Yates Mill Elementary - Quality Initiatives

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Yates Mill Elementary uses a student-centered educational approach that strives to create a school environment where all students are excited about learning, behave responsibly, develop pride in themselves and their achievements, and strive to meet high standards.

Our fundamental assumptions are that we can make a difference and our school can be more effective. In addition, we believe that "people improvement" is the key to school improvement. Yates Mill is focused on functioning as a learning community with collaborative teams, studying best practices for instruction and commitment to continuous improvement.

As a learning community we work toward a shared mission and vision. This translates to teams of staff members learning together and establishing specific standards and goals. In addition, we are analyzing our results and improving on how we collect data on our own teaching and on our children's learning. We strive to improve our understanding of our results.

Ultimately, our goal in continuous improvement is for children to understand what is expected and for them to be able to chart their own growth. Children at the upper levels are setting goals and reflecting on their academic improvement. We believe children need to understand where they are headed academically in order to become empowered to work towards their goals.

As a professional learning community the staff is continuing to develop their understanding of how to measure children's growth. The focus on objective information/data is important as teachers are in the planning process. As a result of this refining view of data collection, the staff is developing clear understandings of how to grade children based on common standards. Teams are working collaboratively to develop common work samples as exemplars or benchmarks. We have moved away from opinion grading to data driven grading of children which is consistent with WCPSS Standards Based Grading initiative.