Turnaround 4C Plan Tools: The School Improvement Plan

The Turnaround 4C Plan is your educational map for the school year to improve student success. This starts with developing a strong culture where all groups, students, teachers, and parents, feel safe and comfortable in their school, where they feel that they matter.

Your game plan goals are to build a positive climate, create a unified working environment, have a viable curriculum that will improve test scores and increase a school’s overall GPA, and finally, build up leadership density in the school. 

In addition, the school improvement plan includes

• why these goals are important to improving the school this year
• who it will be impacted in reaching these goals
• identify your indicators of success

For a template, feel free to reach us. 

Bryan Wright at at brwright44@gmail.com 

Mark McBeth at lead2day@yahoo.com or 

For more information about the the topics discussed,
Bryan Wright: brwright44@gmail.com
Mark McBeth: mark@educationalrelevance.org

Thanks for listening. If you would like to share your thoughts or topic ideas, or would like to be a guest, you can find Educational Relevance on Facebook, YouTube or contact us at oliviaw1201@educationalrelevance.org

Transcript

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 0:00

Welcome to Educational Relevance, a platform for experienced educators to share proven methods and strategies to successfully educate today's students. My name is Bryan Wright. I've been a lead administrator for over 30 years in education, secondary schools. With me today is Mark Mcbeth, a colleague and a partner of mine who has been successful both as an author and administrator in schools himself.

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 0:25

So, we've been going through this four C's turnaround. can you kind of review a little bit about what that's all about and what we've been working on?

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 0:32

Sure can. In our Turnaround 4C plan, we've talked about four steps. Climate, culture, curriculum, and connections. And we've done podcasts for each one of these four individually. And the reason we we think this is successful, cause we are always looking about how we can do things to successfully educate our children. And have our children reach academic success. We want to keep the main thing, the main thing. to make sure we give students an opportunity to be successful, but also giving educators more efficient strategies. How to achieve that success. And so that's why we're doing these things, Mark. What do you think

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 1:12

Yeah, I think that that's great. And 1 of the things that you and come up with over the years, Bryan, is a series of tools, to be able to help facilitate these conversations forward in turnaround schools. And so how do we move climate, culture, curriculum and making connections across all those, Is, easier done when you have some sort of template, some sort of model, some sort of tool to be able to move people forward. The most common one, Bryan, is a school improvement plan. But, I think it takes a slightly different approach when you're going in to turn around in school. how do you approach, school improvement plans when a school that has been maybe struggling over time?

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 1:59

Well, before I do that, Mark, to make sure I talk about the turnaround 4C, climate is what, who we are. culture is what we do. Curriculum is how we do it. Then connections is why it matters and putting all those

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 2:10

Yeah.

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 2:11

As a turnaround agent the first thing you got to do is make sure you have a game plan. Mark, you and I are old football coaches, so we always like using that old terminology of when we were trying to set up game plans and so we start being successful in individual games that our kids are playing. So, the same methodology applies here. You want to make sure you start with the game plan and the game plan usually incorporates the four goals we discussed before. The first one is creating a culture. And so you want to make sure you create a culture. And in that culture, you're talking about building a positive climate. Every school we know has a culture. So let's keep that in mind. But what we want to do is to build a positive climate, so people feel good. And that's what I said about who we are and what we're trying to accomplish. Second thing we're talking about having a viable curriculum that every school again has a curriculum. But right now it seems that schools we go to, kids aren't learning the curriculum. They have low test scores and actually, quite frankly, their GPA. And this is something that a lot of schools don't talk about. The overall GPA of the school is usually under two. It's not above two. So we're talking about helping that school, overall school GPA, having students find success. How many students can you get on the honor roll using the viable curriculum you have? The third one we'll talk about is Is building up a school and teacher engagement, teachers buy into their kids and engaging them and learning and having kids feel like they're learning something from that teacher. So they want to sit in that classroom. So it's really important to build that give and take so that kids are learning. Teachers feel comfortable teaching it and there's a valuable lesson in that regard. And the fourth goal we're talking about is always building leadership density. Having teachers become leaders, having parents become leaders, having students become leaders, and everybody working together to attain a common goal, which is student success. And that fourth goal we talked about is why it's so important that we want to make sure we have that school improvement plan at the beginning so that we can bring it all together and that we can say, Hey, this is what we're trying to accomplish this year in school. What do you think? As soon as we're hired. we ask opinions. What do you think? We ask teachers their opinion. We ask parents their opinion. We asked students their opinion. And we actually set up meetings, Mark, so they can actually come in and share those thoughts and ideas with us. As a matter of fact, we talk about teachers, we say, hey, this is what we're going to do. What do you think? And we said, do you have any ideas? And we actually have them bring idea to the table. We have parents bring idea to the table. So when the first day of school occurs, we've already had those, those mini meetings and we've already got things. We say we're all working

