Self-Scouting and Studying High Performing Schools

One of the things I learned from my coaching days was the importance of "self-scouting." You see, coaches spend lots of time scouting their opponents and trying to figure out the strengths, weaknesses, and tendencies of those they compete against. I learned early on that this is a very important thing to do but you also need to spend some time analyzing yourself. When I taught 3rd grade and coached high school football and basketball, we would spend time at the end of each season analyzing each of our own games...we wanted to see if we were too predictable in 3rd and short, within the red zone, etc. We wanted to see if our opponents would easily be able to tell that we switched from our triangle-in-two defense to half-court man after timeouts. We charted our tendencies. We thought about "us" and why we did what we did.

In my time as a school administrator, we use the same approach to study the correlates of effective schools and then compare ourselves against high performing organizations in other areas. There is tons of educational research that outlines nine major characteristics of high performing school systems.

* A clear and shared focus
* High expectations for all students
* Effective school leadership
* High levels of collaboration and communication
* Curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices are aligned with state standards
* There is frequent monitoring of learning and teaching
* A focus is placed is on meaningful professional development
* A supportive learning environment
* High levels of family and community involvement

Each summer, my admin team and I will discuss how we are doing in these important, time-tested areas. We will brainstorm ways to enhance certain aspects in need of improvement. We will "self-scout" ourselves to see what we do too much of and what we don't do enough of.

We like to have an unquenchable thirst for improvement that pushes us to move further and further up the mountain. Stay tuned as the York Dukes have much more to accomplish. Dream BIG!