Welcome to Valencia Middle School

I believe that not only can all children learn, but rather all children must learn. It is up to us to find out the ways to make this happen. As educators we must create an understanding and a sense of urgency for the necessity of improving all students' learning, and regularly report on this progress. Data must be used and disaggregated to create interventions for students.

The focus needs to be on student learning and not on teaching. All schools should strive to become Professional Learning Communities (PLC) where every adult in a building will be focused on each and every student. When a student is not being successful, than the PLC comes together and does whatever it takes to ensure that student’s success.

There must be a widely shared vision of instruction that is focused on rigorous expectations, the quality of student engagement, and effective strategies for personalizing learning for all students. We must agree on what good instruction looks like and emulate that throughout all classrooms. All adult meetings must be about models of effective instruction and student learning.

To be an effective teacher, there needs to be well-defined standards and performance assessments for student work at all grade levels. Both teachers and students must understand what quality work looks like, and there will be consistency in standards of assessment. Every student in a grade level must be evaluated based upon these same standards. Timely interventions need to be put into place for students not meeting the agreed upon standards. These should be done with formative assessments rather than summative.

Supervision should be frequent, rigorous, and entirely focused on the improvement of instruction and student learning. It is done by people who know what good instruction looks like. Professional development should be primarily on-site, intensive, collaborative, and job embedded, and is to be designed and led by educators who model the best teaching and learning practices.

Data is used diagnostically at frequent intervals by teams of teachers to assess each student's learning and to identify the most effective teaching practices. There will be time built into schedules for this shared work. Data should be timely to drive instructional and interventions.

With the focus of all stakeholders in the Professional Learning Community, all students will learn and succeed.