You’re feeling good – you have created demand for modeling your school as a PLC and have structures in place to answer the key questions. You are making progress along the PLC journey… Well, you think you are. Or perhaps your PLC is stagnant; you are not seeing progress or you are not sure about how to measure it. Or maybe your school is just beginning the PLC journey and you are questioning how to monitor the first stages, especially since small wins are essential in the beginning to sustain the momentum. Or perhaps you’re wrestling with when and how to lay out the next steps of your school’s improvement work and are trying to determine how it fits into the larger school improvement plan.
Hundred Day Plans provide an effective and efficient time frame for school improvement. As the authors pointed out in an earlier article entitled More Than Wishful Thinking, Using Hundred Day Plans to Achieve School Goals (TEPSA, September/October 2012), “It takes about one hundred days for the impact of your actions to become clear… These short cycle [Hundred Day] plans describe the desired outcomes, identify the necessary resources and assign key responsibilities over a specified period of time.” The typical 100-day cycle begins in August and concludes at the beginning of February, right before many schools and districts engage in state and national assessments. This specific, targeted time frame provides an authentic benchmark to evaluate the success of the current school improvement plan.