What separates good schools from great schools? Since we know you’ve moved mountains (or at least scoured the globe) to find the best teachers possible, often times transforming your school from good to great can mean only a few small administrative adjustments.
Great schools, put simply, are the schools that identify and implement the strategies necessary to get great results from students and retain the best teachers. We’ve encountered principals and administrators that understand this concept in its abstract form, but don’t know what tactics to implement to get started on their analysis.
One of the most important thing to consider when performing this analysis is your teachers, as they’re the lifeblood of any given school. Teachers should be able to get together with each other and with administration to discuss course learning goals and curriculum criteria on a regular basis. In great schools, the goals that are identified out of these discussion sessions are made uniform across classrooms.
Before you engage teachers in a discussion session, it’s a good idea to formulate which questions you should ask them to consider during these sessions. We’re sharing some great ones below:
- As teachers, what are we trying to accomplish and what goals do you set for yourself and your classroom?
- How do your students achieve these goals? How are they doing?
- How do you evaluate how well they’re doing? What assessment methods do you employ?
- How are you helping the students that need a little more support?
Sitting down and asking these questions to your teachers can often kick-start improvements at the classroom level that can begin to make great changes in a school’s culture and student success rate.
