Elmwood Middle School

School Characteristics and Replicable Practices

At Elmwood Middle School, all students are expected to meet high academic standards. Teachers spend time determining priority standards and coming to a collective agreement on the interpretation of the standard.
Clear learning targets, clear expectations of proficiency, and targeted common formative assessments have been beneficial for collaboration among teachers when planning interventions for students who have not yet reached proficiency.
Teachers make connections across the disciplines to reinforce important concepts and to assist students to think critically and apply what they have learned to solve real-world problems.
Cooperative learning is visible in many classrooms as several teachers have been through the Kagan training

We have divided all of our students into small advisories within their house teams, which meet daily for 30 minutes. This time of the day is used to provide our students with character education skills to aid in social development, house building skills, study and organizational skills, goal setting skills, as well as academic support and enrichment.
Encore teachers make the curriculum varied with activities that provide enrichment in the fine arts, physical education, music, STEM learning, and computer literacy.
The special education staff at Elmwood provides a continuum of services for the resource students and the self-contained students. Some student needs are met in the regular classroom using indirect services, where the regular education teachers provide instruction, using needs specific modifications, under the guidance of a special education teacher.
To promote family and parental involvement at school, Elmwood offers a variety of programs and activities that foster the alliance between home and school. These include our Friday Fun Night, our Parent/Teacher Conferences, our Open House nights, our annual Career Day event, and our annual Field Day event.

At Elmwood, failure is not an option, and every student is expected to learn and produce proficient work. Teachers provide students multiple opportunities to display proficiency.
Students have one to one access to Chromebooks in all of their core classes. They use Chromebooks to access supplemental resources, collaborate with classmates, and work through inquiry based learning and research. Through our partnership with our local public library, students are given ecard accounts that give them access to all of the public library's electronic resources.
Students with disabilities are enrolled in classes that provide the least restrictive environment possible. Students in self-contained classes are enrolled in regular fine arts classes, such as choir and art, and PE classes.
The media center has a world languages section with fiction and nonfiction books in Spanish and Marshallese. Spanish and Marshallese speakers make up the largest percentage of our ELL students.
Each student at Elmwood is valued and respected. Students are placed in small advisory classes with a 1 to 18 teacher student ratio. They meet multiple times a week throughout the year and utilize that time for team building activities and developing rapport between teachers and students.

Our practice of shared leadership across the building helps ensure that we work every day to fulfill our mission statement and provide the best possible environment for student success.
As a Professional Learning Community, we have embraced the belief that "all" means "all" and that learning cannot be optional for students. Content specific collaborative teams meet weekly to determine essential learning outcomes, create assessments for those outcomes, and analyze data to identify which students need additional time and support to reach proficiency, as well as which students are ready to extend their learning.
As a leadership team, we are intentional about modeling for our staff the characteristics of continuous learning, experimentation, and reflection on a daily basis. We continually read about and expose ourselves to new ideas, then share with each other what we are learning.
At Elmwood, we work hard to develop relationships with all the members of our larger educational system. We work very closely with our feeder schools to host events that invite families of future raiders into the building to begin learning about our culture.