Engage Others in the Work

As your team analyzed your school’s data, you likely realized a need for additional information on conditions and survey item results. This presents a terrific opportunity to engage others and set a collective vision for how to improve working conditions. With that in mind, we encourage your team to create opportunities for additional educators in your school to analyze your school’s teacher working conditions data.

Identify a Priority of Practice

Your team has selected an area on which to focus working condition improvement efforts by analyzing data. The next step in this process is to identify a priority of practice. A priority of practice is an area on which to focus that addresses an underlying challenge within your control, related to the actions/practices of adults within the school. Priorities of practice are also actionable through inquiry and structured so that progress can be measured.

As your team identifies a priority of practice for the focus area, be sure to take into consideration the improvement efforts already in progress in your school. While there may be more than one condition that your team would like to address, we strongly encourage you to start with only a small area that aligns with the criteria listed below. This may include targeting specific areas or items within a condition rather than all aspects of a condition.

Make sure that the priority of practice meets these criteria:

• lives within your locus of control;
• focuses on practice for which adults in the school are responsible;
• addresses an underlying challenge that, if improved, has the potential to improve a number of circumstances; and
• is actionable through inquiry.

Use Worksheet 10 to check alignment with the criteria above.