Piloting a Self-Assessment Tool for a Whole School Approach to Sustainability in Mongolia

Abstract

This chapter attempts to demonstrate to the readers how Mongolian schools have been introduced to the concept of the Whole School Approach under Education for Sustainable Development pillars within the framework of the financial assistance from the donor-funded project on ESD promotion.

It presents the lessons learned and challenges encountered in this pilot program, which may interest the further strengthening of this approach in school management and planning.

FormalPara Key Message

A key message from this chapter is the transformative role of a WSA self-assessment tool in promoting ESD in Mongolian schools. It highlights the development of a tailored checklist that equipped 30 schools with essential skills in management, planning, collaboration, and problem-solving. The initiative empowered schools to devise specific action plans addressing identified challenges, with leadership playing a crucial role. Implementing the tool required efforts and time, particularly in reorienting the view of the school community as fixed and given to a dynamic and shapeable one.

1 Introduction

Addressing global sustainability challenges through achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is the foremost agenda for many governments worldwide. Target 4.7 of SDG 4 on Quality Education lays out the knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes needed for every citizen to live responsibly within the finite boundaries of the planet and take an active part in addressing local and global challenges through Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) and Global Citizenship Education (GCED). UNESCO (UNESCO, 2015) has urged its member states to focus on human rights, peace, gender equality, sustainable development, and health while meeting target 4.7. The Government of Mongolia (GoM) has put forward the goal of becoming a middle-income country while preserving ecological balance and stable democracy, as articulated in its Sustainable Development Vision-2030 policy document (GoM, 2016). It reflects the aforementioned global agenda in the national-level policies and operations.

Mongolian schools strive to focus on a meaningful contribution to a more sustainable world. The questions of how to nurture students as global citizens, organize school management, and adopt the most effective way of overcoming sustainability challenges within the school walls are of great importance for schools today. To find the answer to the question, we initiated the development of the WSA as a self-assessment tool to help schools reorient toward sustainable development. We piloted the tool in 30 selected schools in Mongolia under a donor-funded project. This paper describes the initial stage of developing and using a WSA self-assessment tool, which we believe will be refined and amended with usage.

2 Why WSA

WSA integrates sustainability principles into all aspects of school life and enables students to live what they learn and learn what they live. The integration of the WSA in schools is a new concept in Mongolia. WSA is a cohesive and collaborative action by a school community aiming to raise quality and standards across the entire school. Every school has different starting points and needs. Using a WSA might help a school community find optimal solutions to address their needs and challenges. According to UNESCO International Bureau of Education (UNESCO, 2023), it involves addressing the needs of learners, staff, and the wider community not only within the curriculum but across the whole school and learning environment. On the other hand, it promotes a new school management culture in Mongolia as a school community tends to follow school principals’ decisions which are always top-to-down.

The first initiative to pilot the WSA in Mongolia was operationalized within the Education for Sustainable Development-Phase II (ESD-II) project implemented by the GoM in partnership with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation in 2019–2022. This project aimed to transform education policies and schools toward achieving sustainability goals under the SDGs and national development goals. The local implementing partner of the ESD-II project, the NGO, Information and Training Centre for Nature and Environment (ITCNE, 2020), coordinated the entire process of piloting WSA and introducing the self-assessment tool to the 30 pilot schools in Mongolia under this project implementation.

Piloting the WSA as a self-assessment tool in the selected schools was a timely response in contributing to the education reforming process in Mongolia. School management and school-level planning have been considered among the weakest areas in the Mongolian education system since its transition to democracy in the 1990s. This has been due to the weak capacity of the schools to plan their activities as per their needs and situation and the lack of a systemic approach in school planning by school leaders. The government has been paying more attention to this area by revising its policy directions. The WSA self-assessment tool development and piloting intended to address this school-level planning capacity deficit since school governance is one of the salient pillars of the WSA.

3 How We Have Started

The GoM formed a project consulting team comprising leading education researchers from national education research institutions and specialists with school planning and management background. The team reviewed the government rules and related policy direction, such as the Ministry of Education’s (MES) criteria for school performance assessment and the State Inspection Agency’s criteria for school inspection. However, these criteria were only related to monitoring school activities and did not investigate the issue of a holistic approach to school management mentioned earlier. Schools had never conducted a self-assessment of their management. The WSA, for the first time, ushered in a school-level planning tool through the self-assessment exercise involving everyone inside and outside the school: teachers, the school’s administrative and other staff, students, local communities, and parents while harnessing local wisdom.

