How Principals Can Keep School Improvement Plans Going: Introducing My School Improvement Partner

September 15, 2026

Principals leading school improvement initiatives have to keep long-term priorities in focus while responding to the day-to-day demands of operating a school. A staffing issue, an unexpected knock at the door, or another pressing organizational or instructional need can pull attention away from what must be done to keep school improvement plans in motion.

WestEd’s Center for School Turnaround and Improvement created My School Improvement Partner to address that challenge. The AI-powered thought partner is designed to help principals maintain focus on improvement priorities, work through implementation challenges, and plan their next leadership moves.

In this Q&A, Dr. Terry Hofer, the Director of School Improvement at the Center for School Turnaround and Improvement, shares his experiences with school improvement, the common challenges, and the purpose behind My School Improvement Partner.

What’s it been like leading school improvement efforts across the country, and what separates the schools where progress sticks from the ones where it stalls?

Each time I’m in a school, I have a front-row seat to the endless pressures on school principals for their time and attention. In some cases, after a knock at the door, I sit alone in an empty office waiting for their return. In other instances, the principal protects the time, and we are able to accomplish a lot.

Those experiences have reinforced for me how difficult it is to protect attention on improvement priorities amid the daily realities of leading a school. When principals are able to sustain attention on long-term goals and enlist others on their school improvement journey, the conditions for meaningful progress are stronger. When urgent demands repeatedly pull their attention away, even the most clear-eyed plans grounded in high-impact, evidence-based strategies can lose momentum or fall short of potential.

For years, my colleagues and I have had the privilege of leading improvement efforts in schools across the country. There is little that is more professionally gratifying than hearing the joy in staff members’ voices when they share an improvement journey that results in exceeding their established goals.

At the Center for School Turnaround and Improvement, improvement is grounded in the Four Domains framework. Can you share more about that framework?

The Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement have been central to this work. The Four Domains framework—Turnaround Leadership, Talent Development, Instructional Transformation, and Culture Shift—organizes research into 12 broad practices associated with successful school improvement. It has helped us and thousands of educators answer an essential question: What practices are most likely to accelerate improvement? But identifying the right practices is only part of the challenge. Leaders still have to translate those practices into consistent action while navigating everything that competes for their attention each day.

I believe in the importance of maintaining attention on established goals in the midst of the realities of implementation and have prioritized it as our focus at the Center for School Turnaround and Improvement (CSTI).

The result of that work culminated in the recent release of My School Improvement Partner, an AI agent designed to serve as a thought partner for principals.

What is My School Improvement Partner, and how is it different from other AI tools?

My School Improvement Partner is a purpose-built AI agent created exclusively for school principals leading school improvement efforts. The agent is not designed simply to provide the fastest possible solution. Instead, it is grounded in the Four Domains for Rapid School Improvement and designed to mirror the type of responses that CSTI School Improvement Specialists would provide in coaching sessions. My School Improvement Partner does this by working to understand enough of the school’s context to pose the right questions at the right time.

Principals can upload their School Improvement Plans, attendance data, or other documents to provide My School Improvement Partner with important context about their school and improvement priorities. My School Improvement Partner takes in that information, grounds it in the Four Domains, and then supports principals in determining the next best leadership moves to strengthen implementation.

We created My School Improvement Partner because school principals need a thought partner in the moments between meetings to help them focus their attention on what matters most and to navigate the realities of implementation that threaten to derail the best-laid plans.

What does My School Improvement Partner look like in practice?

My School Improvement Partner facilitates an ongoing conversation grounded in the school’s improvement priorities. Principals can use it to create and refine a school plan, sustain focus on goals, think through implementation challenges, and consider the leadership moves most likely to move the work forward.

In practice, a principal might open My School Improvement Partner after a leadership meeting to think through a follow-up conversation with a key staff member, grade-level team, or department or, at the end of a busy week, to help reset priorities and protect time to advance them in the week ahead.

Initial users have found it most helpful for preparing for meetings, following up after meetings, contemplating feedback for walkthroughs, and scheduling focus time within the agent on their calendar to follow up on priorities.

How do you envision the future of school improvement with My School Improvement Partner?

For the past decade, I have thought about the essence of school improvement as reflection and conversation. The Four Domains framework has helped enrich that reflection by prompting principals to consider the impact of each of the 12 practices. The insights that stem from those reflections lead to opportunities for conversation and idea sharing, whether through one-on-one conversations, in small groups, in meetings, or across an entire faculty.

My School Improvement Partner can help principals identify what is worth reflecting on more quickly and with greater precision. That can lead to better questions, stronger conversations, better ideas in response to challenges, and ultimately, better outcomes for students.

That is exciting—and I am grateful to be immersed in it!

Get Started With My School Improvement Partner

School improvement requires long-term focus on clear priorities. Principals can identify priorities, refine their practice, and sustain their school improvement goals with the support of My School Improvement Partner.

Each My School Improvement Partner license includes an optional onboarding session and quarterly follow-up check-ins with a CSTI School Improvement Specialist. To learn more, please visit msip.wested.org.