Luella Middle School Belief and Mission Statement

We know:

• All learners learn best when they are engaged, motivated, and intellectually challenged.
• All learners learn best when they feel safe both physically and mentally.
• All learners need effective, timely, and specific feedback to meet mastery learning targets based on performance standards.
• All learners need to feel ownership and membership in a community that they are both a part of and contributor to in tangible and intangible ways.

For these reasons:

• We will organize our school into small professional learning communities that will provide students, teachers, and parents easy access and the ability to support mastery learning by students.
• We will utilize technology as a means of organization, communication, and creativity to close the feedback loop, monitor and track student progress toward mastery targets, and to engage students in meaningful standards-based learning projects.
• We will make demonstrating mastery learning the primary and ultimate focus of everything we do and constantly measure our actions against the question; How will it help my students to demonstrate mastery learning?
• We will make learning constant and time flexible. By utilizing block scheduling, flexible grouping strategies, and pyramids of academic intervention we will meet students where they are and move them to mastery of the performance standards.
• We will implement consistent and pervasive professional development through each learning community that will expand and refine the ability of our staff to make learning meaningful and engaging for each student.

In order to accomplish this we must:

• Create partnerships with stakeholders in the community who can support student demonstrations of mastery as resources of knowledge, time, assessment, and evaluation.
• Challenge students to solve authentic, real world problems that will allow them to demonstrate mastery of the performance standards through the journey and solutions they present to solve these problems.
• Provide students and teachers ubiquitous access to technology tools that are clearly linked to their demonstration of mastery learning.
• Ask the best questions.