How do you spot a culture of continuous improvement in a school? You’ll see it in lots of places: daily or weekly check-ins among teachers, periodic opportunities to analyze information together, regular principal office hours, professional learning that’s never “one-and-done,” ongoing conversations about hiring, budget, and school goals, and more.

You’ll also see it in the presence of students and families at the table when questions are discussed and decisions are made. At Thomas A. Edison Career and Technical High School in New York City, for example, students participate in teacher planning teams—which, according to teachers, was especially helpful for improving remote learning when their school building was closed because of COVID.

In schools with an improvement mindset, educators relentlessly fine-tune their school design to ensure equity, expand opportunity, and improve outcomes for all students. Experts in improvement science at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recommend three steps:

1. Look for patterns and identify problems. For example, a high school implementing personalized, competency-based learning might notice that a particular group of students consistently lags behind in mastering learning goals.
2. Diagnose the root cause of the problem. It takes trust and frank dialogue to avoid two common improvement traps. The first is “solutionitis,” rushing to implement a solution without fully understanding the actual problem you’re trying to solve. The second is fixating on students themselves or their families as the root of a problem, which stymies a school’s ability to act.
3. Try, test, and adjust again. Any solution is only as good as how well it works. Effective schools monitor the success of a new strategy or innovation, then decide whether to expand it, adjust it, or dump it altogether based on how well it’s delivering the results it should.

The bottom line is this: a culture of improvement doesn’t happen automatically. It’s designed into a school by many people, starting with the school leader. Will you invest in data systems and technology that deliver actionable information? Build time for learning and reflection into the master schedule? Intentionally hire staff who bring a learner mindset to everything they do? Align your work around both the key elements of your model and your goals for students and graduates? These are design decisions to make now, which can set the stage for a school that’s resilient, adaptable, and ready for the future.