Our swiftly changing society profoundly influences the work at schools. Today, public schools in nearly every country are under enormous pressure to change. In many countries the major challenges today are to deal with the increasing technical improvements and the cultural change towards a heterogenous society (cf. e.g. OECD 2019, 2016; Imlig, Lehmann & Manz 2018; European Union 2016; Altrichter & Maag-Merki 2016).

Even when there is rich conceptual and practical educational research literature about educational change there is still a need to learn more about how to shape transitional change processes in school districts and individual schools (Steffens, Heinrich, Dobbelstein, 2016; Reinbach 2016). Especially for project leaders of all levels, this acceleration increasingly begs the question how to bring successfuland sustainable implementation that is accepted and carried through by all those involved. Key participants are principals and project managers as it is their responsibility to ensure guidelines and developments are implemented.

Many principals and project leaders have consciously and purposefully shouldered the challenge of implementing numerous, simultaneous and, in part, highly complex transitional processes. All the same, they are often confronted with scepticism, reserve, doubt and even outright boycott, often by politicians, staff and parents (Rasmussen 2017; Landert 2014).

This is where the project Shaping Transitional Processes in Dynamic Societies comes in, proposed by a research group of the Zurich University of Teacher Education, the Education Authority of the Principality of Liechtenstein and the University of British Columbia. The project aims to develop helpful support services for school principals and project leaders with which current and future reforms and improvements can be mastered alongside the demanding daily school routine.

Based on a literature review on school improvement followed by interviews with principals, teachers and members of school authorities, the project intends to conceive a variety of support services and material. In a second step dialogue workshops with varying participants (schools, school authorities, etc.), develop them further and systematically test their efficacy. In a final step the material will be tested in pilot schools.

In a first step, a literature review was conducted in 2019 with the aim of filtering out relevant factors on school improvement processes. The database "FIS Bildung" was used for the search. Due to the abundance of the indicated publications (156 publications with the keywords "school im-provement AND definition" as well as 445 publications with the keywords "school improvement AND theory") all publications were examined individually. In addition, there were some publications that either did not appear in the search process or were older than 10 years but were written by authors who play a significant role in the German-language professional discourse. The review filtered out ten main factors. Each factor in turn contains second level factors. The factors were reviewed with semi-structured guided expert interviews, sharpened and condensed (again with respective second-level factors) (Brückel, Kuster et al. 2020). The qualitative content anal-ysis by Mayring (2015) was used to evaluate the interviews. The rule- and theory-based procedure was intended to identify "relevant individual factors" (Mayring 2015, p. 22) that are relevant to action in school. Interview partners (school principals, teachers and members of school authorities) were sought who had been involved in school improvement projects over the past 5 years. In the end, 40 interviews were conducted and transcribed. 12 interviews were analyzed due to resource constraints. After combining the results of the literature review and the interviews, nine factors stood out. In a next step, the question raised how the interplay of these nine factors can be presented and described so that - the entire spectrum of factors important to school improvement are represented. - the description is comprehensible and accessible without diminishing complexities, - it supports principals and project leaders in competently initiating transitional processes in their schools. At the end, a first prototype of a model and material were available (Brückel, Kuster et al. 2020). To test whether the model and the material are relevant to stakeholders, dialogue workshops (Brück-el, Larcher et al. 2019; Bohm 2008) with school and project leaders (20 to 25 participants) will be held in spring 2021. In terms of research methodology, the dialogue workshops are based on focus group discussions. After completion of this phase, pilot schools are to be found which are willing to build up their school with the help of the model and the developed material. Therefore a two-year process is planned, dur-ing which the schools will be supported.

The paper presents the initial project and its objectives, shows how the literature review was conduct-ed, and discusses the school improvement factors that emerged from the literature and interviews. The results show that there are certain school improvement factors which are relevant in any change process. These factors can be determined beyond a national context and do not depend on a specific issue. In addition, the model and first results of the dialog workshops will be presented. Beside limitations that became apparent during the process are also pointed out: for example, there is no consistent wording for school development, school improvement or educational change. In conse-quence a literature review a literature review must address the question of which papers are consid-ered. Due to a lack of resources, only a limited number of interviews were evaluated. And finally the question of how to translate research results into a model which is relevant for princi-pals and project leaders has to be discussed critically.

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