What Story Are You Telling? How to Evaluate Your School Improvement Plan
May 8, 2025 May 8, 2025
Every school has a story.
What story are you telling? Whether it’s one of resilience, growth, rebuilding, or innovation, these narratives shape how educators, leaders, and communities see their progress.
Yet, as I work with principals nationwide, I’ve noticed a recurring question that surfaces at the end of every school year:
What do we attribute our success or challenges to?
This isn’t just reflective, it’s strategic. The answers to this question influence everything from next year’s goals and coaching conversations to resource allocation and staff morale.
But what happens when those answers miss the mark? Consider the following:
- Scenario 1: the principal who credits rising test scores to a new reading app, only to discontinue the additional teacher collaboration time that drove the improvement.
- Scenario 2: the leadership team abandoning a promising approach because they misdiagnosed why initial results fell short.
These attribution errors don’t just cloud understanding, they actively undermine school improvement efforts, waste limited resources, and can fuel teacher cynicism from the varied improvement cycles.
This is where Attribution Theory matters more than we think. By examining how you assign causes to outcomes, you can develop more accurate narratives about what’s working, why it’s working, and how to build upon it. This article will guide you through:
- Common attribution errors in schools
- Their costly consequences
- A practical framework for telling your school’s improvement story with greater precision and purpose
Applying Attribution Theory ultimately transforms how you plan, implement, and sustain meaningful change in your school.
What Is Attribution Theory in Education?
Attribution Theory explains how people interpret the causes of events. In education, we attribute student outcomes, good or bad, to specific actions, decisions, or circumstances.
It’s the mental model behind:
- “Our scores went up because of the new remediation program.”
- “Student engagement tanked after we changed the schedule.”
- “Our PLCs are working because we hired strong team leads.”
These interpretations form the narrative of your improvement efforts. And yet, if your attributions are off, your next steps will be as well.
Why Are Educators Particularly Susceptible to Attribution Errors?
Because schools are dynamic, complex, and deeply human systems, it is common to misdiagnose the reasons behind your outcomes.
With dozens of variables affecting student learning, such as curriculum, instruction, relationships, trauma, technology, leadership, it is tempting to grasp the most obvious explanation.
But that is when errors creep in.
As educators, we:
- Want to celebrate success (sometimes too quickly).
- Focus on narrow specifics, like a specific video series on Main Idea
- Feel the pressure to explain results clearly to stakeholders.
- Gravitate toward causes we can control (or at least explain).
For example, you may attribute growth to a new tech tool when, in reality, it was a more profound shift, like improved collaboration or more strategic use of data, that made the real impact.
What Are the Costs of Getting Attribution Wrong in Education?
Misattribution isn’t just an academic concern, it actively undermines school improvement in specific, costly ways:
- Wasted Investments: Schools repeatedly invest in popular programs while overlooking effective, unglamorous practices. For example, a school purchasing expensive reading software when teacher collaboration time was actually driving the reading gains.
- Implementation Confusion: Teams pursue contradictory strategies because they are working from different theories of change. For example, different grade-level teams attribute success to different factors and pull resources in opposite directions.
- Teacher Cynicism: When leadership trumpets simple causation stories that contradict classroom reality, teachers lose faith in the improvement process. For example, crediting a new curriculum for achievement gains when teachers believe student support services made the difference.
- Poor Planning: Improvement plans are only as strong as the diagnosis they’re based on. Bad attribution leads to misaligned plans.
Simply put: If we get the “why” wrong, we’re unlikely to get the “what’s next” right.
How Do Community and Administrative Pressures Influence Attribution?
This is where leadership gets tricky because community and administrative pressures can cause a leader to fall into two traps:
- The Urgency Trap
- The Oversimplification Trap
What Is the Urgency Trap?
The Urgency Trap occurs when district leaders, school boards, and community members often want quick answers to questions like this:
- “What caused the drop in math scores?”
- “Why did attendance improve?”