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 4:51

So when you arrive, in July you're hitting the ground running, calling people into your office. Are you calling meetings? Are you going out and visiting people? How are you building that? That knowledge base to know what to put in it.

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 5:06

The goals are the guideline. And so you want to make sure as soon as you get in who's your PTA, PTSA president, who's your union representative? Or union president. What's the leadership there? You want to make sure these, these groups are discussed with and talked to. Who's your student council? Get your student council involved, have kids come in there. This is what we're trying to accomplish. So they know what's going on. And then the one part you said, and I thought that was so key, getting out in the community. You know, we talked about that last week, getting out there, getting to know people in the community. Hey guys, what's your impression of schools? You know, a lot of times when you have a school that's a turnaround school, sometimes the public persona is not the best. So you want to find out what's going on so you can say, Hey, these are things we're trying to accomplish here. So you start getting the public to speak for you and speaking your behalf as well. And what this does Mark, is build that leadership density, giving people a chance to share their ideas and say, Hey, if you think this is going to work better, let's put this in play. And then we start the school year at that time. Everybody's had to say so people have some thought processes and we can go ahead and begin where at least we have an idea, a game play where everybody feels motivated. And that's where that positive climate, is now starting to build because people feel good about having something to say

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 6:25

Yeah, and I think that during those meetings, I'm also conveying my code, which then gives me feedback of where they're thinking. So if I'm talking about student learning first, rigor, relevance, relationships, generating results and those things, and student disciplines off the charts, you know, we can't do this or that. Then that gives me that climate that you're talking about that negative climate. Things that need changed, even though we're trying to enhance that culture, it really gives me the starting points to think about in that climate, but it also outlines, the expectations to everybody. My code is where we're headed folks.

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 7:06

Well, let's, enhance that code piece if we can. Cause when you talk about code, you're absolutely right. and I think I told you before, there have been schools that just incorporated my code into the part of their Immediate climate and they put it in print. It did not become Bryan Wright's code It became the school code, but it became the school code because we met earlier as staff We met early with the teachers, You met earlier with the parents and they said, this is what I believe in. And they like, Hey, that's pretty good. And then they said, We think our school should become the embodiment of that very same code you have. So that didn't come now, a Bryan Wright code that became

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 7:47

There you go.

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 7:50

It worked out a lot better. And then that became part of the school plan as well, and having people believe in that. And want to make sure I give you an example of that, Mark, there was a teacher in one of the schools, that, I feel so strongly about code. I had asked teachers, write your own code, put it up on the wall, put it up on the board, let the kids see your code, let them know what you're about. So we had teachers do that. They put their own codes up. again, this is voluntary. This was not mandatory. This is voluntary. But that teacher took it to a different level. He said he wanted every student to write their own code. And he had student, codes all across the room. So when the kids came in and they started acting inappropriately, he said, Hey, isn't that your code up there? Are you living by your code? And kids made some tremendous changes and the disciplinary actions in that classroom went down significantly. Because kids felt they had their own code, they had

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 8:43

All right. Yeah,

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 8:45

words. It wasn't his, it was theirs. So that's just a great way of using leadership density, but also using code as an advantage to motivate the students and to get better

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 8:55

and I think we'll get in more depth on that when we get into the discipline matrix and those type of things too, I got a question related to a previous conversation we had. about superintendents who write 5 year plans, who actually are superintendents for three years. What's the difference between, a turnaround principals school improvement plan compared to, superintendents five year plan

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 9:25

Oh, that's a, that's a great question. The difference, Mark, is when we talk about a Turnaround 4C plan, we're talking about total implementation within three years. if we're there five years, something's wrong, And you said this once before, and I love the comment. You said the whole idea about us, the turnaround principals, we got to work ourselves out of a

