REPORTS TO THE BOARD

Woodland High School Report

To: Michael Green

From: Phillip Pearson

Date: June 20, 2022

RE: WHS Report

Looking Towards Next Year

On behalf of the WHS team, I want to thank the board for the opportunity to visit with you during
the last board workshop. It was a great experience and it helped us to clarify our own thinking.
By way of a board report, I’ve reproduced one of the slides from that presentation here:

We spent a lot of time on Thursday talking about the orange circles. Those are the ones that are
involved in dual credit options like College in the High School. We didn’t spend much time on
the inner green circle labeled “Core Skills and Habits of Mind”, so I wanted to spend a few
sentences here clarifying what that circle refers to.

There exists a set of skills and dispositions that are useful and important in any walk of life,
things like work ethic or timeliness or the ability to read for meaning or use evidence-based
reasoning. Although those programs that focus on more specialized skills like Cascadia or
Running Start implicitly rely on and build upon those skills for students, the building of those
skills is not within their core mission. That’s our job.

Identifying those core skills is one of the tasks at WHS for next year, starting with the identification
of our core intellectual/academic habits of mind. The idea is that, as departments, we will by
defining intellectual habits of mind that are fundamental to all disciplines, and then make those
things explicit in our courses. That work will be kicking off on the morning of August 24th and
you are all invited to join us to see how we get started.