Report Writing Guide

Formatting and guidance for completing and uploading the accreditation visit report into the SAIS Portal.

• The portal is located at http://portal.sais.org.
• Contact joanne@sais.org for assistance.
• If you copy and paste into the Portal (rather than writing directly into the entry screens), note that the program will strip out a lot of formatted material. Please review the text as it appears in the Portal window.
• Write complete sentences based on the prompts.
  • When writing commendations – The visiting team commends the school for . . .
  • When writing recommendations – The visiting team recommends the school consider . . .
• It is customary to use bullets in the commendations and recommendations.
• The Portal does not function like a google doc. You must save your work often. The most recent version of a section will overwrite previous versions, but you can use the archive to look at past versions. The archive runs on a set schedule, not every time you save.

Overview of Report Format

The SAIS Accreditation Portal was created to make report writing easier and allow the team to focus on the school and the commendations and recommendations rather than struggling with formatting the report. As a result of work done by the SAIS Accreditation Summit volunteers, SAIS has launched a revised format for visit reports, which is intended to serve the needs of the school in receiving high-level commendations and recommendations that align with the vision of the school and its current strategic initiatives.

The sections of the visit report previously called profile, vision, plan, results, additional, and conclusion have been replaced with Introduction, Goal Area Title, Description, Commendations, Recommendations, Additional, and Summary & Conclusion.

The final visit report consists of the following sections:

• Cover page, History, Review, Policies, Roster (all dynamically generated)
• School Snapshot: written by the school as part of their snapshot and standards response
• Introduction and Overview of the Visit
• Goal Area 1
  • Goal Title
  • Description
  • Commendations
  • Recommendations
• Goal Area 2
  • Goal Title
  • Description
  • Commendations
  • Recommendations
• Goal Area 3, 4, 5, 6 (repeated format – leave blank if needed)
• Additional Commendations and Recommendations (leave blank if needed)
• Summary, Conclusion, and Recommendation

All text is to be entered into the portal.
Visit reports are due 10 days after the visit concludes.

Download the guide below for the above directions and a sample portal report. A list of commonly used words and phrases is also available for download.