District leaders must
limit initiatives to allow
for the sustained focus
essential to school
improvement.
 Identify
two things Superintendent Ditka did
well and two things he should have done
differently.
 What
will you do to build shared knowledge
around the school designations to ensure
your county has one message?
 What
are some things you might do so that
school improvement is viewed as a positive
effort?
Ken Blanchard
(2007) advises
leaders to “spend
ten times more
energy reinforcing
the change they just
made than looking
for the next great
change to try”.



Michael Fullan (2001) asserted the problem
confronting educators is not the absence of
innovation but the “presence of too many
disconnected, episodic, piecemeal, and superficially
adorned projects”.
Reeves (2006) agreed and discovered the size of a
district’s strategic plan was actually inversely related
to student achievement – the thicker the plan, the
lower the results.
Richard Elmore (2003) asserted that most districts
are engaged in a frenetic amount of unconnected
activities and initiatives characterized by volatility
(jumping from one initiative to another) and
superficiality (choosing initiatives that have little
impact on student achievement and implementing
them in shallow ways).
When Harvard Graduate School of
Education and Harvard Business School
collaborated in a joint project to develop a
district-wide improvement strategy for
central office leaders, they concluded that
the biggest impediment to improving
schools was the unmanageable number of
initiatives and total lack of coherence
(Olson, 2007).


unmanageable number of initiatives
total lack of coherence
too many disconnected, episodic, piecemeal,
and superficially adorned projects
 the thicker the strategic plan, the lower the
results
 initiatives characterized by volatility (jumping
from one initiative to another in a relatively
short period of time)
 Initiatives characterized by superficiality
(choosing initiatives that have little impact on
student achievement and implementing them in
shallow ways)

It is important to know
what you are doing, but it
is even more important to
know why you are doing
what you are doing!
Initiative:
 techSteps
 DIBELS
 Sustained
 District
Administrators
would say:
Silent
Reading
 Lexile measures
 WV Writes
 SPL
 WESTEST 2
 Principals
say:
 Teachers
say:
would
would
 Find
the list of initiatives-assessmentsinstructional tools (Lavender sheet)
 Divide the list up among the people at your
table. Each person writes his/her list on
post-it notes – one initiative per post-it.
 Go to one of the large charts – write the
name of the school(s) on the chart.
 As







a team…
Determine whether the initiative is (1a)Required
or (1b)Not Required
Required by: (2a) state (2b) county (2c) school
Take all of the Not Required items and list them
on the Priority Grid
Compare each item to every other item in pairs
to determine priority items
What will we keep and why?
What will we drop and why?
Do we need to create? What? Why?