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 9:43

job. Yeah. Yeah,

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 9:44

that's what we do. So we're, we're not there, as a turnaround principal for five years. As a matter of fact, one of the schools I hired a guy who was a teacher of the year there. He was an excellent instructor. And so I hired him. And then sure enough, a year or two later, he became the principal there. And so he has some of the ideas we started and we, him and I still stay in contact to this day. And he's been there for several years that school, I went from step A to step B. He'd taken that school from step B. All the way to some of the things he's doing are sustainable, the school has been successful, it's gone through a renovation and changes, and those changes have not, those academic changes have not missed a beat, and he's still there. Now, that's what we're about. We're not there to stay five, six, or seven years. We're there to make those changes. I tell people, Mark, there until the legend becomes myth, all right? We're there, to make these changes and adjustments, get that school, hopefully on the right track, then we're out of there. now you talk about superintendents, superintendents. I think they love to stay in some places for four or five, six years, become a superintendent, have a statue in front of the school district with their behalf. I think they all would love that, but it doesn't work that way. And if you're talking about making changes in the district, one thing we should talk about, Mark, and this is something I want to ask you about later on, because you know, this better than I do when you were a central office. you're talking about making changes. Understand, somebody's going to be resistant to the changes you're trying to

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 11:14

yeah,

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 11:15

And since they're going to be resistant, you're going to have to make sure you're going to say, this is what's best for students. Not what's best for teachers. Not what's best for adults. This is what's best for the students. And that's going to be a guiding light. But understand if you're gonna make those decisions, somebody is not going to like what you're doing. So Mark, I'm going to turn this question over to you. How is the central office worker,? you know about the change because you've been right there. When you see these changes happening. How do you keep people motivated saying, wait a minute, this is what we do for the students. Cause I think you made that decision once,

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 11:45

yeah. I think, it's, doing the right thing all the time, which is focusing on student learning. I've been in these situations where the union gets heavily involved in teacher protection. And it

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 12:02

right?

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 12:03

at times make it very hard to move forward, They're more worried about the adults, than the kids, which I have a lot of respect for. I understand that. but We have to produce a product as a service at the end. And that's what we always keep central focused. The other thing is, to clearly define things that are unacceptable, it's just unacceptable to not, make student learning rigor the relevance, the relationships that they're doing. It's unacceptable for us not to look at results to determine whether results are moving us forward or not. As long as you keep those things that central focus, you can keep converting conversations back, And I think that's the key from central office to the principalship. It's always that same thing is keeping that conversation. Forefront. They say, well, what about our instructional time? How are we in enhancing student learning? With that instructional time, if you want more planning time, how does that enhance our performances? How do we generate results as a result of you having more planning time? I have no problem with planning time if it enhances student performance. So let's just have that conversation. you want to have, change in the way that we discipline students in the school. Okay, how does that impact student learning? It's just turning that conversation constantly around. Oh, I understand kids misbehaving. How does this relate to other kids learning? How do we improve that to ensure students are learning?

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 13:49

And Mark, that's why when you talk about the game plan itself, you ask to come in cause not every game plan is going to be the same at every school, every school. When I run into a school, we start with a template of a game plan. But what we put underneath how we want to reach those goals are entirely different from school to school on that school's need,

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 14:12

I was at central office working with multiple principals across multiple schools. Each had unique needs and differences And so I had to approach them differently, different plan within the same system. So it's even within the same district, there's some uniqueness, same expectations. Just uniqueness.

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 14:36

As a central office worker, yes, you're absolutely right. I think, we all want to make sure we, want to be successful with students. That's our major goal. That's our main thing. You keep that the main thing, but as we're doing that, we want to make sure that you have a game plan that's set up. That's why it's so important that you incorporate different viewpoint, different ideas. So now once the game plan is going to be implemented. First day of school, the first week we always have those meetings with students. We tell students, this is our game plan, this is what we're trying to accomplish. Then by the end of that first week,