- “What did you do differently this year?”
While these are fair questions, they often cause leaders to fall into the oversimplification trap.
What Is the Oversimplification Trap?
The Oversimplication Trap occurs because the leader is expected to respond confidently without too much jargon. This can cause a leader to:
- Reduce nuanced data into sound bites, like students spent 45 minutes a week on a specific program.
- Credit highly visible changes over quiet, long-term ones.
- Focus on what is easy to measure rather than what is meaningful to change.
The result? Attribution becomes performative, not strategic. It favors visibility over validity.
What Makes Good Attribution Analysis Different from Bad?
Strong attribution analysis requires the courage to embrace complexity and uncertainty. Consider these contrasting approaches:
| Bad Attribution | Good Attribution |
| “We improved because of the new tech tool.” | “We saw growth where the tech was integrated with purposeful instruction.” |
| “This teacher is just naturally good.” | “This teacher uses modeling, checks for understanding, and adapts instruction based on data.” |
| “It just worked.” | “Here’s how we planned, adjusted, and supported implementation.” |
In other words, good attribution focuses on the process, not just the product.
Reflection Exercise: What Is YOUR School Success Story?
Your school’s story should reflect the true complexity of change while remaining actionable. Strong attribution narratives:
- Acknowledge uncertainty while maintaining confidence
- Connect multiple data points into coherent patterns
- Respect the time required for meaningful change
- Consider both intended and unintended consequences
- Recognize the human elements of school improvement
Our School’s Story Guide
This is why I created the Our School’s Story guide within this article as a tool to help you tell your story. It assists leaders to move beyond surface-level success stories to a deeper, actionable narrative that respects both the effort and the impact.
It frames reflection around three parts:
- Part 1: Our Choices
- Part 2: Our Journey
- Part 3: Our Outcome
Part I – Our Choices
Effective leaders acknowledge internal capabilities and external constraints when describing initial expectations and challenges. They recognize that improvement requires alignment between what is within their control and what is shaped by context. This balanced attribution sets realistic expectations and creates accountability without overreaching.
Start your story by answering the following questions:
- What new expectations did we set, or challenges we focused on, at the beginning of the year?
- How did we plan to implement new expectations or address our challenges?
- How did we plan to evaluate the impact of these changes?
Part II – Our Journey
The journey section explicitly acknowledges the collaborative nature of improvement, countering the tendency toward individual attribution. By highlighting how “the collaboration of the staff led to new heights,” leaders attribute success to collective effort rather than individual heroics. Similarly, by analyzing pitfalls honestly, leaders can avoid defensive attribution and instead create learning opportunities.
Continue your story by answering the following questions:
- What new heights did we achieve based on our expectations or challenges?
- How did the collaboration of the staff lead to the new heights?
- What pitfalls hindered us reaching other new heights?
- How did the pitfalls impact the journey?
Part III – Our Outcome
Evidence becomes crucial for accurate attribution. When leaders point to specific, measurable evidence of successes and failures, they ground their story in reality rather than perception. This evidence-based approach prevents selective attribution where leaders highlight only favorable outcomes while ignoring contradictory indicators.
Close your story by answering the following questions:
- What evidence illustrates our new heights?
- What evidence demonstrates that we did not overcome our pitfalls?
- How will we sustain our new heights moving forward?
- How will we use our lack of success to review, reflect, and revise our plan moving forward?
Final Thought
The story you tell about school improvement shapes the future you create. When you rush to attribute success or failure to simple causes, you miss the rich complexity that could inform truly transformative change.
The next time you are tempted to declare “This worked!” pause and ask:
- What else changed during this period?
- Who might see this differently?
- What evidence would challenge our assumption?
- How can we test our attribution theory?
Because if you aren’t careful, the improvement story becomes a highlight reel rather than a learning tool. So, as you close out the school year, consider that telling the right story is not just about celebrating what happened but about understanding why it happened.
And in schools, the “why” is everything.
