Continuous Improvement Planning Main Page

If the decision making power is distributed to teachers ,the benefits to students are enormous.

For teachers, the benefits are a greater sense of professionalism and empowerment.

        If you've managed to meander your way to this page it is likely due to the fact that you're interested in the district's

CIP and how it has had an impact on Olmsted Falls. All districts are involved in the improvement process...whether they

know it or not. In short, you're either improving or declining. Olmsted Falls has been a high performing district as

demonstrated by our performance on State accountability measures. For us, this is just the start. While demonstrating

a high percentage of student proficiency is certainly admirable, the mission doesn't start and stop there. We've

elected to take part in Ohio's Improvement Process for several reasons. We needed a structured school improvement

mechanism in order to begin to look at our student effect data (our achievement) and connect it to the adult

behaviors (our cause data). The OIP has provided us with the opportunity to do this and much more.

        Our CIP is more focused than it has ever been. We have 1 district goal and it centers on raising student achievement

in Reading, Math, Science and Social Studies...across the board. We've tried to downplay our goal and focus more on the

actions and tasks that our staff must undertake in order to bring about higher levels of student achievement for all students.

We strongly believe that in order to do this our focus needs to be on making the learning targets (the academic content standards)

crystal clear to students and couple that with high quality student feedback (a.k.a. formative assessment). All our

efforts are on helping our staff become experts on these two thing because at the end of the day an expensive

regular or intervention program won't matter much if we are not implementing those things that have been proven to work.

Listed below are the notes taken from a District Leadership Team meeting in Columbus, OH. We felt that we needed to define why were chose

to undertake this initiative and then work towards broadcasting it at every opportunity.

What is the purpose of continuous improvement?

• To continue our excellence we will need to engage in a deep level of inquiry in order determine how to continue to get the results that we get and ask ourselves how we

can ensure learning for all students.

 Why choose a District Leadership Team?

• Representative of staff
• Including the building principal, two were chosen from each building
• Actively involved in building improvement
• Speak for the building and listen to colleagues
• It could have been several people in each building, but we needed a manageable group

 Why do we need a District & Building Leadership Team?

• In order to continue the excellence we cannot stay static and must continue to ask what is next
• We need to honor what we’ve accomplished and work to continue the excellence
• We have a changing student population and live in a changing world
• Learning together, sharing together – collaboration that is well structured will increase achievement
• Data tells us that being in collaborative groups is more effective

 Thoughts on leadership teams...

• We need to work smarter not harder
• We need to ask this question--Where are high levels of learning taking place and how can we have our teachers share these practices with others?
• This is a teacher led initiative and everyone has an equal voice
• Should inquiry and improvement be done individually or should it be a  collective sharing of instructional practices? We believe that excellent districts encourage inquiry and work to remove barriers in order to make it happen.

What is collaboration?

·        Sharing ideas

·        Meeting with colleagues

·        Dividing the work load

·        Professional growth

·        Discussing with others about what is working and what we might need to alter

·        Collaboration is about coming to a common understanding of what “the good” is and committing to it, but remaining flexible with implementation

·        Comes in different forms and is specific to the needs of those within the buildings

·        Collaboration is providing helpful information to colleagues in order to help students learn at even higher levels.

·        Working smarter not harder

·        Has a structure to it in order to guide the discussion

·        Improves student achievement and progress

·        Compromising through having a professional discussion

·        Solution focused

·        Focusing on a few things and do them well

What isn’t collaboration?

·        Having everyone do the same thing.

·        Creating more work for you.

·        A mandated agenda

·        Busy work

·        Getting rid of everything we’ve done before and replacing it with something “new.”

·        Taking on too much 

 What are the benefits of collaboration?

·        In order to continue the excellence the question becomes can this be done alone or should this be done together.

 The big idea is to increase student achievement.

 LINK:  From Power Indicators to Common Assessments document