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School improvement planning has been a central part of school improvement initiatives for decades. Evidence suggests, however, that traditional planning processes are regularly superficial. In the USA, some principals have begun developing short-cycle planning designed to encourage school leadership teams and staff to develop, monitor and adjust plans throughout the academic year.

In this study of eight schools in one urban district, the authors analyzed multiple rounds of short-cycle improvement plans and principal interview data to assess the progress schools made implementing plans over the course of a semester, the ways in which plans were monitored and adjusted and the extent to which principals embraced short-cycle planning.

The authors found that many tasks from first semester plans were completed, which informed the development of plans for the second semester. Observational data were primarily used to monitor plan completion, although principals engaged in monitoring but relied on their leadership team to do so. Principals reported regular engagement with plans throughout semester, but plans were seldom adjusted within a semester.

The findings suggest that short-cycle planning is potentially a viable alternative to traditional annual planning as principals communicated being more engaged and adaptive. Still, the evidence also indicated that old habits might be hard to break as school leaders did not monitor and adjust plans frequently enough to guide improvement efforts in relative “real time.”

School improvement planning, especially for low-performing schools, can be conceptualized as a planning process to strategically improve organizational processes, operations and outcomes. However, bureaucratic procedures and related inflexibilities sometimes results in inauthentic plan development. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the extent and ways in which principals engage in satisficing behavior – or being in the realm of “good enough” – when developing school improvement plans (SIPs).

The authors qualitatively analyzed 364 short-cycle SIPs submitted by principals of 134 low-performing schools participating across three cohorts of a university-based systems leadership program focused on change leadership and school turnaround.

Eight satisficing behaviors in the SIPs were identified. The five most prominent satisficing behaviors follow: plan content is consistent across schools within a district; a plan or plan features are resubmitted; plan priorities focus solely on test scores; plan timeline is insufficiently considered; and the directly responsible individual (DRI) (to complete tasks) is insufficiently considered. Overall, 80 percent of SIPs contained two to four satisficing behaviors, and fewer than ten SIPs were free of such behaviors or, in the authors’ estimation, completely authentic.

The development of SIPs is mandated for the nation’s lowest-performing schools, but little analysis of such plans has been conducted over the last 20 years. Moreover, although the notion that principals engage in satisficing behavior has been raised previously, to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to systematically identify ways in which principals satisfice.

Limited research on root cause analysis exists in educational leadership. Accurately diagnosing and detailing root causes—the why—of organizational failure, as is relatively common in other fields, could improve principals' ability to devise situationally- and contextually-responsive solutions in their improvement plans. In this study, the authors analyze school improvement plans to provide insight into how principals use root cause analysis to identify their and their school's failures as a way to respond strategically with goals and action steps.

In this exploratory qualitative study, the authors develop coding schemes and leverage an existing rubric of school improvement plan quality to assess what principals identify as root causes for 216 priorities across 111 school improvement plans.

The overall quality of root causes submitted by principals was low, typically between “beginning” and “developing” stages. The majority of root causes aligned with priorities and desired outcomes, but fewer than one-third had a systems focus. Moreover, less than half of root causes suggested that school leaders played a part in the organizational failures. The vast majority of plans instead identified teachers as the root cause, foundational fault or “why” of the problem.

An increased understanding of root cause analysis conceptualization and development seems necessary if improvement planning is to be a strategic response to a school's most serious organizational challenges. The predominant approach to school improvement planning has focused almost exclusively on how to succeed or become better with little investment in identifying root causes of organizational decline or failure. This initial study of root cause quality in school improvement planning is a key first step in critically thinking about how improvement is to be achieved when failure is unconceived.

This study centers the reflections of principals across the USA as they navigated the overwhelming stress of closing and reopening schools during a global pandemic. Specifically, the authors explored how school principals addressed self-care and their own well-being during the pandemic.

This research study is part of a broader qualitative study conducted by 20 scholars from across the USA in Spring 2020 and organized by the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE). This national research team conducted 120 qualitative interviews with public school principals in 19 different states and 100 districts. As part of this team, the authors coded and analyzed all 120 transcripts in NVivo using a self-care framework.

The responses from the participants capture some of the complexity of self-care during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors found evidence of both negative and positive sentiments towards self-care that will be described in five major themes. For the tensions with self-care, the authors developed two primary themes: leaders eat last and keep from falling off the cliff. For the demonstrations of self-care, the authors also developed three primary themes: release the endorphins, people need people and unplug from work.

Although researchers have identified the stressors and reactions of principals during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, little is known on how principals engaged in self-care practices. This study aims to identify these self-care practices and offer recommendations for principals.