A school playbook uses a set of guiding principles to develop strategies, processes, and resources that help align the school, staff, and students to the school's mission and vision. This resource is a blank template to use when defining your core guiding principles and strategies.

This set of questions can help you leadership understand the current mission and vision of your school. It can also be used in a continuous improvement model to identify areas of strength and growth within a school. These questions are intended for teachers and leaders.

Conducting a detailed community needs assessment can help you gain a better understanding of your community, increase community engagement, guide your planning, and help you make a positive impact. This resource is a set of questions that can be posed to a school community to determine the educational needs of a community / town / city.

An essential component of starting a new charter school is engaging stakeholders in the design of the school. Engaging all stakeholders early on helps facilitate the support needed to drive the mission and vision of the school.

This resource is an excellent starting point when school leaders consider equity in their school design/philosophy. It briefly explains why equity is so important in school design and provides a few simple actionable steps. Leaders should begin the process of examining their own understanding of who they are and what they believe about equity, the children they serve, and the school community they support, as well as how their beliefs and behaviors connect to determine how they show up in their work.

Practice Profiles define a design essential (critical practice) in the school. Practice profiles create a shared understanding and commitment to the things in the practitioner’s control. These profiles explain in detail expectations for implementation by providing a description of the necessary design essential or critical practices.

The following are benefits of using practice profiles in schools:

-Clearly and consistently defining elements of the charter school model
-Allowing for deeper knowledge and transparency of the work happening in the charter school
-Support co-creation and collaboration between key stakeholders
-Create a culture of continuous improvement
-Use teachers as the experts
-Allowing acknowledgment of areas in the work that need improvement and support
-Practice Profiles could help support educator effectiveness practice
-Providing a structure to help support school, staff, and program evaluation

This resource works collaboratively with the Practice Profile Overview. It is a short step-by-step guide on how to implement a Practice Profile.

Practice Profiles define a design essential (critical practice) in the charter school. Practice profiles create a shared understanding and commitment to the things in the practitioner’s control. These profiles explain in detail expectations for implementation by providing a description of the necessary design essential or critical practices.

The following are benefits of using practice profiles in charter schools:

-Clearly and consistently defining elements of the charter school model
-Allowing for deeper knowledge and transparency of the work happening in the charter school
-Support co-creation and collaboration between key stakeholders
-Create a culture of continuous improvement
-Use teachers as the experts
-Allowing acknowledgment of areas in the work that need improvement and support
-Practice Profiles could help support educator effectiveness practice
-Providing a structure to help support school, staff, and program evaluation

School leadership is conducted through shared responsibilities within established legal structures. Faculty, staff, administration, and boards of a school collaborate to guide and lead the school with input from stakeholder groups. Governance and internal administration are implemented in a manner that cultivates active collaboration, supportive relationships, effective leadership, consequential action, and accountability. These three entities: the leadership council, principal, and executive director make up the collaborative leadership structure of the organization and are there to support all the members of the school community.