Aligning International Curriculum Standards and Practices with National Quality Assurance Frameworks

This Organizational Improvement Plan proposal will consider how the directors of our group of international schools can begin the work of aligning values, standards and practices to meet the needs of both the individual international schools and the nationalized quality assurance frameworks -- working with individual school principals in our home nation. The international school system provides alternatives to local and expatriate parents in an ever-increasing number of schools across the globe. As this number of international school increases, so too does the number of those schools which are required to align their international curriculum standards and practices with nationalized quality assurance requirements in their countries of operation. This often presents widely differing and sometimes divergent norms, values and expectations within a school environment. Taken from the perspective of the leadership of a large group of international schools, this paper explores the complexity of this issue. A cross-cultural perspective which is informed by the work of Hofstede (2011) will employ the action of Distributed Leadership (Gronn, 2002) and various change management drivers to consider how the directors of this large multinational organization can build the capacity and motivation of a group of principals to enact the changes required in each of their individual schools.