveness on results. The focus of goals shifts as the results are analyzed.

Differentiated instruction is an approach to planning so that one lesson is taught to the entire class while meeting the individual needs of each child. The teacher weaves these individual goals into the classroom content and instructional strategies. The content, in conjunction with the instructional strategies are the vehicles by which the teacher meets the needs of all the students. Each lesson has a definite aim for all students and includes a variety of teacher techniques aimed at reaching students at all levels. The presentation of the lesson takes into account student learning styles and involves all students in the lesson through the use of questioning techniques aimed at different levels of thinking. The instructor makes allowances for student's differences, adjusts expectations, and provides choice in the method students will use to demonstrate their understanding of the concepts. The instructor also acknowledges that different methods are of equal value, and evaluates students based on their individual differences.