Year One and Year Two: What Do You Do in Comprehensive School Improvement?: Issues About Change, Volume 9, Number 2

In the summer of 1998, SEDL's Strategies for Increasing School Success (SISS) program formed partnerships with staff at five schools to begin a two-year initiative called Facilitating Implementation of Reform Strategies and Tactics (FIRST). These initiatives would differ from former models of school improvement. FIRST partnerships would be long-term, broad scale, in-depth, "joined at the hip" partnerships focusing on the identified needs of the schools and including all relevant staff.

In the course of research into school improvement strategies and particularly through the first year of experience in partner schools, SEDL staff identified and confirmed the primacy of five core issues for school improvement efforts. The staff's analysis of school issues and strategies for advancing school improvement was framed within these areas: focus of the improvement work, organizational structures that support school change, personal and social dynamics of the individuals and organizations involved, the widening circles of contexts that influence school work, and leadership that can influence all of the preceding. This publication discusses the experiences of SEDL staff as they worked with partner schools during the first and second year of implementing a school improvement plan.

This publication is one of a series of briefing papers called Issues About Change.