Cedar Hills Elementary 23-24
OUR CONTEXT
Cedar Hills Elementary is located on the shared, unceded traditional territory of the Coast Salish First Nations in the northwest of Surrey. We have a passionate population with a rich blend of multicultural learners - over half of our families speak Punjabi at home, although many also speak English, Hindi, Arabic, Tagalog, Pashto and a variety of other languages. We enjoy highlighting the differences that make us and our cultures unique while also celebrating the things we have in common that bond us.
At Cedar Hills, we aim to be an inclusive community that fosters healthy self-expression and positive relationships (this is our vision statement, which was created years ago and continues to guide our practice).
As Timber Wolves, we HOWL by being Honourable, Optimistic, Welcoming Leaders.
Contributing to our school community is a major focus at Cedar Hills. We know that contribution and collaboration bring pride and contentment, so students are offered many different ways to contribute their efforts and ideas. Both primary and intermediate students have the chance to participate in extracurricular activities, such as school sports (e.g., soccer, volleyball, basketball, badminton, etc.) and different clubs (e.g., Drama Club, Lego Club, Dance Club, Chess Club, etc.). Students also take on roles within the school that help make it a better place to be (e.g., by planning school events with our Leadership Team, keeping the school grounds free of garbage as a part of our Clean-Up Crew, being a class representative during lunch visits with our Principal to speak about school-improvement ideas, serving as Lunch and Playground Monitors to support the independence of our younger students during unstructured time, etc.) and perform at various school events to entertain/amaze staff, students and other community members (e.g., during our Remembrance Day, Winter, Diwali, Vaisakhi and Eid assemblies, in our Talent Show, etc.).
Cedar Hills is fortunate to host a number of during- and after-school programs that enhance the learning that takes place within our classrooms. These include the following:
- Canada Scores!, which pairs soccer with poetry to encourage self-expression,
- Scores in Action!, which pairs various sports with business education,
- Check-and-Connect, which builds connections in order to encourage regular attendance,
- StrongStart, which develops school readiness in our community's preschool-aged toddlers and young children, and
- our Breakfast Program
We take pride in our students’ strengths and their ability to support each other in achieving personal and academic goals. At Cedar Hills, we believe in the power of Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) as a cornerstone of instructional practice and relationship building. Last year, we had success approaching numeracy instruction through an SEL lens, and this year we decided to shift our focus even further in order to broaden our strategies for numeracy instruction. SEL continues to be woven into all that we do at the school level, but our expressed goal is now to make number sense and other numeracy concepts more accessible to and significant for our students. This aim helped give shape to this year's student learning plan.
OUR LEARNERS
Numeracy skills help to shape the way that we view and understand the world. Numerate learners recognize how mathematics can be used in their daily lives to make decisions that are in their best interests. In this sense, numeracy is just as much about thinking and reasoning as it is about numerical computations. At Cedar Hills Elementary, we want our students to learn to think critically about information that is presented to them, to use reasoning skills to logically consider a situation, to make sense of new information, and to understand patterns they see in different settings and materials. We also embrace the diversity that exists in our student population and want to prioritize equitable access to the curriculum to ensure that every student has a point at which they can actively participate in learning activities. For these reasons, we have explored pedagogical approaches that encourage students to consider, question and communicate about numeracy in group, real-world and play-based contexts.
Below, we highlight a few of the ways in which our students have demonstrated strength this year in the areas of:
- Reasoning, Analyzing and Communicating
- Questioning and Investigating
- Understanding and Solving
Reasoning, Analyzing and Communicating - Our learners can reason and communicate their mathematical thinking concretely, pictorially, and symbolically
- At Cedar Hills, students have opportunities to utilize mathematics in real-world settings in order to make connections between what they are learning and mathematics in everyday life. Students use different materials, diagrams and a variety of manipulatives to display their thinking and learning.
- In the picture below, students in grade 1 used the concepts of measurement, addition, and subtraction (along with many others) to create a roughly-to-scale model of a city that they first developed on paper and then mapped onto their carpet area!
