Independent Schools
Student success for independent schools
Independent schools have the freedom to shape an education around their own mission and their knowledge of each student. That includes understanding the student’s strengths, interests, experiences, and needs, and creating the conditions in which they can grow.
True Progress supports that work through a Student Success System that brings faculty knowledge, leadership, and learning support together. The shared commitment is to know each student deeply, act on that understanding, and keep examining whether the school’s response is helping.
From Student Support to Student Success
Student support brings expertise to particular needs. A Student Success approach connects that work with the school’s responsibility to know and respond to every student.
A student may appear to be keeping up while relying on workarounds that become less effective as the curriculum changes. Another may need greater challenge, a different approach to teaching, or conditions that make learning possible.
Teachers, specialists, and leaders bring their knowledge together with the student’s and family’s experience. They develop a fuller understanding, agree how to respond, and keep examining whether their efforts are helping.
Partnership
Working with your school
True Progress works with your leadership team and faculty on your school’s own students, priorities, and educational approach. The work draws on founder David Stevens’s background in learning and student support and his doctorate from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Leadership
Clarify how the school responds to student needs, shares responsibility, and reviews whether its response is helping.
Faculty
Professional learning and coaching help educators build a shared understanding of students and develop their approaches to teaching and support.
Families
Prepare for conversations that bring together the family’s knowledge, the school’s understanding, and a clear account of what happens next.
Peer practice
Draw on experience from other independent schools addressing similar questions about challenge, learning support, and transitions between divisions.
Student Success System
Five connected drivers
Five connected drivers support the school’s continuing work of knowing students, responding to their needs, and examining what is helping.
Visibility
Visibility combines True Progress assessments with the knowledge of educators, students, and families. The Screener, Diagnostic, and Inventory help the school investigate ELA and math learning as part of its continuing work to understand each student’s strengths, needs, and experience.
How the assessments workFocused Curriculum
Curriculum that provides the foundations, depth, and challenge students need, shaped by the school’s educational aims and knowledge of its students.
Instruction
Formative Teaching that responds as learning unfolds, drawing on assessment, classroom work, observation, and students’ own reflections to develop understanding and independence.
Meaningful Data
Evidence that helps educators understand progress over time and examine whether instruction and support are helping.
Workflows
Shared routines for bringing knowledge together, making decisions, following through, and sustaining attention as students move between teachers and divisions.
School context
Your school’s context
True Progress helps your school understand students’ learning in relation to its own curriculum and expectations. National and independent-school comparisons add perspective to decisions about support and challenge.
Trusted by leading independent schools
Get Started
Begin with a pilot
Begin with a no-fee, 90-day Visibility Pilot for one classroom or one grade level. Two assessment windows let your school explore what it can learn about its own students and their progress.
Faculty and leadership can then consider how True Progress could support the school’s wider student success work.