Collaboratively Developing a Shared Vision for District Learning

To our guests, welcome to St Georges School. St. Georges has an appealing pleasant environment where students feel comfortable learning due to its location in the countryside, away from the city center. As a result, the school is free from noise, car fumes and traffic. Students here are also close to nature, and they also learn to love protecting animals, flowers, and trees. Occasionally, the students would take a guided walk to the countryside and visit natural places like rivers, lakes, and farms. During such natural walks, our students get an opportunity to participate in nature-related activities like bird watching, hiking, plants, and animal study from their natural habitat (Jones et al. 2020).

We also have a modern building critical for a conducive learning environment. The learning commons atrium comprises such a colossal brick and glass structure, four stories high. Every floor has a balcony encircles this wide-open area to serve as the instructional space and a classroom hallway. All these structures are located on 132000 square feet designed in a manner flexible of their learning zones. The buildings are also designed to achieve the current institutional needs of our students and teachers. Our instructional space is organized into cohorts that group science labs, smaller learning areas that are more flexible, classrooms, separate learning communities, and maker spaces. It provides the students and teachers with multiple learning zones for project-based learning, collaboration, and independent works. For instance, a group of students can be doing a class project in the primary classroom during certain particular times. A handful of the students are taken through personalized learning within the adjacent smaller room. At the same time, another group of students can collaborate at the learning commons nearby. The learning commons are furnished with whiteboards, an open area of tables and chairs located in the hallway outside the classroom (Jones et al. 2020).

The arrangement of these classrooms provides teachers with flexibility and space to allow students to engage in varied activities minus getting crowded into the artificial and limited confines of a single classroom. In contrast, the teacher can keep an eye on all students. Also, a line of sight to every instructional area is provided by this floor to ceiling glass walls. The reason for all these spaces is to enable change in pedagogy, particularly for this 21st-century learning. The rooms also enable varied activities to run simultaneously, minus interfering with each other.

Furthermore, as you can see, our classrooms are organized into learning hubs with glass walls enhancing large collaborative spaces enabling students from different classes to converge together. This design facilitates our efforts to migrate from a teacher-centered learning approach to student-led instruction. These walls are moveable, and on a need basis, the walls can be moved to form one giant classroom whenever there is a need for more spaces. Also, students can write on the glass walls and post charts on them to facilitate learning. Some teachers also divide their classes, letting students move to zones outside the classroom while still observing them (Valentim & Freire 2019).

Also, we have blended learning design...

…promote unity. Our students, therefore, admire and respect their differences. The school has also developed a school toolkit that creates a caring school culture. The material is segmented over an 18-month period where staff can select the appropriate activities designed to effect non-violent discipline, improve classroom management, promote learning, and develop mutual respect (Jones et al. 2020).

On the other hand, the school has collaborative team-based education support services that assist students and districts. The school education support services have been designed to help learners achieve their academic goals and success with their school environment enabling positive outcomes. Subsequently, to ensure continuous improvement in the school, the school formally adopted a continuous improvement model with the Build-measure-Learn cycle to prototype innovations rapidly. Our teaching staff are always motivated and guided to achieve college and career readiness for all the students; thus, they adopt tangible innovations during the build phase where technology collects data and feedback from students and teachers. At the measure phase, the team reflects on the progress made, and applicable changes are made. In contrast, the school uses this continuous improvement approach to blend learning models and test innovation at the learning phase. The school improvement plan also has student training, parents conference, and staff time to engage and reflect on particular goals and priorities tied to students achievement (Jones et al. 2020).

Moreover, the school conducts frequent assessments on the students to develop some summative and formative judgments. Also, the teachers, administrators, content area teams, and grade level collaborate to ensure that instructional, assessment and curricular practices reflect the intent of the schools mission…