Already some time has passed since Harris (2003) noted the 10 points that are “characteristics of schools striving to make improvements.” In addition, later Muijs et. al (2004) reviewed papers on “school improvements burdened with a difficult situation,” extracted commonalities, and clarified 9 items.

　Several years have passed since coordinated efforts and cooperative action research within this kind of school grouping have turned attention to school improvements that include problem solving, professional growth, and building a specialized learning community, thus clarifying that process and the viewpoints and methods of initiatives.

　Until now, school improvement initiatives have also been pragmatically incorporated in Japan by boards of education, schools, and individual researchers. Action research methods have also been incorporated into in-school training with the aim of including problem solving and professional growth. Moreover, initiatives have been made on the school organizational level and the gradual yield of outcomes has been reported (Sawamoto et. al 2003, Kihara 2006). However, in Japan there is still little research conducted that straddles both practice and theory, and collects information based on the pragmatic development of these kinds of organizational initiatives, addresses the roles of entities involved in such initiatives, and gathers knowledge regarding how to proceed.

　Therefore, this paper tackled this research topic on an ongoing basis to contribute to the accumulation of knowledge, and used cooperative action research for organizational initiatives for the purpose of school improvement (Oyanagi 2004, Sato et al. 2005).

    Then, this paper clarifies the outcomes of organizational initiatives to improve academic skills that were incorporated for approximately 3 years at a mid-sized, public jr. high school  (approx. 600 students and 40 teachers), and the improvement measures that are being defined from knowledge obtained. In addition, this paper visualizes the involvement of the school, university, and board of education in the initiatives, and discusses the effective roles of each.

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