Importance of School Leaders for School-Wide Improvement Success

A focus on your District’s schools’ operating cultures may be in order if

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• you have schools with continuing significant performance issues

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• simpler fixes haven’t “stuck”

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•  you keep adding new programs, but these really only serve as “band-aids”

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• intuitively you know your district’s school personnel need to think and act more constructively in an aligned and integrative manner — yet also “beyond the status quo” — for true sustainable success

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If this is your circumstance, your district’s school improvement efforts will more likely succeed and endure if school-wide social and emotional learning (“SEL“) is utilized as the integrative “Big Idea” to guide school-wide improvement efforts.

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This is what more than twenty years of evidence clearly suggests.

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But that’s not all.

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Involved and committed school leadership is THE MOST IMPORTANT INGREDIENT for a successful school-wide approach to SEL.

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Ten years of research on factors related to successful whole-school change and improvement identifies the school leader’s engagement and active support as the single biggest predictor of whether school change efforts take hold and yield benefits to students.

~ Berends, M., Bodilly, S.J., & Kirby, S.N. (Eds.) (2002). Facing the challenges of whole-school reform: New American schools after a decade. Santa Monica, CA: RAND, as cited by CASEL.

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School administrators are among the stakeholders most responsible for creating a school learning culture that supports positive change.

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Positive culture change requires three things of leadership:

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• A clear focus on performance

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• Collective identification/prioritization of 1 to 3 specific value / behavior shifts

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• A clear alignment framework to leverage the unique culture and to support the behavior shift

  ~ The Culture Advantage

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It is important to recognize that student social-emotional skill development is not just about implementing another program.

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When a school makes it a priority to help students develop the personal and social skills necessary to establish a safe school environment (a SS/HS requirement, for example), a new staff approach to learning and leadership is typically required — one that consistently models these SEL skills for both colleagues and students, through thick and thin.

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