As we turn the corner into October, and we are well away into the new school year, I want to share some of the exciting things we will be working on over the course of the school year. When building our school growth plan for year, we saw a collective desire to move our all of our students into a deep level of personal motivation around their learning. In order to reach this outcome, we knew we had to structure and scaffold the learning environment in a very thoughtful and purposeful manner that involved focusing on reflection, feedback and developing our personal and group learning goals. With this in mind we developed this guiding question to lead our work…
Our Guiding Question at MPE:
If our staff and students engage with perseverance as reflective learners (set personal goals and embrace challenges when the learning gets hard) will our students be more successful in their overall competency development?
Under the structure of this guiding question we believe that we need to develop these 3 aspects of student learning;
- We need to make the “process” student learning visible to the students who are doing the work. To this affect, we will be using new tools like SeeSaw and eportfolios to showcase the process of learning (not just the outcome of learning). This will allow the student to be able to reflect on their learning as they are learning.
- We will build on their capacity to be reflective of their learning by using tools like the ladder of feedback to strengthen their capacity to learn deeply from their tasks.
- We have hired Mr. Dontas to work as a Collaborative Support Teacher will all classroom Teachers to build some common language around Goal setting and developing personal learning targets that eventually will be student generated through use of feedback and reflection that is authentic to the individual student.
It is our theory of action, that if we focus on the development of these three aspects of student learning we will see an notable increase in the individual and collective success of students developing their skills in all competency development.
We are all looking forward to this work and seeing the progress over the course of the year. As parents, you will first start to see this work coming though classroom communication and into our report cards (as every child will have elements of self reflection and goal setting on their report cards this year). However, as we develop our work around this growth plan, we are hoping the language and mind-frame/mindset is evident in the language your children are using at home.