Continuous improvement and culture

Continuously monitor progress and measure results while fostering a culture of organic growth, improvement, collaboration, and innovation.

To truly usher in impactful change, leaders must transform behaviors—both learning behaviors of students and teaching behaviors of staff.

Education leaders at all levels can benefit from applying the planning, monitoring, and evaluation cycle and outcome-based planning and evaluation to education transformation initiatives. Monitoring and evaluating can help educational transformation programs define and measure quality indicators and measures of the education transformation process, gauge progress toward desired educational outcomes, increase stakeholder participation, and empower school leaders and educators to build and sustain transformation in schools.

"If our students are to thrive beyond school, they will need evidence of their creative, social, collaborative, analytical, and digital competencies."

Fresno Personalized Learning Initiative: Year 1 Report

As you read Fresno Unified, the Futures Challenge, and 21C Learning Design, consider why having a plan in place for ongoing progress monitoring and measuring results while fostering a culture of organic growth, improvement, collaboration, and innovation is key to student and organizational success.

Rethinking school education strategy is imperative to growth toward behavioral change

Many policies around the world focus on improving educators and teaching, yet relatively few are driven by a behavioral change strategy. Improving children’s learning is more than simply changing the level at which they learn. It's changing their learning behaviors at school, in the classroom, and at home. This becomes even more important if the growing focus on 21st century skills— complemented by significant technological change in the classroom—is to truly transform the way children learn. Improving teaching requires teaching practices (or behaviors) in schools to change. It's impossible to change education without changing teaching practices. Therefore, almost by definition, improving teaching is a behavioral change process.

High-performing education systems lead by applying a behavioral change strategy, the parameters of which are determined by the evidence base. This nuanced approach profoundly impacts the effectiveness of the strategy at all levels of education. While previous decades saw a host of policy interventions fail to reflect (and in some cases substantially contradict) the evidence, there's now a greater focus on evidence-based policy. Improving educators and teaching is the most productive reform that policymakers can implement. An effective change strategy focuses on organizational change and individual behaviors. At its core, it focuses on implementation and alignment, because the strategy must detail how behaviors will change.

Learning shifted from a focus of knowing to a focus of doing. Students are required to engage in more analytical thinking and innovation while expressing creativity, initiative, and emotional intelligence. How can student growth and progress in these critical skills be measured?

How might you answer this question:

In which of the “growing” skills are students actively engaging?

After reading Fresno Unified, the Futures Challenge, and 21C Learning Design, consider your organization's current plan for measuring continuous improvement.

Develop a plan for monitoring and ensuring continuous improvement. Consider measuring both opportunities for professional development and impacts on student learning. Do you have an ongoing plan for developing teacher leader capacity? How will you measure growth? Consider reaching out to Microsoft for support in developing a solid plan for continuous improvement, data collection and analysis, and building teacher leader capacity with synchronous trainings and asynchronous online modules through the Microsoft Educator Center.

Consider your organization's capacity for implementing and teaching students the tools required to meet the learning needs of the class of 2030.

• What is included in your organization's current plan for continuous improvement?
• What are you measuring and monitoring?
• What is working?
• What needs to change?
• What support or training can Microsoft provide?