This section outlines our school’s key areas of focus. It reflects our commitment to continuous improvement and responds to the evolving needs of our students. Whether centered on student engagement, social-emotional well-being, or academic growth, our focus guides our learning journey and informs the strategies we implement throughout the year.
This year we will be focusing on literacy, more specifically on improving our students' reading and reading comprehension.
Literacy is the ability to understand, critically analyze, and create a variety of forms of communication, including oral, written, visual, digital, and multimedia, in order to accomplish one's goals. A text is any piece or combination of oral, written, visual, or digital communication.
The purpose of reading is comprehension. Comprehension is the understanding and the interpretation of a text and that is what gives children purpose for reading. It involves making connections between what is read and what is already known, processing text and transforming understandings and thinking.
School Learning Story Diefenbaker
School Learning Focus for the 2025/26 school year
Our school is focusing on literacy, more specifically on improving students’ reading and reading comprehension.
Evidence-Informed Rationale (WHY)
Diefenbaker Elementary has 70% of its students proficient in literacy. This number is static between primary and intermediate students. We want to improve the number of students who are moving to proficient as they progress to intermediate grades. Our school's reading assessments have indicated that students are having success decoding and improving their reading fluency. We notice that student reading comprehension is an area of focus for improvement.
Priority Learners
We are emphasizing our students with learning disabilities. Our goal is to progress more of their literacy learning from a developing understanding to proficiency. Currently, 100% of our students with learning disabilities are developing in English language arts.
Baseline Data
During our Fall Reading Assessment we noticed that students were effectively progressing with their decoding and reading fluency from primary to intermediate grades. In a few areas of reading comprehension we do not see a similar progression between primary and intermediate grades.
Out of all the components of reading comprehension, connection making and inferencing are where we see a decline in performance standards from primary to intermediate. We are progressing readers from emerging to developing understanding, but we do not seem to be improving on the number of proficient students in these two areas.
Action Statement (HOW)
As a learning community, we are going to be working on connection making and inferencing to build reading comprehension. We will utilize the district's literacy pillars to engage our students effectively in reading.
Intended Impact (SO WHAT)
We want to nurture our students' growth as readers, writers, thinkers, and communicators by developing their reading comprehension.
Evidence of Impact (HOW WE WILL KNOW)
We will know that we have had success with our school learning story by seeing an improved ability to make connections and inferences in our students. Development of these reading comprehension skills will allow our students with learning disabilities to also experience growth. We will compare our school's Spring reading assessment to our Fall reading assessment.
Alignment Statement
The development of our students' reading comprehension relates to the Richmond School District's strategic priority 1 on having every learner achieve their highest potential. Specifically, the first objective on improving literacy.
