Mt. Woodson's Instructional Focus for the 2017-2018 school year aligns directly with the Ramona Unified School District's Instructional Focus:

All students construct learning through relevant and rigorous tasks that demonstrate standards based speaking, reading, writing, creating and problem solving.

It is our goal to develop self-regulating scholars that can acquire and apply knowledge and know where to get information or clarification. Students can construct their own meaning of the content in ways that make sense and relate to other areas of learning. This is a shift from simply memorizing content, subject by subject, to fully understanding the whys and hows of information and being able to apply learned skills in integrated content areas.

We expect to accomplish this by making learning explicitly clear...making it Visible! When students have the intended learning spelled out for them, they know what it is they are supposed to learn during the lesson/s. We call this the Learning Intentions. Then we create a learning path for scholars to be able to achieve this goal. Students have multiple steps to achieve in order to fully understand and be able to apply learned skills to all content areas. We call these steps to learning Success Criteria.

We are following the research completed by John Hattie. Here is a short video on making learning visibly clear for not only students, but for educators as well.

Parents can help us by asking students what they learned at school instead of what they did at school. In addition, let scholars tell you how they know they learned what they were supposed to learn by tell you the success criteria they met to get to the intended learning. The journey will be long and complex, but the results will be a school full of scholars and educators capable of learning and acquiring skills and information for a lifetime of learning.