Independent Schools
Student success for independent schools
Independent schools have the freedom to build an education around their mission and their knowledge of students. That freedom is one of the sector’s great strengths, and it places a high demand on the school: knowing students deeply enough to make thoughtful decisions about curriculum, teaching, challenge, intervention, and opportunity as they develop.
True Progress helps schools make that understanding shared and durable. The Student Success System connects faculty knowledge, student and family perspectives, assessment, teaching, and continuing review so the school can know every student deeply, act on that understanding, and keep examining whether its response is helping.
From Student Support to Student Success
Student support brings essential expertise to particular needs. Its work often begins when a concern, referral, evaluation, or visible difficulty brings a student into closer attention. A Student Success approach retains that expertise while extending shared attention to every student.
A student may appear to be keeping up while relying on workarounds that become less effective as academic demands increase. Another may accumulate accommodations without a clear account of whether the underlying learning is changing. A student earning strong grades may meet every requirement while receiving too little depth, challenge, or opportunity to develop greater independence.
Teachers, specialists, and leaders bring their knowledge together with student and family perspectives. They develop an explanation of what the student needs, decide how to respond, and return to the student’s subsequent learning and experience to determine whether that understanding and response still hold.
Partnership
Working with your school
True Progress works with leadership teams, faculty, and specialists on the school’s own students, curriculum, and priorities. The work focuses on practical questions: how the school develops a shared understanding of students, how that understanding informs educational decisions, and how faculty return to the evidence of what happened next. The work draws on founder David Stevens’s three decades in learning, assessment, and student support, including doctoral study at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Leadership
Develop shared practices for knowing students, clarifying responsibility, and reviewing whether teaching, challenge, and intervention are helping. Leadership creates the conditions for understanding to travel across teams and school years.
Faculty
Professional development and coaching connect research with questions from the school’s own classrooms. Faculty strengthen their ability to understand student thinking, respond during teaching, interpret evidence, and examine what students subsequently understand and can do.
Families
Bring the family’s knowledge, the school’s evidence, and the student’s own perspective into a coherent account of learning. Conversations clarify what the school understands, what it is still investigating, what will happen next, and how progress will be reviewed.
Peer practice
Draw on what True Progress is learning across independent schools facing similar questions about neurocomplexity, challenge, intervention, family communication, and transitions between divisions. Peer experience provides perspective without assuming that another school’s answer should become yours.
Student Success System
Five connected drivers
Independent schools already possess deep expertise in relationships, curriculum, teaching, and student support. The five drivers connect those strengths so that knowledge of students informs learning, evidence informs judgment, and decisions reliably carry forward.
Visibility
Develop a shared, current understanding of every student from faculty knowledge, classroom work, assessment, and student and family perspectives. Visibility includes strengths, interests, ambitions, difficulties, progress, and experience of school.
How the assessments workFocused Curriculum
Connect the school’s educational ambitions with what students understand and need next. Focused Curriculum strengthens foundations, creates coherence across learning, and gives faculty a purposeful path into greater depth and challenge.
Instruction
Use Formative Teaching to adjust instruction, practice, feedback, and challenge in response to what students understand and need next. Evidence from learning changes what happens while learning is still unfolding.
Meaningful Data
Develop shared meanings for learning, progress, and proficiency so evidence strengthens professional judgment rather than creating more noise. Faculty examine whether students are moving and whether teaching and intervention appear to be helping.
Workflows
Turn shared understanding into dependable action. Clear responsibilities, useful review points, and continuity across classrooms and divisions help the school carry decisions forward and return to what students experience next.
School context
Your school’s context
An independent school should not have to reduce student success to an external definition. Its mission, curriculum, expectations, and knowledge of its students provide essential context for understanding learning and deciding what should come next.
National and independent-school comparisons add useful perspective. They can help educators understand where a student stands and how learning is changing, but they do not determine what the school should value or what a particular student should pursue next.
True Progress helps faculty interpret assessment evidence alongside classroom work, student experience, and the school’s educational aims. External reference points strengthen judgment without replacing it.
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.