Before attending the orientation and the institutes that followed it, Hope staff selected a five-member team consisting of the principal, faculty, staff, and parents and community members. The size of this initial team expanded and changed over the course of the school’s participation in the project.

  
 
 
The team from the school attended the day-long orientation meeting held by AED in fall 1996, along with staff from other schools participating in the SSA. As an introduction, they participated in a goals-sorting activity, in which they selected three to five learning goals through a consensus-building process. As a next step, they described what these goals might look like in the classroom and school. Almost immediately participants understood that SSA was (in the words of participants) “non-threatening,” and “not trying to catch you doing something wrong.”   They also saw that SSA differed from other modes of accreditation and evaluation because it was a form of peer review using a school’s own learning goals, rather than an externally mandated checklist, as the basis for review. They grasped that the peer/external review seeks evidence of how a school was fulfilling its goals. In the words of a participant school: “self-assessment involved critical friends who helped us break down barriers to doing what’s best for children.”