Professional Learning Communities

McKinley Middle School Leadership Teams

As a Professional Learning Community, we are committed to insuring that all of our students are successful. This year we are in the process of implementing the McKinley Middle School Site Plan. Every staff member serves as a member of a collaborative “Leadership Team. Each Leadership Team is focused on the goal of achieving our “shared tactics” or implementation plan. Listed below is a brief discussion of our Leadership Teams.

Intervention:

This team will implement strategies for allocating existing resources to support a school-wide system of interventions, incentives, celebrations, and strong parental partnerships to promote and enhance student learning. Through the “Whatever it takes” philosophy, a pyramid of interventions will be compiled to provide the student with a myriad of additional assistance within and outside of the classroom.

Climate: We will create a climate that ensures trust through communication, and responsible, respectful, and ethical behavior by everyone.

If the goal of achieving high levels of learning for all students is to be realized, then schools must develop a climate that stretches the aspirations and performance levels of students and adults alike.  This group will attend to incorporating celebration into our school, by recognizing small incremental steps of success for our students, our teachers, and our school. Everyone will be responsible for contributing to the celebrations, linking public recognition and enhancement of vision and values, and creating opportunities for various kinds of recognition.

Service: We will work collaboratively to implement curriculum-based service learning projects.

This team will develop service related opportunities, ways to involve the community into our school family, and develop more ways to have open communication between student, home, and school.

Goals: We will develop a plan to ensure that individual achievement goals are identified and successfully completed by all of our students.

Providing students with the tools to write academic goals, involving parents in the goal writing process, and providing opportunities to recognize students as they successfully complete individual goals is the focus of this team.

Instruction: We will ensure that we are using research-based instructional strategies in order to effectively implement District curriculum.

This PLC team will facilitate working together in a systematic process in which teachers will analyze and improve classroom practices, and work in teams that engage in an ongoing cycle of questions to promote deep team learning, analyze and improve classroom practices, and engage in an ongoing cycle of questions to promote deep team learning.  This team will also find a means to a clearly envisioned and articulated purpose.

A Professional Learning Community is Characterized by:

• Shared mission, vision and commitments.
• Collaborative teams.
• Collective inquiry.
• Action orientation/experimentation.
• Commitment to continuous improvement.
• Results orientation.

Pillars of a Learning Community