What role does reflection play in your international Christian school’s improvement?

/ mkessenburg

This blog post is part of a series on your improvement engine—make sure you have a great improvement engine (purpose, perspective, process, plan, and practices) before you start working on your improvement goal!

Photo by Ümit Bulut on Unsplash

Reflection can help you and your colleagues to improve your international Christian school! Why?

  • Because reflection helps you and your colleagues flourish.
  • Because reflection helps you and your colleagues to step back, assess what’s happening, and determine next steps.
  • Because not reflecting can result in you and your colleagues not seeing the big picture, not understanding what’s happening, and not determining next steps. Not good.
  • Because reflection is a best practice.

To what extent do you and your colleagues reflect on school improvement? What does reflecting on school improvement look like at your school? What it looks like for me includes weekly reviews, quarterly reviews, and annual reviews which include using this reflection tool and after action reviews.

Image by tartila on Freepik

What helps you and your colleagues reflect? I find that a set of questions helps me and my colleagues reflect. Here are 4 questions that can help you and your colleagues:

(1) How are you doing right now? Use the following scale: 10: flourishing • 1: flailing

(2) How are you doing with regard to school improvement?

  • What 3 insights did you personally gain this school year regarding school improvement?
  • What 3 school improvement accomplishments for this school year do you want to celebrate?
  • What 3 concerns about school improvement do you personally have going forward?

(3) What’s driving your school’s improvement efforts? For me, a school’s improvement is driven by the 5P improvement engine:

  • Purpose
  • Perspective
  • Process
  • Plan
  • Practices

(4) How can you enhance what’s driving your school’s improvement efforts?

(5) What are your highlights/insights for this reflection?

2 tips: For an expanded version of these questions, click here! If you want to talk with me about reflecting on school improvement, click here!

Get flourishing!

Michael