During the September 20^th Professional Learning Day, our staff had an opportunity to examine relevant data on the Data Dashboard.  We took a dive and looked at our school’s enrolment, report card and FSA data.  We also scanned how our students performed in literacy, numeracy and other subjects.  We looked at how all our students performed in these areas, in particular our English Language Learners, students with disabilities and our Indigenous learners.   

As a result of our discussion, the staff purposed to continue to work with our students on social responsibility this year and use the common language of Kindness umbrella: Kindness to self, to others and to place.

Here is how our staff determined to work on Kindness to self with our students in a deeper way:

Kindness to self

Improving Self-esteem

Building Resiliency

Increasing Growth Mindset

Increasing Self-Reflection

Improving Critical Thinking skills

Kindness to others

Building Connections

Kindness to place

Student leadership Green team initiatives for the whole school

We have determined our goals for this school year in the above areas:

• Class birthday/talking circles to share examples of kind words and phrases, to improve students’ self-esteem.
• Encourage our students to take risks, to try new things and to support them in these new endeavours.
• To build connections among students and staff, we will continue with family teams but start earlier in the year.
• Identify teacher-student relationships so all students have at least two adults who care about them and believe in them that they will be successful, through a student survey.
• Host friendship club and recess and lunch buddies (intermediate students paired with primary students)
• Involve parent community in our goals.
• To build our students’ resiliency:
• give our students opportunity to try ADST challenge tasks
• introduce our students to the concept of the Learning Pit, where they learn about helpful growth mindset statements to find learning hard things meaningful and reinforce these statements throughout the year
• introduce our student to Habits of Mind where they have a chance to practice problem-solving and critical thinking skills and perseverance.
• To increase self-reflection on our learners:
• Helping our learners reflect on what a successful learner looks like and does, perspective-taking and observations of what students notice in themselves and others that show that the students are improving in their learning and school experiences.
• Continue to work with intermediate Student Leadership team on building our school community through monthly Kindness assemblies.