A prominent aspect of rolling out the WSA in Mongolia started with selecting schools that would become pilots of the approach. The GoM, the MES, and the Ministry of Environment and Tourism (MET), both partners in the ESD project, nominated a number of Mongolian secondary schools from various geographical locations through an open announcement. The aimag/district local education departments administered the school selection process.

The expression of interest to participate in the WSA tool piloting activity was delivered to all nominated schools to submit their short proposal explaining why they need to adopt a WSA. On receiving proposals from the interested schools, the local education departments reviewed them, assessing them against the prepared criteria. The school selection criteria prepared by the consulting team included the school’s willingness to participate in the pilot and their expectations, the school’s previous activities in ESD, and the school’s motivation to look at their present situation for further improvement.

Based on the review results, the local education departments selected the 30 schools (24 rural and six urban schools) in six aimags and two districts of Ulaanbaatar. The reason for picking up the locations is that SDC’s project activities were implemented before in those places, so WSA tool piloting would complement the already invested areas to maximize the project impact there.

The next step was to formulate the actual WSA self-assessment tool suitable for Mongolian school conditions considering their specifics and needs. The project consulting team and ITCNE worked on this demanding task. They used UNESCO’s (2014) conceptual framework as the foundation for the design of the self-assessment tool. According to UNESCO (2014), the WSA is an approach that covers all aspects of school governance, organizational structure, operations, research, human resource development, curriculum, school infrastructure, students’ participation, partnership with parents and public relations, organizational culture, and school values. In Mongolia, the WSA was considered an appropriate framework for assessing what exists, creating a plan to address gaps, and identifying measures of progress as it includes:

• An overarching supportive, safe, and inclusive school culture

• School-based programs in and out of the classroom that focus on social-emotional learning and respect for differences

• School policy that prioritizes, monitors, and reports on progress for all students, with a focus on eliminating disparities

• School partnerships to bring community programs and resources into the school setting to augment school capacity and address families’ needs beyond the classroom

In addition, the consulting team examined and reviewed the national school inspection criteria and standards and the experience of schools using the WSA in countries such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and India. Besides, the documents on key outputs and the experience of previous donor-funded projects in Mongolia related to supporting school management approaches (“Rural school” project by DANIDA, “Open school” project by Open Society Foundation, and “Eco school” project by Swiss Development Cooperation) have been reviewed.

After reviewing the existing documents and international experiences, the consulting team created a draft version of the WSA tool applicable to Mongolian schools. The tool has 10 handbooks designed to support schools in adapting the tool to their activities.

4 The WSA Self-Assessment Tool

The WSA self-assessment tool was developed and described in detail in the following segments. The WSA Self-assessment tool is a series of handbooks for schools. A compendium of 10 handbooks was developed, unpacking each domain of the WSA, ensuring that they were understandable for schools and easy to use for everyone, as the schools were expected to go through the handbooks by themselves.

WSA tool integrates all aspects of school life, focusing more on sustainability challenges. Schools are supposed to review their current status in various aspects of school development and identify the right solutions to address their challenges. The core principle is to involve the entire school community in the school development planning process. The whole school is supposed to learn how to plan together by themselves instead of hanging around a plan prepared by their school administrators only.

The Mongolian WSA self-assessment tool is a comprehensive model that encompasses all aspects of school life:

• 1. 5 domains and 24 subdomains

• 2. 4 core themes related to ESD

• 3. 5 maturity levels of each domain

• 4. Principles for each domain

4.1 Five Domains and 24 Subdomains of the WSA Self-Assessment Tool

The first component of the WSA Self-assessment tool has five domains or the different strands of the WSA and subdomains. Domains are expected to cover all aspects of school life. It has the following five domains, encompassing every aspect of a school: (i) governance; (ii) capacity building and human resource development; (iii) curriculum, teaching, and learning; (iv) school and its surrounding environment; and (v) partnership and collaboration. Each of these five domains is unpacked into 24 subdomains. Table 13.1 presents the five domains and the corresponding 24 subdomains.

