What Do All High-Performing Schools Have in Common?

Every school dreams of having numbers to be proud of: high scores on standardized tests, high percentages of college acceptances, and even high percentages of students that graduate. To achieve any goal, a strategy is necessary. Some administrators might not even know where to begin with making changes to their school's structure, and others are already doing well but think there's always room for improvement.

The best way to do well has always been the same: look at what the greats are doing, and take a page out of their book. Recent observations on high-performing schools show that they have a few traits in common – traits which any school can easily adopt.

A Standards-Based Curriculum

If a school wants to be, at least, at the same speed as other schools, it's important to use the national standards to construct the curriculum. No one gets ahead by spoon-feeding students and allowing them to coast from one grade to the next without a challenge. Standards for curriculum have been developed after rigorously observing what students can handle at each age level – they work for a reason. It's a strategy based on research.  

Data-Driven Changes

You can't figure out what's wrong if you're not looking at the numbers. Are your students doing well in English but not in Math? Are they doing well on quizzes but poorly on standardized tests? Use data to localize where the issue is, and then go deeper. It's being found that students respond well to action learning systems, in which students learn through doing rather than through listening to a lecture, which could be one flaw in a school's structure. It could also be that your school has insufficient after-school tutoring. At the end of the day, if you're not using data to figure out where you could improve, then your numbers are going to stay where they are.

Targeted Professional Development

It's not just the curriculum that needs adjustment, in many cases – it's the staff's methodologies, too. Students can, purposely or subconsciously, do poorly when they resent an instructor, whether it's because of their professionalism, their availability, or even their choice in materials. Use anonymous feedback forms and in-class observations to see what could be improved on, and then hold workshops to help teachers improve. Learning how to talk to students of certain age levels, learning new ways to teach old lessons, and learning how to be approachable are all skills that can always be improved upon.

Goals

It's one thing to say, "We want to improve." It's another to say, "We want to improve our test scores by 10%." Schools that set goals are more likely to have their eyes on the prize. Make your school more achievement-oriented by setting quantifiable checkpoints, no matter how small.

Community Engagement

Are the parents at your school as involved with the students' learning as they could be? Are you available to them? Do they have access to their students' grades and assignments? What about school activities – are there enough events that the community can attend? Engagement is massively important for motivating the students to want to do better, and for getting all hands on deck when it comes to improving. You never know who in the community would be willing to help out, and schools that focus on engagement tend to be very high-performing.

These are the types of things that create a strong learning atmosphere in which teachers want to teach, students want to learn, and everyone wants to do well – it's proven by research. Where does your school need to improve?