School Goal One
To foster a culturally responsive school community that celebrates continuous improvement of students’ skills in creative and critical thinking.
How can we support our students in their ongoing development of critical and creative thinking skills through a First Peoples’ Principles of Learning lens?
We believe that strong critical and creative thinking skills are important to addressing complex 21st century issues, such as Truth and Reconciliation. Explicit instruction of thinking skills, over time, supports students in being reflective, challenging assumptions and celebrating diversity and multiple perspectives. Students who are critical thinkers are able to move beyond simply knowing information to becoming active, engaged and socially responsible citizens.
This goal and driving inquiry aligns to both our Global Citizenship and Indigenous Learner Success district strategic goals. Additionally, our intended approaches are deeply connected to First Peoples Principles of Learning.
First Peoples Principles of Learning
The Global Citizenship Goal needs to ensure that:
- Learning ultimately supports the well-being of the self, the family, the community, the land, the spirits, and the ancestors.
- Learning recognizes the role of Indigenous knowledge.
- Learning requires exploration of one’s identity.
Over the course of the year, the following will be our direct areas of focus:
- School-wide explicit instruction of critical and creative thinking strategies (school announcements, assemblies, class, clubs, teams and school-wide critical and creative thinking challenges);
- Sustained Inquiry - ensure daily opportunities to practice creative and critical thinking, by providing a balance of process-based learning and product-based learning, offering daily/weekly challenges, asking a wide variety of open-ended questions, supporting skill development for problem-solving during class meetings, social skills lessons, connections to self, others and world, etc.);
- Inquiry-Based Learning;
- Project-Based Learning;
- Assessment Practices - ensure a balance of formative and summative assessment practices. Consistent formative assessment encourages continual feedback practices to support ongoing revisions of student work at each step of the learning. Evidence of learning is shown in a variety of ways and reflects student diversity;
- Teacher Pro-D (monthly, lunch and learns, summer pro-d) - critical and creative thinking, building capacity for sustained inquiry through a cascading challenges approach, embedded daily and weekly inquiries/challenges, build teacher and student capacity for feedback and reflection practices; and
- Numeracy – provide students with more open-ended problems and learning tasks that require multiple solutions, strategies and entry/access points to develop conceptual understanding in numeracy. Foster metacognition by supporting students in justifying their answers and making predictions.
Over the 2023-24 year, we will track progress on our initiatives identified in this year’s plan. More specifically:
- Anecdotal reports - Following school-wide and class challenges practicing the critical and thinking competencies, we will debrief via google doc feedback and share out at staff meeting;
- Parent Checklist - We will collect parent observations via a checklist related to their child’s critical and thinking competency and transfer from school to home;
- Student Satisfaction Surveys - Determine those questions related to creative and critical thinking and use as data;
- Our School Survey - We will ensure that there are at least 2 questions focused on the thinking competency to be used as data;
- FSA results - We will review the % of students who score 3/4 or 4/4 on questions requiring higher level mental processing and creativity, as noted in each year’s FSA school assessment reports for particular questions;
- Exit Interviews - We will conduct exit interviews with our Gr 5 students with at least 2 questions related to critical and creative thinking competency; and
- Core Competency Student Self-Reflections - Student self-reflection of the thinking competency will be collected and reviewed 3rd term at final staff meeting to determine trends, stretches and strengths for 24/25.
- Summary learning, based on evidence gathered over the year, will provide us with key learnings to guide next steps for the 2024-25 school year and beyond.