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 15:10

everyone

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 15:10

knows exactly what we're doing, why we're doing it, how it's going to be implemented, we can talk about how we're going to celebrate it. I mentioned earlier about GPA. You know, we talk about test score, but we don't really talk about school's GPA. And I think that's a hidden asset we miss, because if you got a school that's averaging a 2. 5, 2. 6, 2. 7 as an overall school, Kids feel good. More kids making the honor roll. More kids are going to be celebrated. You can put that honor roll in the newspaper like we've done many times. Kids love seeing the name on the paper and maybe the kid got Four C's in the four, academic courses. But got four A's in the other courses, that kid has a B average. He's on the honor roll. And that kid feels good about what he's doing and what he's trying to accomplish. And that's the whole idea. So I think a hidden gem and all the things we're doing and that's another part when we say a viable curriculum, for example, that explains the viable curriculum, but also explains student teacher engagement. you're talking about the third goal, Hey, Hey, the kid saying, I'm interested. And the kids in the classroom saying, which learning in this class, he can tell you what he's learning. That's great. you see what's your grade and you say, well, I got a C or D. Then why aren't you doing better in this class? Now you can ask the student, if you learn all these things, why aren't you doing better? And it all said it puts the on the back on the student. And it's amazing to me, Mark, when you do that, the kids say, ah, I could in this class. Then you say, let's get it done. that's where you start laughing. Now, the one you worry about, of course, when you say, well, he's learned this class, not much. And you say, what's the engagement? You say, what you getting in class? I'm getting an A. are you getting an A? You're not engaged in And then you can talk about some adjustments you want to make and talk to the teacher about, hey, what things can we do so kids feel good about what they're learning. So each one of these things we're talking about, each one of these goals play a part in that student success.

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 16:58

Let me, take what you were just talking about, because I think engagement, it seems like it's always a goal. Student engagement's a big one, right? But I had a guy tell me once, you know, well, don't create more goals than God. You can, have to have 10 and no more. How many goals do you think should go on there, and then why?

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 17:22

In schools, what you want to do is make sure you've got enough goals that you can sustain enough goals that you can achieve, but also just enough goals. So you can say, this is our pathway to improvement. And again, they're all student based. but I've also seen programs. They got seven, eight goals. As a matter of fact, you mentioned superintendents and superintendents coming to five year plan. You also read all these different goals they want to do and all these different things they want to accomplish. sometimes they don't even get to the second, third goal because it's too many. want to make sure you have just enough. And some schools, it may be only three goals. Some schools, maybe only two goals, But, implement them with fidelity, implement them with a clear focus in mind so that you can achieve those goals and achieve success, which brings the last thing. If you have eight goals and you achieve six You only meet 75 percent of your goals. So you're already a failure. know, you may have met the first six. So you want to make sure you, when you're talking about goals, goals that you want to reach and goals that you can see and having people feel good about, keep that in mind. Having people say, Hey, you are a part of this goal and you're a part of this plan and we're in this together. And also, the code is like the navigation. The code keeps

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 18:36

Yeah,

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 18:37

Right. But everything else is the parts that you all be fighting with the waters gets choppy and this sort of thing, but you also got your navigation piece and you know, this is where we want to attain, which is where we want to go. And so you get those goals on board with that that navigation, you'll find student success

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 18:53

so that also leads me to a second thought how do, you know, you're reaching or, making progress in a goal? Is there something that allows you to say? Oh, yeah, we're on path,

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 19:05

Oh, as the goals continue, you're going to have a philosophy of why you should have those goals. But then you have indicators of success under each one of those goals. So as you're doing your indicators of success, then you say, Oh, we're doing this. We're doing this. We're doing this So each one of the goals have their indicators underneath it So you can say this is our guidelines and make sure those indicators are Liquid just like any game plan in a football game After the first quarter they're doing something right or wrong, you got to make some changes in your game plan Especially at halftime. At halftime, you're doing some things right or you're doing some things wrong. There's gonna be some changes at halftime. Same thing applies as you're talking about four quarters in a school By the end of each one of the grading programs you have, you're looking at the goals. How are you doing? Which ones are being successful, which ones you need to change. You also have school data teams, you have school improvement teams, you have school, management teams, so you got all these things in line so you can always make sure you maintain and keep a focus on what those goals are. One last thing we're also going to talk about And that's going to always be celebrate the successes no matter how big or small. If you've got attendance of 87 percent for the year last year and your attendance first time in September goes 92 you better make sure that's a wow. We've, that's an indicator of success right there. That's indicator. We're doing some good things. Let's keep that going. Let's keep that momentum going. When you're talking about a, teacher for viable curriculum, you say first quarter, you get 60 percent of your kids on the honor roll. And you say, wow, you only had like 35 the whole year. Last year at 60 percent of the kids in your honor roll, make that a big thing. That's an indicator of success. These are things that are showing now people are seeing things in motion that are actually working and they're feeling good about what's going on and that helped build that positive climate. And eventually when you start building out and you say, these are things that we think are important. So yes, you build up on that.

