Welcome to Woodrow Wilson High School. We are a school on the move. Over the last few years our faculty has worked diligently toward building a more collegial and adaptive school culture through the use of Professional Learning Communities and Adaptive Schools Training. This has allowed us to achieve greater levels of comprehensive and cohesive decision-making and professional collaboration. Such collaboration reaps the greatest benefit to our students by providing them with the best and most supportive learning experiences possible.
I consider it a tremendous honor to be the principal at Wilson High School and a Mighty Mule (and once a mule – always a mule). In 2010 we re-crafted our mission and vision alongside El Sereno Middle School to include our mutual goal of becoming International Baccalaureate Middle Years Program schools. Our collective mission is to empower students with the skills and knowledge to become compassionate, inquisitive, principled young people who create a more peaceful world through global awareness, critical thinking, and a commitment to action and service. Our vision is to create an academically rigorous school of international merit where all stakeholders function as a cohesive and collaborative learning community to ensure that all students succeed as knowledgeable, ethical and caring citizens of the world. To this end, we have accomplished a great deal by moving to block scheduling, implementing a Family Advocacy System, providing all Small Learning Community faculty members with Common Planning Time, and providing training in International Baccalaureate philosophy and methodology. These initiatives provide the opportunity for greater depth of instruction, personalization of the school experience for our students, professional collaboration, and the development of an international perspective in order to prepare our students for a global society.
All departments have worked together as professional learning communities in order to complete our established school wide SMART goals – the building of curriculum maps and common assessments for all subject-level classes during our department professional development. This will ensure a viable and guaranteed curriculum for all students. It will also provide the means for teachers to be able to collaborate on lesson design and the intentional integration of best practices such as culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy, Strategically Designed Academic Instruction in English, differentiation, and research-based instructional strategies to promote authentic literacy. We will accomplish this through the use of the“Mule Team Lesson Design and Study” in order to address critical student needs. The protocol process asks subject-level team members to analyze critical student data, determine needs, and then develop lessons to address those needs within the context of an IB MYP unit plan. It also includes a review and reflection on the lesson to determine further implications for instruction as well as what interventions the students might need in order to meet proficiency on the assessment. The design protocol is also a means to more fully integrate the use of school wide adopted strategies such as Thinking Maps, Cornell Notes, and Socratic Seminars into the curriculum, as we continue to “Avidize” the school.
This brings me to the fact that we are extremely proud to be an AVID National Demonstration site, the only one in Los Angeles Unified. We have visitors from all over Los Angele County and beyond visit the school in order to see the AVID program in action. Students in the AVID program are clearly provided both the academic as well as personalized support necessary to be able to envision and enact their success in college. Beginning in 2010 we were designated as an AVID pilot school. As a result, we are also working toward using AVID strategies and methods in our Family Advocacy class in order to foster a culture of “college readiness” across the entire school by providing students with both the skills to succeed and an understanding of the mindset necessary to not only attend college but complete it successfully with a degree.
Our Small Learning Communities have also advanced in the establishment of their unique identities by creating new logos and moving into contiguous space. The inclusion of Common Planning Time has allowed for SLCs to be able to enact the personalization begun in the FAS class by reviewing individual student progress during Common Planning Time and to refine and enhance instruction through the use of the Mule Team Lesson Study, peer observations (known as “Wilson Walks”), and the IB MYP unit planner. Teachers now have the opportunity to collaborate on interdisciplinary lessons that reflect both the unique SLC theme as well as making viable and relevant connections to our broader international and universal theme as a school. It has also provided the time and opportunity to seek community partnerships and career internships that further tie student learning into real-world applications and a genuine action and service orientation.
Furthermore, we are proud to be working toward authorization in the spring of 2012 as an International Baccalaureate School in partnership with both El Sereno Middle School and Farmdale Elementary, the only full feeder pattern in LAUSD. Last year teachers established a Humanities PLC in order to successfully implement an IB Humanities and World Geography course for our ninth grade students. In IB classes students participate in shared inquiry and project-based learning in order to fulfill the tenets of the IB learner profile. We are first establishing the Middle Years Program but intend to add the Diploma Program at Wilson so that our students may take IB courses in the 11th and 12th grade that will provide them with college credit.
We have also begun to integrate the use of the Pyramid Response to Intervention, a three-tiered approach to ensuring student social and academic success by analyzing the CAHSEE, CST, periodic assessment, and common assessment data on student numeracy and literacy and addressing those needs as specifically related to student success in their EL, English, and math courses. Consequently, we have “double-blocked” Algebra 1 and Geometry classes in order to provide an embedded intervention. We are also immersed in the process of providing an after-school intervention that is strategically aligned to the students’ progress and success in these classes. Following the intervention, they are offered the opportunity to retake tests and improve their grades rather than accept failure. Failure is no longer an option. Furthermore, we practice a progressive discipline policy that provides a protocol and procedures for establishing a progression of actions and services to address the specific needs of each individual student with regards to attendance, attitude, and academics.
I am certain that our continued and unwavering commitment and dedication to these initiatives will continue to advance the achievement of our students. Ultimately, it is our work together in functioning as a learning community and adaptive school that contributes significantly to the continued advancement of a positive and academically-oriented school culture.
Working together toward common goals and meeting regularly to share, refine and assess the impact of lessons and strategies to increase numbers of students learning at higher levels, we are, in fact, as educational researcher Mike Schmoker has stated, enabled “to reach unprecedented levels of quality, equity, and achievement.” We are a school where I believe this to be a genuine possibility. We welcome your input to help us make it a reality.
Most sincerely,
Ursula Rosin
Principal, Wilson High School
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