Online Survey Facilitates

Change Process

School reform efforts can be thwarted by any number of environmental variables, including some that may not be readily apparent. Helping schools determine if they have the right climate for change is the purpose of a newly revised survey posted on the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's Web site.

Questions on the Survey of School Capacity for Continuous Improvement ask about several qualities of a school-teacher collaboration, personal commitment, facilitative leadership, curriculum and instruction, community support-that can help or hinder improvement initiatives. Through candid and anonymous responses, staff members develop a shared understanding of these qualities at their school.

www.nwrel.org/assessment/srs/

"The survey's intent is to help schools identify areas of strength that the school team can draw on that will support change, as well as issues that might interfere with the success of reform initiatives," says Michael Kozlow, NWREL's director of assessment. "If a school is contemplating a new curriculum or a new approach to discipline, this helps staff members pinpoint issues they need to tend to in the process. For example, a planned change may rely heavily on collaboration and distributed leadership, but if the survey shows that these aren't part of the school culture, then the staff will have to address those issues as part of the change process."

The survey can also help schools monitor progress toward conditions that characterize high-performing learning communities. Kozlow recommends that schools take the survey periodically over a number of years to see what changes have taken place. While survey respondents do not identify themselves, they do list their school's name and their own grade level. This enables NWREL to keep all responses together for one school and determine if there are different perspectives across different grade ranges. All information is treated confidentially and reported as an aggregate.

More than 1,800 teachers at 90 schools have used the survey during two years of field tests. Comments and data from those trials led NWREL's assessment team to shorten the survey, regroup the questions in different clusters, and provide an easier way for schools to interpret the results.

Idaho's Department of Education has recommended that all its Title I schools use the survey as part of their needs assessment. Kozlow hopes that all schools will find the survey a useful tool for general planning and identifying priorities.

| Next Article | Front Page | NW Report Index |