A.H.P. Matthew Elementary 22-23
OUR CONTEXT
OUR LEARNERS
LITERACY STRENGTHENED THROUGH CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING (SEL)
At A.H.P. Matthew, we are focused on creating educational opportunities and safe environments for students to develop, practice, and strengthen their social and emotional abilities, which are fundamental to helping students reach their fullest potential. Over the past several years our focus on Culturally Responsive SEL strove to build learning environments and opportunities that support, sustain, and honour students' diverse backgrounds, identities, strengths, and challenges. As part of our endeavour to continue to honour our learning plans of the past, throughout the school year, we have focused on highlighting various topics, events, and themes to help students discover, understand, and grow their relationship with themselves and others through the development of their Self-Awareness. This year we have expanded our student learning plan to include curricular competencies in the area of Literacy. By developing student's self-awareness, we worked to strengthen their abilities in Language Arts, (reading, writing and oral language).
Curricular Competency: Our learners can exchange ideas and perspectives to build shared understanding
Through collaborating, and communicating students gain valuable skills, strategies, and dispositions that help them learn and practice how to work with others to achieve common goals. A.H.P. students can confidently interact and build relationships with their peers to make good choices with one another. Further, they can collaborate with their peers to interact supportively and effectively using inclusive practices to enhance collective understanding.
Morning meetings are one way that students learn to extend their thinking and build understanding by listening to others, sharing their own viewpoints, and synthesize new information.
Talking sticks were created by our Indigenous students and gifted to each classroom in the school to promote talking circles and Indigenous ways of knowing. This helps our learners to listen and extend their thinking.
Curricular Competency: Our learners can construct meaningful personal connections between self, text and world
Our learners are developing their literacy skills by building understanding through making connections. Understanding how new information (read, heard, viewed) connects to their existing knowledge helps our students to make decisions, synthesize, and deepen their knowledge base. Students participated in targeted lessons, and units that focussed on how to connect to information both personally, as well as making connections to the world around them. In addition, students
Core Competencies: Critical Thinking and Reflective Thinking : Our learners can identify and integrate personal, social, and cultural identities
At A.H.P. Matthew, we recognize that students engage in identifying and integrating their personal, social, and cultural identities on a daily basis. Students are self-aware and can describe and identify people, places, and things that are important to them. Using their self-knowledge, students learn to value their personal and cultural narratives to appreciate the various factors (e.g. family background, heritage, language, beliefs) that continue to shape and contribute to a healthy sense of self. Students are able to practice making open-minded, caring, and constructive choices about their words and behaviours. This year, students at A.H.P were challenged to use their observations, experiences, and imagination to examine their own thinking and that of others. Students continue to reflect on their thoughts, ideas, and assumptions through various learning opportunities in their classrooms and around the school.
Our Indigenous Students worked to create talking sticks. This allowed them to learn about and strengthen their connection to their identities.
Students also had opportunities to focus on developing self-awareness through literacy by strengthening their personal development. Gratitude Week Challenge - For May's Mental Health Awareness Month, our school focused on getting students to reflect on the idea of gratefulness and how they can express gratitude, mindfulness, thankfulness, appreciation, and value towards people in their lives who have helped them learn and grow. Students kept a daily gratitude journal and were given time daily as a school to reflect, and respond to writing prompts.
Our school's Diversity Team Committee meets once a month to discuss celebrations, events and initiatives that highlight equity, diversity, and inclusion. Throughout the year, students take charge in creating opportunities to celebrate and highlight various cultural traditions and celebrations. Assemblies, focus days, announcements, bulletins boards, as well as targeted lessons allow students to practice making observations about cultures they are unfamiliar with and continue to reflect on their thoughts, ideas, and assumptions about their existing knowledge and new facts have learned. Some of the cultural celebrations we have had this year include Black History Month, Diwali, International Women's Day, Lunar New Year, Asian Heritage Month, Hannukah, and Vaisakhi.
Our learners can examine prejudices, biases, and diverse social norms
Core Competencies: Critical Thinking, Communication, Personal and Social Responsibility.
