Unsere Theory of School Improvement

Our Theory of
School Improvement

Making schools better for everyone involved with them is a difficult task that takes many minds and perspectives working together to critically explore the full potential of possible directions a school community could evolve towards.

Our Theory of School Improvement provides a roadmap to collaborative change.

Our Theory of School Improvement is highly general, in that it may apply widely across social, economic, cultural, and other contextual dimensions of schools around the world. Yet in spite of this generality, it also provides a clear direction, through the twin aims of understanding human behavior and engaging students in school improvement and sustainable development processes.

It is up to local school communities and collaborators to better understand how these broad improvement pathways can be optimized in local settings.

By focusing on these two general classes of educational innovation spaces, schools around the world can contribute to the cultural evolution of a more conceptually coherent and socially valued general education curriculum.

Our Theory of School Improvement is informed by our Educational Design Concept, and operationalized within our Design-Based Research Model.

Explore the alignment between our Theory of School Improvement and the OECD Learning Compass

Read our open access article in the journal Sustainability describing our Theory of School Improvement in more depth:

Behavioral Science and Education for Sustainable Development: Towards Metacognitive Competency

Hanisch, S., & Eirdosh, D. (2023). Behavioral Science and Education for Sustainable Development: Towards Metacognitive Competency. Sustainability 15, no. 9: 7413. https://doi.org/10.3390/su15097413

Behavioral science is increasingly considered foundational for addressing various sustainable development challenges. Behavioral change and action competence have also become important goals in Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), complementing and interacting with other educational goals such as the development of sustainability-relevant knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes. We argue that these interconnected learning goals of ESD can be advanced by integrating interdisciplinary behavioral science concepts, methods, and insights into the design of curricula, learning environments, and processes for participatory whole-school approaches. Specifically, we highlight the role of metacognitive competency in self-directed individual and collective behavior change and we present our educational design concept for teaching human behavior as an interdisciplinary theme in ESD.