Project ACHIEVE Components
Project ACHIEVE and the Seven Components of an Effective School
While their specific titles may vary slightly across different evidence-based school improvement models, a common core of effective school components has been consistently used to organize school improvement and school excellence processes and procedures. Project ACHIEVE’s evidence-based model uses seven interdependent components for all of its school improvement efforts—components that form the foundation of each school’s focus on the academic achievement and social-emotional/behavioral development of all of its students.
These components are:
- Strategic Planning and Organizational Analysis and Development
- Problem Solving, Teaming, and Consultation Processes
- Effective School, Schooling, and Professional Development
- Academic Instruction linked to Academic Assessment, Intervention, and Achievement
- Behavioral Instruction linked to Behavioral Assessment, Intervention, and Self-Management
- Parent and Community Training, Support, and Outreach
- Data Management, Evaluation, and Accountability
The Strategic Planning and Organizational Development Component
...initially focuses on assessing the organizational climate, administrative style, staff decision-making, and other interactive and interpersonal processes in a school. Activities then move into identifying and reinforcing, or establishing and implementing the organizational policies, procedures, and cyclical approaches that support the academic and social-emotional/ behavioral success of all students.
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The Effective School, Schooling, and Professional Development Component
...focuses on processes that ensure that effective and differentiated instruction and effective and positive behavior management exist in every classroom for every student, and that involve all teachers, administrators, related service professionals, and others.
To support this, effective schools recognize that professional development occurs, formally and informally, every day for every staff person, and they systematically plan and implement ongoing professional development programs and processes resulting in increased knowledge, enhanced skills, and emerging confidence and autonomy.
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The Academic Instruction linked to Academic Assessment, Intervention, and Achievement Component
...focuses on positively impacting the "Instructional Environment"-- Students, Teacher, and Academic Curricula-- in every classroom within a school. Focusing on the Instructional Environment, this Component asks: "What needs to be learned?" "Are appropriate instructional and management strategies being used?" and "Is each student capable, prepared, and able to learn, and are they learning?"
When students are not making good academic progress, a functional, curriculum-based assessment and intervention approach is used. This approach includes differentiated instruction, curricular modifications and setting accommodations, direct instruction and cooperative learning, and other evidence-based intervention strategies as determined by the functional assessment. Teachers here learn how (a) to identify and analyze the relationship between curricular and instructional variables and student achievement, (b) to evaluate student mastery and curriculum-linked performance, and (c) to link task analyses and authentic assessments to classroom-based intervention.
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The Problem Solving, Teaming, and Consultation Component
...focuses on consistent, school-wide data-based, functional assessment, problem-solving approaches that all staff learn and use when developing effective instructional processes and then addressing students who are not responding to this instruction and the next “level” of evidence- or research-based classroom instruction or interventions. This “Response-to-Intervention” component emphasizes a “Problem Solving/Consultation/Intervention” mode of operation that directly contrasts with past “wait-to-fail” and “refer-test-place” approaches, and it is applied with students experiencing academic and/or behavioral concerns.
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The Behavioral Instruction linked to Behavioral Assessment, Intervention, and Self-Management Component
...focuses on implementing comprehensive positive behavioral support systems across schools. Using Project ACHIEVE's evidence-based Positive Behavioral Self-Management System (PBSS), this whole school approach involves students, staff, administration, and parents building and reinforcing (a) students’ interpersonal, problem-solving, and conflict resolution skills and interactions; (b) positive, safe, supportive, and consistent school climates and settings; and (c) school and district capacity such that the entire process becomes self-sustaining. Thus, “Self-Management” occurs at three levels: student, staff and school, and system and district.
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The Parent and Community Training, Support, and Outreach Component
...focuses on increasing the involvement of all parents, but especially the involvement of the parents of at-risk, underachieving, and students with disabilities. Parental involvement in the school and educational process often occurs less in the homes of these latter students, and it often discriminates achieving from underachieving students. Relative to community involvement, many schools do not use, much less know, the expertise and resources available to them that can help their mission and the progress of their students. For students with significant academic or behavioral challenges, the coordination and integration of community-based professionals and services often results in stronger and more pervasive progress and outcomes.
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The Data Management, Evaluation, and Accountability Component
...focuses on actively evaluating, formatively and summatively, the status and progress of students’ academic and behavioral mastery of skills and concepts, as well as the processes and activities inherent in all of the other Project ACHIEVE components. Part of this process involves collecting formative and summative data that validate the impact of a school’s strategic planning and school improvement efforts; its professional development and capacity-building efforts relative to the staff; its selection, training and implementation of academic and behavioral curricula and, later, interventions; and its effectiveness relative to the functional assessment, strategic intervention, and response to intervention services for students not making appropriate academic and behavioral progress.
