What Is a "Professional Learning Community"?
A professional learning community is a group of staff who meet regularly to focus on learning rather than teaching, work collaboratively, and hold themselves accountable for student learning results.  (Richard Dufour)
Building a true professional learning community is the most promising strategy for sustained, substantive school improvement.  (Solution Tree, based on research)
Mt. Adams School District strives to:

    1. Create a collaborative culture.
    2. Sustain successes districtwide.
    3. Align our resources and time to focus on results.
    4. Increase student achievement

By designing PLCs that focus on these four essential questions:

    1. What do we expect our students to learn? – Essential Standards
    2. How will we know they are learning? – Commonly Developed Assessments
    3. How will we respond when they don’t learn? – Interventions
    4. How will we respond if they already know it? – Enrichments

Buildings are developing intentional implementation strategies to fully engage PLCs to support the District’s Mission of “Continuous Student Learning” and Monday professional learning time is set aside for teachers to engage in focused conversations to support student engagement, learning and increased academic achievement.
One of our first actions was for PLC teams to utilize the Washington State Learning Standards to determine Priority Standards (a carefully selected subset of the total list of the grade-specific and course-specific standards within each content area that students must know and be able to do by the end of each school year in order to be prepared for the standards at the next grade level or course.  The district and teachers ensure these standards will be taught and your students will have every opportunity to learn them.  See the MASD Priority Standards page for parent flyers outlining Harrah Elementary School's reading and math priority standards by grade level.