Table 13.1 Five domains and 24 subdomains of the WSA Self-assessment tool

4.2 Four Core Themes of the WSA Self-Assessment Tool

The second component of the WSA Self-Assessment tool has transversal core themes. These are as follows: (i) sustainable development; (ii) human rights; (iii) gender equity, and (iv) global citizenship. These have been adapted from UNESCO’s Global Education Monitoring Report (2016), where countries were reviewed for the implementation of target 4.7 of SDG 4. It states:

By 2030, ensure that all learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to promote sustainable development, including, among others, through education for sustainable development and sustainable lifestyles, human rights, gender equality, promotion of a culture of peace and nonviolence, global citizenship and appreciation of cultural diversity and of culture’s contribution to sustainable development (UNESCO, 2020). 

4.3 Five Levels of Maturity of Each Domain

A third component of the tool is the maturity level which presents the level at which a school is in. We assume that during each round of using the WSA Self-Assessment tool by schools, the maturity level of the domains will change as per the school’s needs and efforts. It will also aid the school in tracking and monitoring its progress. The five levels of maturity for each domain are explained in Table 13.2.

Table 13.2 Meaning of maturity levels for each domain

4.4 Principles for Each Domain

Bringing the principles related to each domain and subdomain would be pertinent here. The principles for each domain have been identified by the consulting team based on the review of existing literature. Each domain’s principles required proper justifications as follows:

• (i) The principles for the domain of “governance” were adapted from the Handbook Governance Approach by SDC (2017).

• (ii) The principles for the domain of “capacity building and human resource development” were selected to ensure their alignment with the ESD core competencies.

• (iii) The principles for the domain of “curriculum, teaching, and learning” were taken from the core principles and teaching methods for ESD identified globally.

• (iv) The principles for the domain of “school and its surrounding environment” were aligned with the standards of ISO 41001 on “facility management”.

• (v) The principles for the domain of “partnership” were aligned with the principles of the Global Humanitarian Platform prepared by the International Volunteers’ Association (Platform, 2007).

As each domain has different principles applied, let us present one example using the domain of “governance.” For the domain of “governance,” the following six principles have been identified (see Table 13.3). These principles were taken from handbook Governance Approach by SDC prepared under the donor-funded project, and also these principles were previously defined by SDC recommendations (SDC, 2017).

Table 13.3 An example of the six principles for the domain of governance

Table 13.3 shows that the domain of “governance” should be aligned with the following six principles: (i) effectiveness; (ii) participation level; (iii) transparency; (iv) accountability; (v) equality; and (vi) response to legal requirements. These principles are supposed to be used by school staff when they identify the current school governance challenges. It would give us more information, for example, on whether school activities involve everyone and whether the school’s budget is transparent for everyone. In other words, this domain will disclose whether the school activities administered by the principal meet the principles. On the other hand, this study evaluates the six principles in the school context. The school handbooks have described these principles in detail to make them understandable.

5 How Schools Learned to Use the Tool

The ITCNE designed a comprehensive and step-by-step training plan to reach everyone at the targeted schools. Training modules covered the content of 10 handbooks on the WSA. The training plan was a cascading model preparing the first six representatives from each school as the master trainers through Training of Trainers (ToT). At the beginning of the first ToT, a pretest was carried out among the participants to gauge their understanding of ESD concepts and their willingness to introduce the WSA at the school level. At the end of the project in 2023, these participants will be asked to write a posttest report to document the changes that have occurred. The ToT was conducted during the COVID pandemic, so the training content was prepared and transacted using EdTech solutions. The training package included video lectures, reading materials, and workbooks.

The second step in the cascade training was the training of the other participants of schools by the master trainers. The ITCNE recently interviewed a few school principals of targeted schools who were a part of the WSA piloting process. They highlighted that delivering information or making every teacher understand the sense of WSA in the Mongolian context was challenging. Delivering important messages to all teachers usually takes on a face-to-face mode in Mongolia. Especially for bigger-sized urban schools, it was not easy to convene all the teachers and make everyone understand what was expected to be done. Because it is a self-assessment to be done for the first time involving the entire school community at the school, everyone’s participation was important. As a school principal mentioned, for a smaller rural school, it was much easier to reach every teacher. Also, participants mentioned that a general understanding of the importance of ESD and SD was weak at the project’s beginning stage, but now this understanding has been enormously improved during the process of piloting the WSA tool. After reviewing the WSA handbooks and receiving a series of training, the target schools administered the first round of self-assessment. Each school’s entire community gathered and gave scores to each WSA domain. The scores for each domain were entered into an Excel worksheet that ITCNE developed. This Excel worksheet provided them with the maturity level of each domain automatically. The use of the tool empowered the school community with a clear understanding of their school’s strengths and drawbacks.

