Evaluation and reflection
We suggest you pause here to think about evaluation and reflection.
Summative evaluation – where you assess how successful the intervention was, decide how your practice will change, report to the board.
But at every stage in the decision-making cycle you should be reflecting, evaluating in a formative way and making professional judgements about where to go next.
Formative evaluation – Are we are on the right track? Do we need to fine-tune? Do we actually need to complete this?
Many schools are consciously developing a ‘culture of inquiry’ – an open and supportive environment in which staff and the school community regularly reflect on the way the school operates, one in which calculated risk-taking is seen as an essential ingredient of innovation.
A cyclical improvement process is iterative – incremental changes are incorporated into the knowledge base and into professional practice and fed into the next cycle. There is a compounding effect – change becomes the trigger for more questions.
This resource can be used as a contribution to that approach.