How do school leaders build a collaborative, cohesive culture to ensure high quality learning for all students? This book provides a practical, succinct guide for educators on “how” the core elements of the accreditation process can unite a school in its transformative, continuous improvement journey. The authors explain “what is accreditation” and elaborate on using the core elements for schoolwide involvement and collaboration in determining the effectiveness of a school’s program and systems and the impact on student learning through a perpetual cycle of assessing, planning, implementing, monitoring and reassessing. The authors clarify the “why” of accreditation and provide case studies of schools that have used accreditation as a coherent framework to build the capacity for change. The lessons learned from many educators embracing accreditation also provide further insights. Readers will deepen their understanding of how the accreditation process honors educators’ desire to be self-directed in their passion for learning and well-being for all students. They will understand how accreditation builds and strengthens the trust, engagement, ownership and dialogue among all, viewing the school as a professional learning community. Educational leaders will value the book for its realistic approach to connecting the dots of leadership, coherence, continuous improvement through accreditation.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2023 in the subject Pedagogy - School System, Educational and School Politics, grade: PASS, , course: EDUCATION, language: English, abstract: In the current literature, there is a lack of research information concerning the impact that the school accreditation process can have, including through the generated insights, and the potential transformational journeys, of a diverse group of stakeholders with a shared purpose. The Research Question of this study is: What is the impact of the NEASC accreditation process on meeting the needs of twenty-first-century students? The research offers unique insights, via a case study, of an Indian International School undergoing joint accreditation (Council of International Schools, New England Association of International School, and International Baccalaureate). As this was a case study, the sample size was 5. The researcher, as the school's Head of Design and Technology, and also a foreigner, remains close to the action of the participants, recording different insights of various stakeholders via anecdotal notes, regarding the effects and effectiveness of the accreditation process at the school. The study's focus is on investigating reflections on participating in an international school's accreditation process. While previous research often concentrated on external stakeholders' perspectives, this study emphasizes the views of internal stakeholders within schools. Unlike studies focusing on enrolment and learning impacts, this research explores the narrative perspective of the benefits of international school accreditation. Existing studies highlighted positive impacts on enrolment and mobility of programs, but the research community lacks an in-depth exploration of the narrative aspects of accreditation benefits. The researcher, being a stakeholder in the accreditation process, provides an internal perspective, addressing this gap in the literature. Although researchers have examined international schools over time, a problem that has yet to be addressed regards the insufficient research detailing the benefits of international school accreditation from a narrative perspective. A gap therefore exists both in terms of lack of literature and the adoption of a narrative methodology to solve the problem. Insights from the examination of studies in the field convey that many researchers opt to adopt an external perspective to examine how accreditation processes impact international schools.

Comparative Case Studies: New Designs and Directions extends the comparative case study methodology established by Bartlett and Vavrus and employed in many areas of social research, especially in education. This volume unites a diverse, international group of education scholars whose work exemplifies the affordances and constraints of the comparative case study (CCS) approach and offers new theoretical and empirical directions for researchers. In 11 engaging chapters, experts in comparative education, early childhood education, peace education, refugee education, special education, and teacher education discuss their use of the CCS approach to produce new ways of knowing and to address challenges of multi-scalar and multi-sited research. The first section, Conceptualizing Cases and Case Selection, emphasizes the importance of carefully selecting cases during different phases of research while continuously reflecting on how these choices influence the findings. The second section, Balancing Specificity and Generalizability, addresses the challenge of balancing the need for rich, deep data while including multiple sites. The third section, Enabling Processual Analysis across Sites and Scales, demonstrates the fit between the CCS approach and qualitative research that unfolds over time and space. Addressing the Transversal Axis, the fourth section, showcases research with a strong temporal dimension. The final section, New Directions, suggests inspiring and innovative methods. Offering rich methodological examples and provocative discussion questions, this volume will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students in education and research design courses, and to scholars and policymakers in diverse fields seeking to design studies of complex phenomena at different sites and scales.