The actual process of administering the first round of WSA Self-Assessment went through the following stages:

• Analyzing the current situation of school life and identifying the challenges.

• Identifying the solutions to address the current problems.

• Determining the actions to be taken to meet the expectation.

The assessment process required the participation of not only the school teachers and students but also parents and local communities, including local government administrators. Additionally, it was a new exercise to conduct school-level self-assessments by themselves because, in Mongolia, external parties or upper-level authorities usually do assessments. During the first round, a total of 14,000 participants from selected target 30 schools participated in the assessment exercise. 14.9% were from local communities who are sub-national-level administrators, local education authorities, and local service providers in education and health sectors. 84.7% were beneficiaries of the education sector, such as school students, their parents, school teachers, school support staff, and school administrators.

5.1 Challenges

There have been some challenges identified. The biggest challenge was the issue of how to involve everyone. A recent interview with a few school principals (one urban school and three rural schools) who were a part of the first round highlighted that it was not easy to invite everyone into this process because some people did not understand why they were doing it. Moreover, the process seemed overwhelming for them, initially covering all aspects of their life.

After the first round, it became simpler, and the second time round, they were able to do the exercise much more confidently and easily. They were also motivated now because they were able to find the solution to the difficult question of how to plan school life and how to make their schools more welcoming and relevant for the learners. Another important lesson was to learn to identify their problems. Schools became aware that they were using a “magnifying glass lens” to assess where they were, what their issues were, and how they would best be able to nurture their teachers and students to become active contributors to sustainable development.

The participants understood that it was an exercise to involve everyone at the school level toward the next step of addressing their problems based on the self-assessment findings. It was a new and challenging goal for schools. It was a whole process of changing the attitude and minds of people at the school, asking them to participate in school-related decision-making, which was a completely new culture in the case of Mongolia. Earlier, school decisions were usually made by only one person, namely the school principal. With the introduction of WSA, a new culture of everyone’s participation in decision-making was created and piloted. It was time-consuming and an entirely new way and intimidated the schools in the beginning.

Some schools assessed lower in the governance domain tried to introduce student-led governance involving students in all school affairs. Now, the whole school enjoys this culture. But they shared that it was not easy to change the students’ minds. They always waited for their teacher to lead their actions. They learned in this culture gradually.

Having completed the self-assessment checklist, the majority of schools reported in their annual reports to ITCNE that this exercise opened opportunities for further improvement of the school situation, addressing their drawbacks while identifying the causes of the difficulties they encountered. It was an exercise to fully understand the importance of collaboratively planning and monitoring school affairs toward integrating ESD principles. It was, without a doubt, time-consuming and demanding, but it got the whole school to come together and work as a team and ushered in a cultural shift in the way the schools functioned.

6 Analysis of the Findings from the First Round of Assessment

The 30 target schools under the project piloted the first round of the WSA Self-Assessment using the newly developed 10 handbooks as the beginning stage of introducing WSA. Schools entered their scores for each domain and subdomains into the Excel worksheet. The ITCNE compiled all the school data into one database for a thorough analysis to see the general trend of the schools across five domains.

To analyze all schools’ data on five domains, the Leadership Practices Inventory methodology (LPI) (Kouzes and Posner, 2013) was used in the discrepancies in the level of maturity among schools. This method highlights the voices of stakeholders and indicates key focus areas and underlying conditions rather than simply ranking the end results into poor and good ones.

All school data for each domain and subdomain have been aggregated, producing the national-level average points taken by schools. It can present the facts about where the domains are (see Fig. 13.1).

Fig. 13.1

Average maturity level by five domains and their components

The highest score schools are supposed to get is five. Figure 13.1 illustrates the average score schools assessed themselves on each of the 24 subdomains, and five domains ranged from 2.31 to 2.75. This may conclude that schools assessed themselves below the medium level in all domains. In terms of maturity levels, this score is at the second level of the five levels of maturity. The average score for the governance domain was 2.31, the youth employment of partnership domain was 2.41, and the organizational structure and operational mechanism of the human resource development domain scored 2.75. The school campus, security, and sanitation of the school and learning environment scored 2.73, whereas the average for the school building, land use, and protection was 2.71. Importantly, these findings can provide rich data for the school community for evidence-based planning and serve as a baseline to measure the outcome of the follow-up Action Plans.

