2010-2011 School Improvement Plan - Highland Elementary (PDF)

Highland Elementary School Improvement Plan 2010-20112010 - 2011 School Improvement Plan SummaryFOCUS ON LEARNING: The staff at Highland are committed to creating a plan of action which will guide us in our work towardimproving our school performance in specific content areas. Although we have two main content focuses this school year, this doesnot mean we are any less intentional in our plans to improve in all areas. In this plan, we are specifically focusing on improving ourstudent achievement in areas of mathematics and writing. Within the area of writing, we have come up with an action plan thatfocuses on grade level and whole school collaboration around the modeling of the writing process, and being more intentional inutilizing our powerful teaching and learning strategies. We have adopted a school-wide pre-write to help our students better organizetheir thoughts and to use our instructional time K-5 more efficiently by not having to re-teach a different pre-write each school year.We are focusing on COS (content, organization, style) as our data shows we are scoring lower in this area by focusing on the SixTraits writing language. This will allow us to have a common writing language building-wide, which will allow adults and students tocommunicate about how we can improve student writing using concrete strategies and methods. Within the area of mathematics, weare working to utilize the PLC model (professional learning communities) to begin to examine formative and summative classroombaseddata (daily assignments, quizzes, end-of-unit assessments) as teams to better inform our instruction and plan/implement specific,timely interventions. We also plan to utilize the data collected from our district math assessments given three times during the schoolyear to give us a better understanding of what specific math GLE’s (grade-level expectations) students are mastering, and which theyneed additional time/instruction to master. Our work will be supported by our district math specialist, Mr. Eric Bates.DEVELOPING EXCELLENCE IN STAFF: The use of data to inform our instruction will be our goal for the 2010-11 school yearin the area of developing excellence in our staff. Although we will work as team to inform our instruction in all content areas,mathematics will be a main vehicle in building capacity and skill within our staff to use data effectively. Using common, classroombasedassessments and district mathematics assessment data, grade level teams will become more proficient in their ability to adjusttheir instruction in a timely fashion using the results of data collected. In addition, they will also work together to create classroombasedinterventions to help those learners who need additional support/time. Our plan is to work to replicate some of these practicescreated from grade-level teams so that these strategies can be shared and implemented by fellow teams. We will work to recognizethese best practices during staff meetings and trainings in order to celebrate and share, as well as model.DEVELOPING PARTNERSHIPS WITH FAMILIES AND THE COMMUNITY: The staff at Highland greatly appreciate thesupport we receive from our families and the surrounding community. We will continue to work to cultivate this partnership bycreating opportunities and mechanisms with which to clearly communicate to these parties on a regular basis. We continue to offerevents such as Open House and Kindergarten Orientation before the onset of school, Curriculum Night, LAP Reading Night, andseveral PTA-sponsored evenings. Additionally, in partnership with our Highland PTA, we offer opportunities for parents to impactour learning community through participation with our Art Docent Program and annual art show. We have a new school-widebehavior/communication program that we are excited about, and expect that this will help us to communicate with families on aconsistent basis.2 2