Improving Quality in Education: Dynamic Approaches to School Improvement

Improving Quality in Education is a major contribution to the area of school improvement, setting out a dynamic framework that will helps schools collect data, evaluate themselves, decide on priorities for improvement and develop action plans. Emphasising the setting of targets, the authors stress the fundamental importance of making schools into the best possible learning environments, giving students and teachers the means to achieve them. Their practical, flexible approach can easily fit with the individual circumstances of each school and system.Based on this approach, the book goes on to explore a number of projects that focus on important challenges schools all around the world are facing, such as preventing bullying and developing teachers. Readers, be they practitioners, school advisors, policy-makers or researchers, will see how the contents of Improving Quality in Education can be applied in a wide variety of educational settings.To conclude the authors offer practical suggestions for designing improvement strategies, providing guidelines to schools on how to self-evaluate, make decisions on priorities and design action plans, including a useful toolkit of guidelines for measuring the quality of teaching and the efficiency of school factors.Aimed at all professionals working in the area, whether academics, researchers, policy-makers, school advisors or teachers, this book will provide expert guidance not only for graduate students, university libraries and individual academics, but also school management teams, school support agencies and officials in educational policy.

Bert P.M. Creemers is Professor in Educational Sciences at the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Leonidas Kyriakides is Assistant Professor of Educational Research and Evaluation at the University of Cyprus.