7 Observations so far

Based on the findings of the Self-Assessment Checklist, schools could identify their weak areas and problems of further attention. During the recent interviews, a few school principals (one urban and three rural schools were invited) said that this beginning stage of planning was not easy in terms of making everyone toward one goal and one activity. Because school-level planning took place differently, by only a few people or the principal alone, all schools could face this challenge. No collaboration in planning any school-related activity became a culture that significantly impacted the introduction of the WSA tool in school activities.

Schools prepared the Action Plan to adapt the WSA tool in their activities considering the findings of the Self-Assessment exercise. During the project implementation period, the project supported schools with small grant funding to implement their Action Plan activities. Funding was provided due to the gap in the government budget allocations to schools. Schools always face a funding gap to implement quality-related activities according to their needs and specifics.

The project team paid monitoring visits to schools twice a year in cooperation with the local support teams to provide mentoring guidance and assistance. Schools also sent progress reports presenting their results of the WSA tool adaptation. The project team reviewed the school progress reports and reached the following conclusions:

• (i) Principles of good governance were embedded in school-level planning. The process of involving joint efforts and collective decision-making to arrive at solutions was a step-by-step process and not easy. But now, many schools reported that collaborative decision-making has become school culture. They especially enjoy when students take an active part in this process. This whole approach improved effectiveness in school governance, as they told.

• (ii) Each school’s plan of action reflected their pressing needs incorporating various ESD elements into the teaching and learning process. This has taken the learning process beyond the cognitive area and has put more focus on social and behavioral competencies, creating a learning environment that connects classroom learning to life and practice. Many schools focused on the domain of school surrounding to provide a favorable learning environment. They created school outside gardens to be used for science experiments. The school’s outdoor and indoor environments were transformed into eco-labs for testing ESD-integrated lessons. Some schools introduced waste recycling and collecting culture at the school level and family and soum levels.

• (iii) The ESD themes have penetrated well into school activities. The examples are the schools where the entire school community was bringing down its ecological footprint by saving water and electricity and through better waste management. Schools learned to identify a solution to save energy and recycle. But the challenge was that soums and aimags do not have facilities to collect recycling goods and waste. No proper system is there. However, schools learned to recycle and manage waste.

• (iv) An innovative partnership model was created between schools, local authorities, and communities. Schools tried to involve local communities in addressing their problems by seeking support from them. A local mentoring team called Sub-TACG has been formed to support schools in ESD implementation. Besides, some schools tried to do advocacy activities on themes like waste management to influence local administration and communities.

In summary, the results of the inception stage of the WSA adoption in 30 Mongolian schools show that the schools have made progress in strengthening their leadership role in ESD by introducing a new management culture and by upholding common human values despite the various challenges mentioned earlier. The key activities observed in target schools can be summarized below by each WSA tool domain:

• 1. Governance: Improved leadership of school principals and managers was witnessed; they learned how to change school management according to the principles of WSA and were able to influence the community, change attitudes, unite for a common goal, and gradually become a model school for ESD. To become an ESD school, the whole school was involved in decision-making in accordance with the principle of cooperation and partnership and democratization of school management. One of the 30 ESD pilot schools (School Number 28 in Ulaanbaatar) encouraged student participation in the decision-making process by making students members of the school’s procurement committee. This school is now named the “School Governed by Students,” a first in Mongolia.

  This study is in line with the review results of the study by Henderson and Tilbury (2004). The review results demonstrated that a committee/working group (with management, staff, students, and stakeholder participation) should be formed to decide on actions and review the school planning and operation progress. Plus, it shows that democratic decision-making and meaningful participation of all stakeholders are at the center of WSA.

• 2. Capacity building and human resource development: Schools learned how to integrate the ESD pillars into all school activities by piloting unique approaches to building their capacity. All school staff, including school cooks, learned in their work areas. The cooks became proficient in preparing nutritious and healthy food for children. At the same time, students from the eco-clubs of a school in Arkhangai province trained the support staff about the ecological footprint. They supported them in improving the energy efficiency of their school.