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 21:01

as we wrap this up, I think one of the things is, I always think about from a leadership perspective is we write this school improvement plan overall, but inside my world of the leadership team. we're creating individual plans, individual goals of our leadership practices to get us to those points. And we have to think about that when we're moving climate, when we're moving culture, when we're embedding curriculum, we have to create those little steps that's going to help us get to that goal to help the teachers get to that goal. The community get to the goal, the teachers, the students to get to the goal. So that's one of the things that I think is essential. Overall, Bryan, is there a summary that you would send people home with and say, use this tool, use this template, use this idea, what is it that you want to send people away with right now?

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 21:54

Well, first of all, we, we do have a template and if anybody wants to template, look for our, emails on, on the bottom of our page, and we'll be happy to send our School Improvement Plan Template. Your whole goal is to make sure you achieve student success and you want student success to be attained. And one last thing I'll say about that, Mark, is that every educator administrator I know has an ego. We believe we can go there and do all these things with students. But the one thing we also got to make sure, you better be humble. Cause I'm always overwhelmed by the stuff that teachers can do in schools. I'm always overwhelmed by stuff students do in schools. And I see the greatness of those, groups and how they, help to make their schools successful. I'm always amazed by community support when the community comes out and that includes our parents. They say, Hey, all we want to do is best for our children. And you give them an opportunity to do that. So when you talk about, the successes. All the successes are geared towards the eventual, seeing kids get better in school, better academically, better emotionally, very spiritually. and so in every school we talk about, Mark, when we talk about turnaround, say we're going to raise attendance. We're going to raise test scores. We're going to lower discipline. We'll talk about these things that we're going to do that when he's mentioned the discipline matrix next week and how we're going to do that. we have all these things in mind already. So game plan gives us our outline. So we can say, okay, since we're going to reach these goals, This is how we're going to go about doing it. then last thing I'm going to say about that is not only do we give you the template, but then how you fill in that template. Cause I was going to have in that template, the philosophy of why you should be doing it, but also the indicators of success. So you can always make sure you, you're always monitoring those indicators. So you, know, you're doing the right thing and you can make those adjustments. again, the game plan is always liquid. It's going to be changed, but at the end of the year, if you achieve those goals, you're discussing, I think you'll be, you'll be happy with the outcome. And so will your district, I can

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 23:59

Good. Yeah, thanks, Bryan. I think that the templates more simplified. It's not a big, huge school, the state improvement plan thing. It's it's really getting to the point.

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 24:11

and please understand. I think you'll find successes in it, within those successes, You'll reach certain academic standards and your school improve as a result, but you're doing it together. A lot of people come to school and they say, we're going to reach our test scores. Yeah, but We better build a positive climate first where kids feel safe in their environment. The kids feel comfortable. They want to be a part of, and they have a say so in what they're doing. You want to make sure that teachers feel comfortable when they teach in the curriculum, but they want that student and teacher engagement. They will not be judged negatively. If they have a problem with the student, you want to make sure your parents feel comfortable when they say, Hey, my child is learning in this school. These rules are in place so they're going to benefit my child. Eventually, my child can leave that school and become successful citizens as a result. Then you talk about the connections with the community saying, Hey, we like that school right now. We see what's going on. We see some changes there. We want to support what they're doing right there. These are things we all wish to attain as we're discussing that. So Mark, we can do all that. Then we're on the road to a successful school turnaround. Well, Mark, next We'll be talking regarding our school matrix

mark_6_08-28-2024_094149: 25:22

Well, I'll talk about how it was originally created, and then you can talk about how you've enhanced it and used it across several districts and coached other administrators through the use of it.

bryan_6_08-28-2024_094225: 25:33

Thank you everybody for listening and we hope to see you next time. Bye. Bye