To what extent does your improvement plan actually help you improve?

/ mkessenburg

This blog post is part of a series on your improvement engine—make sure you have a improvement engine (purpose, perspective, process, plan, and practices) before you start working on your improvement goal! (See also School Improvement Reflection Protocol).

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Ensure your improvement plan actually helps you improve! Why?

(1) Because a helpful plan gets you and your colleagues flourishing. 

(2) Because a helpful plan gets you focused on your priorities, lets you know when to start and when to finish, and identifies necessary resources.

(3) Because an unhelpful plan gets you winging it—no documentation, no thoughtful goals, no start and end dates. Not good.

(4) Because using a helpful plan is a best practice.

Let’s keep thinking about this by reflecting on 3 questions: 

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán

Question 1: What makes a good improvement plan good? Here are the criteria that come to mind for me:

(A) Documented: Your improvement plan must be documented—no documentation really means no plan. Don’t wing it.

(B) Evidence-based: Your plan is based on a careful assessment of the current situation. It’s not based on a hunch or a fad. (For accreditation, your plan addresses recommendations, commentary, and root causes.)

(C) Includes key components like goal, due date, action steps, resources, and evidence of progress. 

(D) Formatted effectively: I suggest you use a spreadsheet (see examples below).

(E) Gets participants experiencing the 5 elements of flourishing: passionate purpose, resilient well-being, healthy relationships, transformative learning, and helpful resources.

Question 2: To what extent does your improvement plan actually help you improve?  I think my improvement plan actually helps me improve. It’s easy to access, based on my priorities, has all the necessary information, and gets me experiencing resilient well-being, transformative learning, and helpful resources. In short, my plan works!

Question 3: What can you do to make your improvement plan even more helpful? Here are some options:

(A) Ask God and others for help.

(B) Get the improvement plan documented.

(C) Ensure your plan addresses root causes.

(D) Develop criteria for a good school improvement plan, and then make sure your improvement plan meets those criteria.

(E) Consistently use the improvement plan.

(F) Look at plans others are using. 

Here’s a template for a basic school improvement plan (see photo below). Please note that in addition to including a goal, it also includes:

  • Vision Script Status: Write 1 or more paragraphs of what you want to see happening as a result of achieving this goal. Write in present tense verbs. (Here are some tips for writing your vision script.)
  • Experiment (Action Step): Use an experimental mindset. View each action step as an experiment designed to help you achieve your goal. 
  • Champion: Who is the 1 personal responsible for a given experiment (action step)?
  • After Action Review: Use a set of questions to help you reflect on the results of your experiments and to determine your next steps.

And here’s an upgraded template for a school improvement plan (see photo below). Please note the light green sections. These are upgrades to the above version and include:

  • Big Question: What big question are you trying to respond to as you do this action plan?
  • Champion: Who is the 1 person responsible overall for this action plan?
  • Start Date: When will you start working on this plan? When will you start working on a specific action step?

Here are some related resources:

Photo by Anna Tarazevich

If your international Christian school doesn’t yet have a documented improvement plan or wants to enhance its improvement plan, feel free to contact me. I’d be glad to talk with you!

Bottom line: Ensure your improvement plan actually helps you improve!

Get flourishing!

Michael

P.S. Bonus: Here are 10 quotations from books I’ve read that include a form of the word plan:

(1) “For Nehemiah, praying and planning went hand in hand” (Road to Flourishing, loc 2481).

(2) “Nurturing wisdom in leaders may require providing budget and opportunities for leaders’ own professional development, as well as leaders’ preparing annual ‘leadership development plans’ or LDPs” (Flourishing Together, loc 1890).

(3) “…engaged employees plan to stay for what they can give; disengaged employees plan to stay for what they can get” (Trust and Inspire, loc 825).

(4)“It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behavior. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are” (Atomic Habits, loc 471).

(5) “If you want to succeed, plan to fail” (Think Ahead, loc 2927).

(6) “Your mission for today is to create a Good Enough Plan.* A Good Enough Plan is a plan to build and rebuild trust with the stakeholders at the center of your problem” (Move Fast and Fix Things, loc 652)

(7) “The more people who know about your plan, the more they can help” (Hacking Life After 50, loc 305).

(8) “Envision yourself a week from now. You’ve clarified what you want to do and why you’re doing it. Yet, despite all this preparation, you haven’t even begun. What went wrong? I call this the ‘crystal ball method’, though it’s sometimes also known as a ‘pre-mortem’. It offers a way to identify the big obstacles to your goal before they have derailed your plans” (Feel-Good Productivity, loc 1484).

(9) “Plans go wrong with too few counselors; many counselors bring success” (Proverbs 15:22, TLB

(10) “What feedback do we have about our vision, our strategy, and our plan?” (Insight, loc 3248).