ABSTRACT
Worldwide interest in school improvement shows no signs of abating, if different countries’ government policies, the amount of literature published, and attendance at the annual conference of the International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement are used as indicators. In this chapter, the authors outline the components of the project. They examine issues in conducting comparative case studies before looking at some similarities and differences between countries across the improvement process on the basis of case study analysis. The authors present their eventual final framework and offer some recommendations for its use by practitioners, researchers and policy-makers. The project, Capacity for Change and Adaptation in the Case of Effective School Improvement, drew on Hopkins and colleagues’ 1994 definition of improvement, defining effective school improvement as ‘planned educational change that enhances student learning outcomes as well as the school's capacity for managing change’.
