Kristin Miller

Dr. Van Osdel

EDU 522
21 September 2014

School Improvement Plan Reflection

The school improvement plan (SIP) process represents the Collaborator component of
the Educator as a Developing Professional Curriculum Model (EDPCM). Developing and
updating the school improvement plan is a collaborative process. Teachers, administrators, and
district staff collaborate to create a plan that enables the school to become a place where students
are successful. After the initial collaboration of updating the SIP, the teachers from the
committee need to collaborate with the rest of the school staff to reveal the goals of the SIP.
Teachers from the SIP committee also need to be leaders to help reach the goals for the school
improvement plan.
The school improvement plan process is an excellent example of Standard 1.0 of the
ELCC Building Level Standards. The entire SIP process is about collaborating, evaluating
data, and writing and implementing school-wide goals. Teachers on the SIP committee come
from a variety of core and encore subjects; these teachers bring their knowledge and ideas to the
process and collaborate with the other teachers to update and revise the plan for the school.
This year was my second year on the SIP committee; I was able to be a part of revising
the goals that we wrote for the school the year before. The interesting part of working on the SIP
this year was that we did not have standardized test data to look at to reevaluate our goals. This
year, we spent a lot of time determining how we are already assessing the students and how we

can work this into the SIP goals. As a committee, we choose to evaluate our reading and math
achievement based in the Scholastic Reading Inventory and the Scholastic Math Inventory.
Our goals this year were more focused than last year. We choose to focus on four areas:
reading, writing, math, and school culture. Our plan for improving reading is to focus on
students Lexile levels and incorporate Lexile appropriate reading into all classes. To improve
our students writing our English Language Arts teachers are developing a rubric that will be
used in future years to assess the students writing in all content areas. Math is a unique area and
math teachers will be focused on improving on the students math abilities. Lastly, school
culture will be focused on through the use of the Whittier Way: respectful communication, dress
for success, helping hands, supporting others, and bring your best self.
According to article titled Three school improvement mistakes (and how to avoid
them) by Bryan Goodwin and Ceri Dean located in McRELs Noteworthy Perspectives:
School Improvements, schools should focus on a few key areas when writing school
improvement plans. In short, rather than attempting to do may things and none of them well,
schools should identify the one or two big things they will do next. And when they are in the
process of doing this, they must not overlook culture. By paying attention to both technical
processes as well as issues related to school culture, they will eventually find that their
improvement efforts have become comprehensive and systemic. (2007, p.2) Whittiers SIP
committee made a conscious effort to focus our goals to allow teachers to focus on the most
important aspects and to help their students to become successful, which is the main reason for
writing a school improvement plan.

References

Goodwin, B., & Dean, C. (2007). Three school improvement mistakes (and how to avoid
them). Changing Schools, 1-2. Retrieved September 21, 2014, from
http://www.mcrel.org/~/media/Files/McREL/Homepage/Products/01_99/prod61_NW_Sc
hool_Improvement.ashx