Excellent teaching is by far the most significant in-school factor driving student learning. To achieve the results we seek for all of our students, we will have an intensive focus on highly-effective teacher coaching, so that every teacher at DRCS is providing a world-class education for our students. Studies have shown that high quality teacher development can quickly change teacher practice and increase effectiveness, for both new and veteran teachers. At DRCS, we will hold our students and ourselves to a high standard of performance, effort, and integrity, ensuring that our school community uses the challenges our students and families face to motivate and inspire our work rather than to excuse suboptimal outcomes. We know that when teachers are getting better, at an ever-accelerating rate, our students can consistently achieve at unprecedented levels. At Deep Roots Charter School, three core values allow our roots to grow strong with staff, students and families:
1. Purpose
2. Practice
3. Service
These values, along with our mission, guide all choices that we make as a school, from professional development plans to curriculum choices to scheduling. For that reason, we have described each value, with notes on alignment to our school design, in detail below:
Practice: “Deliberate practice” is a concept developed by psychologist Anders Ericson as he and his team studied expertise. They concluded that, “expert performance is qualitatively different from normal performance” and is the result of a very specific form of practicing, in which individuals do many repetitions, receiving very specific feedback against a known standard, so that the quality of each subsequent repetition is better than the last. At DRCS, we expect our students to develop deep expertise in reading, writing, mathematics, and content areas; we expect our teachers to become true experts at their craft; and we expect our leadership team and support staff to be experts in making those around them more effective. Therefore, every individual in our school community will engage in deliberate practice, and value this as the path to excellence. Service: At Deep Roots Charter School we recognize the needs of our school, families, and community. In order to meet those needs and develop teachers, staff, and students who will feel empowered to work towards change and growth, we will develop a sense of purpose in serving our community and those who live in it. Community engagement or “service-learning” is explained by the National Service Learning Clearinghouse as, “a teaching and learning strategy that integrates meaningful community service with instruction and reflection to enrich the learning experience, teach civic responsibility, and strengthen communities.” At DRCS our model of service-learning will be discipline based, which will require students to have a presence in the community throughout their time at DRCS and reflect on their experiences regularly. In these reflections, students apply classroom content as a basis for their analysis and introspective, extrospective, and moral understandings. Purpose: At Deep Roots Charter School our mission is to serve and teach a family of disciplined learners who are empowered to grow in their community, college, and beyond. We recognize that this is our purpose and why we teach and work to serve our community. Everything we do grows out of this purpose and every decision we make is driven by this purpose. If we want our students to be successful leaders in their community, college, and beyond, we must teach them to think in the same way. Simon Sinek, in his best-selling book, “Start with Why,” argues that the greatest leaders are able to inspire others to take action by being driven by a central purpose. He claims that many organizations do not know why they do what they do, which is why so many are unsuccessful. Too many organizations are solely focused on results rather than a cause or belief, which addresses the very reason the organization exists. As educators we want to empower our students to uncover their unique gifts and talents and apply them towards an outward purpose they are passionate about discovering and working towards.
