Creating a student success system that enables your school to provide the learning environment, experiences, relationships, and supports all students need to thrive in school is an on-going, adaptive process; especially since school and community capacities and student needs continually shift.

These team reflection and action planning tools use a set of questions to guide inquiry, potential data sources, and related “look fors” that are focused on key attributes of effective student success systems. They are intended to spark courageous conversations that lead to reflection, collaboration, and innovation.

For Student Success Teams

This team reflection and action planning tool is designed as a guide to support student success teams as they create, operate and continually improve their student success system. When this tool is first being used by a student success team or the full school community, each of the four sections could involve two hours of reflection, analysis, and discussion, and might be best spread over several sessions. The complete tool might be used on an annual basis, with individual sections or subsections being employed more frequently, by the student success team or the larger school community to facilitate continuous improvement

Download the Student Success Team Reflection and Action Planning Tool (Google doc)

For District Leadership

As district leaders, it is important to foster the enabling conditions for schools to engage in self-reflection and continuous improvement. By creating conditions for honest and productive self-reflection, and supporting and modeling these practices, school teams can further develop their practices. In addition, district leaders can use this tool and framework to look across the schools they support in order to learn and leverage the strengths of different schools within the district, and to coordinate supports across schools. For example, schools within the same district may have varying needs, and by investigating their school-level data, district leaders can differentiate how to support their schools. Additionally, district leaders must coordinate within and across departments and teams to ensure that work is streamlined, coordinated, and ownership of decision making is clear and well communicated.

This district resource was created to:

• Enable district leadership teams to consider the strengths and areas for improvement within and across the schools they support
• Identify patterns or trends of student and adult needs to enable effective and scalable research and evidence-based strategies 
• Create opportunities for school leadership teams to learn from and with one another
• Reflect and act on the changes the leadership team can make to create enabling conditions for school team success

Download the District Leadership Team Reflection and Action Planning Tool (Google doc)