School Story Evidence #2 post on May 19, 2025

Four years ago, Diefenbaker School decided to focus on Social Responsibility goal for our school community using the common language of the Kindness Umbrella – be kind to self, to others and to place.

This is final evidence post looking at how our interventions have positively impacted our students’ skills as valuable citizens of our school and community at large.

Often as I interact with our students, it amazes me how our students continue to show kindness in day to day life our school.  Survey results do not show these specific instances that we experience in our school community. So many of our older students continue to be helpful and kind as big buddies toward our younger students during recesses and lunches outside without adult prompts. Diefenbaker students will take turns holding doors for everyone entering. Students will say hello and ask about your day.  Students will go out and pick up litter as our earth savers, as they call themselves.  Our guest teachers will comment on how helpful students and staff have been to them.  Diefenbaker School is truly a community of students and staff who care for others and for the land we inhabit.

As this was the fourth and final year into our social responsibility goal, we focused on the application of students’ knowledge of kindness. The staff provided our students with opportunities to show kindness to others and to understand its positive impact on themselves, others and our community through Bulldog family teams, kindness challenges, community charity initiatives and assemblies organized by our student leadership team. We also connected with our feeder secondary school Leadership teams to work together on common projects.

Moreover, this school year, the staff decided to focus on building our students’ resiliency in presenting them with Learning Pit stages illustration, in hopes that our students would see the benefits of persevering in their learning throughout this year.

The following results are from Students Learning Survey and Middle Years Index survey for Grades 4, 7 and 5. Questions selected from the surveys relate to this year’s focus on Kindness to self and building resiliency.  See the attached results for more detailed information. 

Student Learning Survey results for Grades 4 and 7

72% of Grade 4 students responded positively to question, “When you have trouble doing something, do you KEEP trying?”  This is a significant increase from previous year’s of 56% of students who responded positively to this question.

83% of Grade 4 students responded positively to the question, “I try my best in learning the lessons taught at school.” This is a significant increase from 58% in the previous year.

67% of Grade 7 students responded positively to the question, “Are you provided with feedback on how to improve your learning?”  This was fairly the same as the previous year at 66%.

Grade 7 students were asked about how they feel about their improvements in Math, Reading and Writing, question asked was, “I continue to get better at math, reading and writing.”  81% of students felt they improved both in Math and Writing this year, both increases from previous year, 71% felt they improved in reading, fairly similar to previous year’s of 75%.

MDI survey results for Grades 5

Only 10% of our Grade 5 student body reported complete lack of optimism.  49% were very optimistic about the future and 41% felt somewhat optimistic.

0 Grade 5 students at our school reported lack of confidence in their academic ability. 85% reported strong belief that they are confident learners and 15% reported that they are somewhat confident and interested learners.

These results are very encouraging in the work we have begun with our students on resiliency in their learning and on their beliefs as confident learners.

Next school year, our staff have decided to pursue literacy as our school learning goal. Collectively, we seek to improve our students’ reading and writing skills to better their communication, social responsibility and critical thinking skills for this time and future learning.