This school-level redesign tool was created for you, your colleagues, and local community partners to identify your secondary school’s assets, needs, and opportunities to transform teaching and learning goals, structures, and processes. Grounded in the Redesigning High School: 10 Features for Success report, this tool is intended for use across a wide range of school redesign models, including California school district networks engaged in the state’s secondary school redesign pilot.
The tool, developed primarily for a school-level design team of educators and allied professionals, can guide your inquiry, analysis, and action. Working in teams, your job is to organize data, examples, and insights that highlight strengths and identify gaps within three redesign principles. These features describe essential elements of successful secondary schools redesigned to:
- create relationship-centered learning environments;
- provide challenging and engaging instructional design; and
- build professional capacity for culturally responsive, inquiry-based learning.
The tool is meant to help your team synthesize data and insights and provide a roadmap for implementing your short- and long-term strategies. It outlines practices and identifies the infrastructure needed to redesign schools in ways that layer practices and policies so that all components speak to one another across all levels of the system. This process is designed to inform professional educators and contribute to a public narrative about how we can transform schools and systems.
Secondary School Redesign Self-Assessment Tool by Barnett Berry and Cheryl Jones-Walker is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Funding for the Secondary School Redesign Self-Assessment Tool was provided by the Youth Thriving Through Learning Fund and the Stuart Foundation. Core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided by the Heising-Simons Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, Skyline Foundation, and MacKenzie Scott. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.
