We will practice…

• Creating a positive, nurturing, engaging, and fun atmosphere in the classroom and throughout the school to become a school community where everyone belongs, learns, is known and is respected as an individual.
• Providing opportunities and access to a guaranteed curriculum because each person has a right to learn, to achieve, to dream, and to be accepted.
• Starting from a place of observation and noticing what a child brings to his/her learning as a way to understand what and how to best teach as opposed to talking about what a child doesn’t know or can’t do yet.
• Challenging children academically so each child is on a learning trajectory that will enable them to demonstrate, apply and extend their knowledge, skills, thinking.
• Developing social skills through a strong collaborative because treating one another with kindness and respectfully is important to bridging cultures and working collectively to solve world problems.
• Teaching the social/emotional curriculum because resiliency, self-advocacy, working together and communicating with others are essential to each child’s success academically, socially, and emotionally.
• Listening to a child’s and watching their non-verbal behaviors, expressions, gestures, and words because we must first understand a child (judgment free) in order to provide necessary, appropriate support.
• Partnering and communicating with parents and our community in multiple ways because educating children takes all of us as we partner together to serve our community.
• Learning as a professional community by using our time together to enhance our individual and collective understanding of the children we serve, knowing that our study will lead to effective instructional practices and high achievement for each child.
• Being passionate educators and demanding high expectations of ourselves and our students because the future of our world depends on the education we provide.
• Fostering linguistic and cultural equity across our school community because global competence is needed in the 21st Century by all and we have a responsibility to engage in inquiry about other cultures and our world.

The children of the 21st Century deserve our best! The future of our world depends on our beliefs, our actions, and our instructional practices in order to become the leaders of tomorrow.