A School Growth Plan, with its “goals” and “initiatives”, is a requirement for all schools. By their very nature, schools are already focused on furthering our students’ learning in various academic and non-academic areas as well as students’ social-emotional development. So what’s the point of having a “School Growth Plan”? We believe in ongoing reflection and revision of our educational practices aimed at continuous improvement and, while each teacher individually focuses on particular areas for improvement in his/her own practice, the School Growth Plan provides a structure to explore a variety of evidence (both qualitative and quantitative) across the school-at-large to determine common areas of focus and strategies for further improvement on which we can work together as a larger school community.
Our School Planning Council, with a great deal of input from Lansdowne’s teachers, established the following School Goals for 2013-14:
1. (Social-Emotional Development) To increase students’ demonstrated level of personal and social responsibility
2. (Literacy) To increase students’ comprehension of text across the curriculum and ability to communicate their understanding in oral and written form.
3. (Numeracy) To increase students’ proficiency in mathematics, with an emphasis on furthering computation skills and perseverance.
Embedded within each goal are numerous interrelated initiatives. Here are a few current highlights:
- Within our Personal & Social Responsibility Goal, we recently engaged in staff-wide professional development around “Restitution” – a highly effective approach to proactively establishing desirable behaviours based on better understanding our “basic needs” as well as addressing disciplinary concerns with a view to guiding students to “fix mistakes” and return to the group “strengthened”. (I had the opportunity to present a mini-overview of “Restitution” to parents at our September PAC meeting.) Meanwhile, a group of Lansdowne’s faculty is also exploring the complementary philosophy and approaches articulated by Ross Greene in his highly respected book, Lost At School.
- Within our Literacy Goal, teachers got together in October to collaboratively assess students’ school-wide reading and writing activities. Through analysis of the overall results, we’ll be developing some common areas of focus and implementing particular instructional strategies to further students’ skills in these areas. We also have a number of teachers working together on various literacy-focused professional inquiry teams, through which they are exploring specific areas of interest and instructional strategies.
- Likewise, with our Numeracy Goal, we have teachers involved in professional inquiry. Moreover, teachers of mathematics will be meeting soon to explore the results of our school-wide math assessments, to look for common areas for improvement and instructional strategies to target those areas.
The above is just a sampling of some of the initiatives underway within each goal area, as we work together to further our school goals.
It’s great to work with a dedicated faculty and school community on these goals and initiatives, as we strive for continuous improvement on behalf of our students.
Ken Andrews, Principal