Developing an Effective School Plan includes a Change Manager’s Handbook, Facilitation Notes, and a CD-ROM of the activities and interactive tools. Using this resource, schools develop a context-specific improvement plan that concretely addresses four essential questions: Where are we now? Where do we want to go? How will we get there? How will we know when we’ve arrived? A significant and intentional result of this process is increased school capacity to identify and analyze key data to inform decisions — about what goes into the plan, how the plan is carried out, and how success is measured.

Recognizing that all schools start the improvement planning process with different types and degrees of capacity, the guide includes a number of self-assessment tools to help a school planning team identify which activities are most useful for its schools and where any specialized expertise (in data analysis, for example) might be needed.