The Handbook for SMART School Teams

The Handbook for SMART School Teams is a comprehensive guide to forming, working in, and achieving results from school teams, and is written specifically for school teams. These teams might include grade-level teams, steering teams, school improvement teams, process improvement teams, and committees and task forces. The book begins with a foreword by Rick DuFour and Bob Eaker. It is important to note that this handbook is the perfect companion resource for a school that is seeking to become, or has already started the process of becoming, a professional learning community. SMART Schools is based on the same idea for school improvement as PLC that the focus of a school should be on student learning and that goals should be Strategic and specific, Measurable, Attainable, Results-based, and Time-bound. The book s foundation comes from W. Edwards Deming (the pioneer of quality improvement) and his theory of continuous improvement (Plan, Do, Study, Act). When an entire school community is thinking PDSA, learning and improvement become second nature and schools can move rapidly up the learning curve to understand how and why progress is (or is not) being made.