Center for Model Schools: Key Drivers White Paper

This white paper explores how three key drivers – Safety & Trust, Communication & Collaboration, and Capacity & Efficacy – are essential to school and district success. These three drivers are deeply aligned with the UChicago 5Essentials framework, a research-based school improvement framework that defines the essential conditions for improving student outcomes. The five essential factors for school improvement are: effective leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environment, and ambitious instruction (Hart et al., 2021). Strong performance on the 5Essentials provides the climate and coherence that allow Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports (MTSS) to function effectively. The 5Essentials survey includes measures of each of the essential factors to evaluate aspects of schools’ culture and climate and provide insights into schools’ organizational strengths and opportunities for improvement. A study of the 5Essentials survey found that all 22 core measures on the survey were positively and significantly associated with schools’ improvement (Hart et al., 2021).

The Center for Model Schools Key Drivers are also grounded in the evidence of seminal and recent research studies that have examined the factors that help schools improve and succeed. This white paper explores the alignment of the key drivers with that evidence base, including research on continuous improvement, collective teacher efficacy, effective professional learning, and the Professional Standards for Education Leaders (PSEL). The paper then explores what each of the key drivers looks like at the classroom, school, and district level and the types of evidence that teachers and leaders can collect to assess their alignment with and improvement on each of the key drivers.