Best Practices and Effective Schools

Since the identification of “effective-school correlates” (clear school mission, high expectations for success, instructional leadership, frequent monitoring of student progress, opportunity to learn and student time on task, safe and orderly environment, and home-school relations) in 1979 by the Harvard researcher Ron Edmonds, much research has been conducted on what are the best practices that contribute to effective schools. Among these best practices are a positive school climate and strong leadership, which support teacher behaviors such as planning, classroom management, and instruction. These teacher behaviors, in turn, promote student success, involvement, and appropriate coverage of necessary content. The result of these best practices is improved student achievement.

Research indicates that a positive school climate can be created through an emphasis on academics, an order ly environment, and clearly stated expectations for success. The leadership processes that help build and maintain a positive school climate are consensus building, modeling, and feedback. Because leadership is so important to effective schools, research has shown that behaviors common to principals of effective schools include (a) being supportive of good teaching, (b) building healthy relationships with parents and with the community, (c) being both task oriented and goal oriented, (d) being assertive instructional leaders, (e) clearly defining and communicating school policies (f) delegating responsibilities to others, and (g) communi cating expectations for everyone. In effective classrooms, achievement on standardized tests is linked to the amount of time a student is actively engaged in working on academic content, the amount of content the student covers that is actually on the standardized test, and the student's level of success on daily assignments and unit tests. For more information, see Edmonds, R. (1979), Harris (2006), and Squires, Huitt, and Segars (1983).