Students in our cohort classrooms participated in Freedom to Read Week. Teachers shared texts that had been previously, or are currently banned, in places around the world. Teachers taught lessons about the importance of protecting intellectual freedoms and examined many books that had been banned for various reasons including topics such as challenging corporations, bi-racial relationships, gender/sexual identity, and others. Students examined why the book was banned, who was trying to keep the message from reaching the audience, and why it would be important to protect the message/values that the author was representing. Our learners presented their learning at a school-wide assembly to culminate the week of activities.
Intermediate classes within our cohort also participated in a collaborative unit with the Teacher-Librarian on Critical Literacy. Students engaged in collaborative inquiry to understand which voices and perspectives were being represented in various texts. They considered questions such as:
- How do your identities affect your understanding of the text?
- Who is talking the most? Who is not talking at all? (Who has power?)
- What values are represented in the words and pictures? and who is missing?
Students worked on being aware of bias, prejudice, and power imbalance in what they are reading to understand the perspectives being reflected to the audience. Expanding our students’ awareness of text was a key aspect of this unit.
Many students over the last two years have participated in our Social Justice Club. This club seeks to raise awareness of social injustices, and promote understanding around diversity, equity and inclusion. Students fundraised for charity, led awareness-campaigns promoting kindness, and created a mural for our school. The mural serves as a reminder to all students and families that AHP is a welcoming and inclusive community.
OUR FOCUS
OUR FOCUS
LITERACY STRENGTHENED THROUGH CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING (SEL)
Strengthening the social and emotional abilities of our students is essential to the foundation of learning and the development of the whole child. Social-emotional learning can positively impact and affect academic performance, relationships with others, development of self-esteem and the ability to manage mental health. Students who develop strong SEL skills will be positioned to effectively manage themselves, their relationships, and their ability to contribute to their families, schools, and communities. This year we have expanded our student learning plan to focus on how the foundational SEL we are developing in our students impacts curricular competencies in the area of Literacy.
(CASEL) Collaborative for Social, Emotional and Academic Learning defines SEL as the application and acquisition of, “the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain supportive relationships, and make responsible and caring decisions.”
In addition, SEL can move equity and inclusion forward through reducing inequities, developing awareness of biases, and critically examining viewpoints, ideas, and systems. Culturally Responsive SEL specifically focuses on building learning environments, and opportunities that are free from bias and honour the diversity of our learners. Culturally responsive SEL "responds to, and is rooted in student’s strengths, stretches, backgrounds, and identities. By empowering students, we seek to develop strong foundational attitudes that will ensure equity and inclusivity for all learners. These experiences can provide students with mirrors to reflect on their own culture and identity as well as sliding glass doors (or windows) that enable students through understanding or imagination to better grasp the cultures and identities of others.” (Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, 2018)
Culturally Responsive SEL as a foundational skill for developing Literacy is developed at AHP Matthew through:
- Explicit literacy and SEL lessons, units, and school-wide themes that target skill sets
- Integrating Literacy and SEL into cross-curricular areas to strengthen academic achievement
- Creating environments that are supportive, inclusive and nurture a child’s strengths, interests, and backgrounds
- School-wide initiatives that focus on Literacy development within classrooms and supported by LST, IST
- Support for Staff including Professional Development and commitment to principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion
School-wide initiatives that create community, shared language, and values
Figure 1: CASEL Framework
Student Learning Goals
The CASEL Framework (Figure 1) identifies 5 key areas of SEL development. Although all aspects of SEL are integrated into our daily work with students, we identified Self-Awareness as the targeted area for student learning goals, and it's alignment with the Core Competency Framework. Self-Awareness strengthens Literacy development in our students, and our learning plan focussed on the following curricular and core competencies.
Curricular Competencies: Literacy
1. Students can exchange ideas and perspectives to build shared understanding and extend thinking
2. Students can construct meaningful personal connections between self, text and world
Core Competencies: Personal and Social Responsibility, Critical Thinking, Communication
1. Identifying and integrating personal, social, and cultural identities
2. Examining prejudices, biases, and diverse social norms
Our Cohort
This was done through specific, targeted literacy lessons as well as our year-long work on culturally responsive SEL. Our cohort that participated in these literacy lessons consisted of 9 classes: 6 primary and 3 intermediate, which represents over half of our school population.