  ESD-integrated lessons were prepared by teachers of different subjects per the “Mutual Learning” principle. As stated earlier, traditionally, cooperation is weak among the teachers, but their attitude changed, and they supported each other, sharing their experiences and planning lessons together. Many schools piloted “ESD Integrated Project-based Lessons,” which is a step toward bringing training closer to reality, saving teachers’ time, and using available resources to improve the quality of education.

• 3. Curriculum, teaching, and learning: “School-based curricula” has been a new approach toward making learning closer to real-life practices integrating SD pillars. Schools continue testing various approaches and methodologies supported by the national expert team. Its results can feed the process of the new national curriculum cycle to be started in 2024 as best practice examples. To date, over 10 schools have developed and tested school-based curriculum models. This approach helps schools to introduce innovations such as EdTech while using place-based learning. To continue learning under challenging conditions, such as during the COVID pandemic, and promote blended and online teaching methods in the future, 30 percent of the targeted schools have tested the curricula creating a modern blended learning classroom.

• 4. School and its surrounding environment: Schools have made enormous efforts to create a favorable learning environment for students through learning new principles of sustainable use, such as saving water and electricity, growing vegetables in greenhouses, segregating and managing waste, and converting unused spaces into study spaces for the students, popularly known as “corridor libraries.” Some schools became model schools of sustainable consumers by creating new habits and activities to recycle and reuse. Forty percent of the pilot schools initiated a new waste management culture not only at the school level but also at the community level. Recycling and collecting waste have become an everyday habit for many people as a result of the school initiative. Another new activity that some schools could promote was creating an eco-environment. One of the pilot schools (School Number 15 in Orkhon province) could create a new garden with plenty of plants where students now do science experiments and plant trees. In addition, this school built a winter greenhouse to provide vegetables for its students (primarily children of nomadic herders) living in the dormitory.

  Our findings show some similarities to Ireland’s Green School research (O’Mahony & Fitzgerald, 2001). It indicates that students are less likely to drop less garbage while being more likely to conserve water and energy and think about the environment.

• 5. Partnership: The birth of a local coordinating mechanism comprising the local authorities, community members, and members of the local media to support the ESD schools was an unexpected result for the ESD-II project. These local coordination groups have emerged as champions of ESD. Thus, an innovative partnership model has been created between schools and local organizations, and schools are learning advocacy activities to influence local administration and communities. This partnership has proved effective in many areas: (i) many schools could raise extra funding from local governments, a new initiative in the case of Mongolia. The school in Khyalganat of Bulgan province created a new summer camp where students can explore science experiments and vegetable planting. This school could raise funding of USD 140,000 from the local government and communities. The governor of the Khovd province has earmarked a budget of USD 90,000 for the further development of ESD in the schools of his province; (ii) schools piloted various activities to introduce sustainable consumption like the waste management system in their localities and promoted initiatives to revitalize the local heritage considering that the local community is a live carrier of cultural heritage and a source of learning. Our study findings are supported by the study by Henderson and Tilbury (2004) (p.39), which highlights the importance of the WSA process to create and strengthen links and partnerships with the community. Examples of the par”ners’ip include active participation in projects outside the school boundaries and equal and reciprocal partnerships.

8 Summing Up

This pilot of utilizing a WSA self-assessment tool in school activities in Mongolia has shown to be an example to be scaled up in the future. It was a learning process to improve everyday schooling adding more new insights related to school-based ESD development. Implementing the Self-Assessment Checklist also gave schools new knowledge, insights, and skills in school management, school development planning, identification of the challenges in collaboration, and finding solutions in a partnership covering all areas of school practices. This has ushered in a new progressive culture in Mongolian schools and will inspire more schools to follow their example. Moreover, the GoM is keen to scale up the WSA model to all schools in Mongolia. Through this project, schools could develop school-specific action plans to take concrete actions to address the challenges identified from the checklist, and each school’s plan was specific to its unique context. Leadership by school administrators was a critical aspect of the successful experiment with the tool. The whole process in 30 schools was not easy to implement right away. It took some time and effort from everyone. Reorienting the entire school community toward collaborating for the school development using the new tool called the WSA self-assessment tool was a key challenge for project implementers and school administrators. Change of attitude and understanding of the school community, from something that is fixed and a given, to something that is dynamic and can be shaped, was the biggest challenge in this process. The new culture of involving everyone in school management and the decision-making process has been a steep and long learning curve for everyone.