Center for School Improvement and Educational Policy

From the 5 Components:
Structural/ Organizational Conditions

These conditions provide the opportunities for other things to change. They may be necessary, but in and of themselves they are typically not sufficient to improve teaching and learning conditions in a building. For example, if teachers are provided with common planning time but do not use it to make substantive change in the nature of their practices and interactions, little improvement will result, common planning time will be viewed as ineffective, and there is a good chance it will be eliminated. Without such planning time, however, we have found that instructional changes do not occur or if they do they are not sustained. Examples of structural/organizational changes that may impact implementation of the nine principles are school and grade enrollment, grade configuration in the building, class size, student-teacher ratios on teams or grades, number of students a teacher is responsible for in one day, instructional tracking and grouping, block scheduling, common planning time for teachers, strategic planning time for staff, bell schedules, length of the day, span of classes covered by a team, number of instructional and professional development days, etc.

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