Martha Jane Norris »

What We Believe:

The vision for learning at MJ Norris is one in which all students are not only involved and take ownership for their learning, but  are excited to pursue their passions.  Through making choices about how, what, where and when they learn, we believe student learning is more connected to real world issues, problems and skills.  This vision includes structures that provide teachers opportunities for continuous professional learning and collaboration between educators and where tools exist to extend the thinking of both teachers and students.

Our Learners:

Our learners come from backgrounds where a great deal of importance is placed on academic achievement. And while there is a high degree of respect and appreciation for teachers and the school in general, many families have experienced education through strict rules, routines and rote learning. Our learners therefore come to school with a great deal of respect for adults in the building, are eager to please, and seek to ‘get the right answer’ in their learning experiences. Teachers describe our community to be one where our families are open and supportive.  Teachers feel parents are truly appreciative and trust them as professionals.  This translates to our learners being respectful, helpful, and hardworking.  They are motivated to do well and are thankful and appreciative for their school experience. Our school culture is grounded in a deep commitment to building a kind, caring and connected school community. Our learners experience this as a strong sense of belonging, not just as a member of their classroom but of the entire school. 

Grade 7 teachers learn every kindergarten students name early in the year.  Students who struggle,  are often ‘adopted’ by older students, or adults other than their teachers, to support them when needed. Our learners in turn, are committed to providing acts of service in the school.  And while there are organized school clubs and leadership groups, on a regular basis students spontaneously seek to be helpful. Many students in our school are English Language Learners. Some who come to us in grades K-7 with no English whatsoever.  These students adjust quickly as they become integrated into the school culture with support from both their peers and their teachers.  We have a strong culture of inclusion within the school and support our learners with special needs in multiple ways.  In addition to the special programs to support learning such as Special Olympics, gymnastics, swimming and cooking, we know the greatest learning occurs with the support of our team of dedicated Education Assistants in the classroom with teachers and peers. We recognize the need to support our learners to orient themselves to British Columbia’s redesigned curriculum.  We are excited by their engagement as they develop new skills and explore their passions and interests. We are committed to deepening our learner’s understanding and ability to apply knowledge, which is at the centre of the new model and is significantly different than the memory and recall of facts that previously shaped education around the globe for many decades.   

Evidence we need to focus on developing our students thinking skills:

Over the last three years, the staff  have identified a set of skills our students need to improve upon in order to develop the thinking skills they will require in today’s world.

 Increased student participation as active rather than passive learners

• Taking initiative to work on areas of weakness (choosing to practice during choice times)
• Enthusiasm for learning something new
• Choosing to go back and improve assignments when given descriptive feedback
• Taking pride in learning growth

Deeper levels of thinking

• Asking thoughtful questions
• Able to describe what learning is occurring
• Able to describe why the learning is important
• Increased meta-cognitive skills and self regulated learners

Able to identify strengths and weaknesses

• Able to set specific learning goals
• Able to identify how they learn best
  

  Increased levels of persistence ‘gritt’

• Experience difficulty but keep trying

Our Inquiry Journey

Year 1:  2014-2015 “To what extent will making learning visible help students become more engaged in their learning?”

Year over year, we have been curious about  how we can support our learners to think deeply about their learning.  We began this journey three years ago by developing our thinking and ability to help students to ‘see’ their learning.  By documenting evidence of learning in digital portfolios we were able to show students not what they did, but what they had learned.  Shifting our thinking to learning rather than doing, had us re-examining the power of formative assessment and establishing learning intentions and setting criteria.  We began by wondering if making learning visible would help our students to become more engaged.  We realized however, that ‘engagement’ is very difficult to quantify and we had not been explicit about what it was that we would do to foster this.

Year 2: 2015 – 2016 “To what extent will explicitly applying learning tools support students to think more deeply?”

In the second year of our inquiry we realized we need to more accurately define what we meant by engagement.  Ownership and deeper thinking became to focus for what we wanted students to be able to ‘do more of’.  We wanted to have a clear understanding of what we would see students doing if they were exhibiting more engaged learning habits.  We also began thinking about what we would need to do to support students to foster these skills and habits.  Teachers began developing and using, “I can …” statements, practicing SmartLearning strategies,  focusing on quality descriptive feedback and student goal setting.  At the end of this year, we had the feeling that we were getting much more proficient in providing learning experiences that supported learners’ ability to see their learning and  to provide parents examples of authentic learning in action.  Knowing if we were affecting change in our learners’ ability to take ownership of and to think more deeply about their learning was still not something we felt we could quantify.

Year 3: 2016 – 2017 “How might explicitly teaching students to self reflect on their learning goals, help them to think more deeply?”

This year, we are curious about what our students can tell us about their learning.  We know that if students can describe their learning strengths, identify areas they need to improve upon or develop and what it is they need to do in order to make that happen, they will have thought more deeply about their learning and will have the  ability to become active participants in the learning process.    We are focused on explicitly teaching our learners to self reflect.  We have come to realize this is a more complex task than anticipated.  Our learners are not practiced in the deeper thinking required of tasks that do not have one right answer but instead require them to analyze, synthesize and apply their knowledge.  

Professional Learning

Our professional learning this year has centered around how we can best support our students to self assess their learning.  We recognized that teaching this complex skill requires us to  explicitly teach students to recognize and describe their learning and to identify their strengths and areas for improvement.  It also requires they are able to provide concrete examples of their learning progression. 

Our professional learning questions:

What strategies are most effective in teaching students to self reflect on their learning goals?

How can we support students to recognize their strengths as well as areas they need to focus on to move their learning forward?

Our Professional  Learning Plan

Inquiry Projects

Teachers in the school are involved in inquiry projects examining how to support students to self reflect on the core competencies.  Clusters of teachers are released regularly to plan and share their learning in order to further their instructional practice in this area.

In- Service

To develop teaching strategies to effectively support students in their ability to self reflect we have enlisted the services of District Helping teachers.