School improvement can be a complex, messy business. At its most basic, school improvement is change--change that might require people to abandon long-held beliefs and practices, shift roles, and learn new skills. Kilgore and Reynolds (2011) suggested that successful change requires that people change their perceptions as well as their actions. Otherwise, changes are likely to be superficial, and people will eventually slip back into old behavior patterns. As a result, school improvement efforts are likely to be more effective if they are built on a foundation of understanding about the dynamics of organizational change and the process of effective school improvement. This paper identifies important elements of the process of effective school improvement.