Principal's Message – Year Two! Oh, the PLACES we’re going!
Greetings, Mustangs!
What a wonderful time it is to be a Mustang! The 2016-2017 school year brought great successes, great realizations, and even greater direction on the PLACES we’re going in the 2017-2018 school year and beyond!
As a point of celebration, it should be noted that the students at Mt. Carmel achieved all-time highs in literacy, math, and social studies scores on the 2017 Georgia Milestones tests! We can chalk this up chiefly to taking a more personalized approach in how we look at student data from our formative and summative assessment systems used in MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) testing and the district’s assessment platform called Illuminate. Teachers dug deep into the data, and began to be more transparent with students as teacher and students began to identity learning targets, sets student performance goals, and created more personalized learning pathways through differentiated instruction. What great successes!
I’ve believed all along that the Personalized Learning endeavors we are taking in Henry County are just as much about discovery of the school culture and climate as it is about discovery of our students. What we learned, as a staff, is that we had much to learn in how we approached Project-Based Learning, especially as it pertains to creating authentic, real-world problems for students. Additionally, we realized we need to release some control to allow students space to perform within a learning and performance style that fits the their strengths and personalities more so than it does fitting with teacher comfort level. By affording student more control and ownership over their learning, coupled with creating challenging and rigorous learning tasks, we are looking to provide students with a more robust and enriching learning experience in 2017-2018.
Through our reflective practices, we’ve come to realize that we are trying to grow the Ideal Graduate, and that the direction for that work starts in kindergarten. We are embracing a more holistic approach to student instruction, beginning in literacy work through the use of a workshop model of instruction that fosters more student advisory and relationship building between teacher and student. Additionally, this model is use in math to provide similar feedback loops so that the student gains a greater understanding of their strengths and necessary pathways in both subject areas. While we are seeking to strengthen our core content areas, we are utilizing our science and social studies standards to provide our students with the “why” of their learning…these subjects afford us the real-world application, and daily learning will point back to these challenges so that students understand how their day-to-day work leads to discovery and problem solving within these authentic learning tasks.
Our teachers and staff have embraced a new mission – to Motivate, Challenge, and Empower our students – and realize that to achieve this means we have to be reflective practitioners and to be models of the change we wish to see. We realize our responsibility is a great one, and that we have more to accomplish in our endeavors than just curriculum and standards, but that we should seek ways to incorporate soft skills – ownership, grit, perseverance, empathy, cooperation – into our instructional sessions as we seek to grow our 21st Century Learners through the PLACES we know we need to go!
