This guidebook is designed to help the individual school faculty, staff, and administration create a school plan. Five features critical to a successful school-improvement plan include: support by research findings; a focus on student achievement; attention to issues of quality and equity; collaboration; and an ongoing and self-renewing process. Following the introduction, section 2 provides background information on the effective schools-research and the effective-schools process. Section 3 describes the history of the planning-stage development and an overview of the process. The final section describes in detail the five stages of the school-improvement process: (1) preparation; (2) focus; (3) diagnosis/interpretation of student outcomes and organizational dimensions; (4) plan development; and (5) implementation/monitoring/evaluation/renewal. Individual steps to achieve each of the stages are discussed. Appendices contain checklists, information on components of the school-improvement process, correlates of effective schools, an assessment instrument, a bibliography of other effective-schools instruments, guidelines, and sample plan formats. (Contains 34 references.) (LMI)