A Window Into Learning
In addition to our school-wide Literacy and Culturally Responsive SEL, our cohort participated in a variety of learning experiences that included:
- literacy instruction on text to text, self, and world/lessons using novels/picture books to understand perspective taking, and how that can impact understanding of situations, critical literacy-who is represented?
- opportunities for students to express themselves in small groups, whole groups, and pair-share activities, morning meetings, check-ins, Zones of Regulation, and talking circles
- direct instruction on strategies for listening, and extending thinking including paraphrasing, and synthesizing new information
- lessons on growth mindset, and global citizenship
- inquiry based learning that allowed students to personalize their learning opportunities and build connections between themselves and the world around them.
- thematic learning around equity and diversity-power structures in text, Black History Month, Mental Health Awareness, SOGI
OUR NEXT STEPS
Summary
The students at AHP Matthew have developed their literacy skills this year due to the focussed attention on:
- exchanging ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking
- constructing meaningful personal connections between self, text, and world
This was done through specific, targeted literacy lessons as well as our year-long work on culturally responsive SEL. Our cohort that participated in these literacy lessons consisted of 9 classes: 6 primary and 3 intermediate, which represents over half of our school population.
All of these classes participated in a series of literacy lessons that engaged students in making connections to other texts, themselves, and the world. Activity sheets were assessed for all of the first lessons and then after continued explicit teaching of the skills, students participated in the same type of lessons again and were assessed again on those second set of lessons. Every class in our cohort shared that students moved up the proficiency scale in regards to their ability to write about how their viewpoints expanded based on sharing ideas with their classmates, and their ability to share their personal connections visually and through their writing.
Evidence
Data from one primary classroom that was representative of the type of learning experienced by the rest of the primary classes in the cohort for “exchange ideas and viewpoints to build shared understanding and extend thinking”. There was a 25% increase in the number of students who reached proficiency.
Lesson 1 | Lesson 2 |
0% emerging 56% developing 44% proficient | 5% emerging 26% developing 69% proficient |
Extending thinking - writing by a primary student
We saw similar growth in our intermediate students that were in the cohort. Data from one intermediate classroom that was representative of the rest of the group. 30% more students reached proficiency by lesson 2.
Lesson 1 | Lesson 2 |
5% emerging 57% developing 38% proficient | 0% emerging 32% developing 68% proficient |
Below is the data for the growth in our students’ ability to “construct meaningful personal connections between self, text and world” in one of the primary classes. There was a 23% increase in the number of students who reached proficiency by lesson 2.
Lesson 1 | Lesson 2 |
37% emerging 53% developing 10% proficient | 24% emerging 43% developing 33% proficient |
Text-to-text by a primary student
Text-to-self by a primary student
Text-to-world by a primary student
Again, similar growth was found in our sample from the intermediate cohort with 18% growth in the proficient category from lesson 1 to lesson 2.
Lesson 1 | Lesson 2 |
0% emerging 70% developing 30% proficient | 17% emerging 35% developing 48% proficient |
Moving Forward
Moving forward, we are excited to continue with our focus on strengthening student literacy skills. We know that SEL will always remain the foundation of everything we do with students and we will continue with that as well, but we are keen to go deeper with our planning and implementing of school wide literacy lessons that are designed to improve our students’ reading, writing, and oral language capabilities.
Staff will embark on a shared learning journey in the year ahead as we read Shifting the Balance by Jan Burkins and Kari Yates. We will also listen to the Six Shifts Pod Cast. Students will benefit from the cohesive instructional practice of staff.
Surrey Schools
Formed in 1906, the Surrey School District currently has the largest student enrolment in British Columbia and is one of the few growing districts in the province. It is governed by a publicly elected board of seven trustees.
The district serves the cities of Surrey and White Rock and the rural area of Barnston Island.