Questioning and Investigating - Our learners can explain and justify mathematical ideas and decisions and use mathematical arguments to support personal choices
- Students at Cedar Hills learn that there are multiple ways to solve problems through different individual, small-group and whole-class activities.
- The picture below shows our grade 5 students taking part in one such activity, a "Three Act Task". Three Act Tasks introduce a problem to students through a video and then have them brainstorm ideas together on how to potentially solve the problem (Act 1). They are then given more information on the problem in the form of clues that provide context and must craft a solution path (Act 2). Before Act 3, the solution reveal, they compare and consider the solutions that they and others have reached. By completing this process, students with different capabilities can work on the same problem with varying degrees of complexity and test their ideas against those of their peers.
Understanding and Solving - Our learners develop, demonstrate, and apply mathematical understanding through play, inquiry, and problem solving
- A numeracy focus identified collaboratively early in the year by staff and students at Cedar Hills involved improving computational fluency and "mental math" in ways that would transfer to everyday functioning. With a large number of students still learning to operate in English, many expressed a desire to receive help making sense of mathematical operations and identifying when to use them.
- The pictures below show our grade 5 and 6 students hosting a Math Festival day for our entire school. They learned and operated a number of game stations that incorporated various mathematical concepts in a fun and yet challenging way. It was a huge success with many students expressing how much they enjoyed learning this way!
OUR FOCUS
Every day, students at Cedar Hills are presented with opportunities to practice and demonstrate their Numeracy skills in ways that staff hope will benefit their lives. Adding to the work we began last year, which centred on improving student attitudes toward math and, as a result, their mathematical capabilities by intentionally incorporating Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) strategies into numeracy instruction, we saw an opportunity this year to take this even further by encouraging flexibility in mathematical thinking in new ways. After years of work with SEL in our classes, we know that it is woven into the practice of our teachers. So, while continuing to consider instructional practices through an SEL lens, we wanted to shift our focus to an area of expressed and identified need, computational numeracy. To get a broader view of the effectiveness of this work, we decided it was important to expand our cohort from our grade 4s and 5s to our students in grades 3 to 6. This cohort included a diverse range of learners in our middle years that were representative of our school’s population.
We focused on the following curricular competencies in relation to numeracy:
- Our learners can develop mental math strategies and abilities to make sense of quantities
- Our learners can explain and justify mathematical ideas and decisions and use mathematical arguments to support personal choices
Our cohort teachers (along with other staff), in collaboration with a district numeracy helping teacher, explored methods for developing computational numeracy and "mental math" strategies in our students that involved reflecting on, discussing and sharing ideas and solutions with peers (e.g., Three Act Tasks, Number Talks, etc.). Based on research in the field, we believed that intentionally bringing these methods into our classes on a daily basis would improve and promote mathematical thinking, student engagement, perseverance, and, as a result, boost student success.
To ensure that all teachers were consistent in their approaches, we hosted numeracy workshops during lunch periods on Three Act Tasks, online resources for encouraging numeracy discussion, and Number Talks. We also provided all interested staff with a copy of Making Number Talks Matter by Cathy Humphreys and Ruth Parker for the sake of conducting a staff book club.
We've seen that when math lessons involve these components, students learn to analyze and communicate their thinking more, which benefits their understanding. This will be discussed further in the "Our Next Steps" section.
OUR NEXT STEPS
The evidence from our inquiry, provided by our cohort and largely reflected in our general population, displays that the approach to numeracy instruction that we employed this year seemed to have a positive impact on student learning.
Cohort teachers tracked the progress of the computational fluency and accuracy of their students through a pre-assessment in late October followed by a post-assessment in early June. They also made anecdotal notes about the abilities of their students to explain and justify their mathematical ideas and decisions using mathematical arguments.
In relation to grade-level computational fluency expectations, our cohort students fit into the proficiency scale at the two assessment points as outlined below:
In October, roughly 85% of our students were demonstrating an incomplete understanding of the material, which seems high but it is important to remember that this assessment is meant to be taken at the end of the school year after a lot of learning has taken place. Alternatively, 15% of our cohort already had a proficient understanding of the material early in the year, which we hoped would allow them to extend this even further by June.
Looking at the June results, over half (57%) of our students had a complete or sophisticated understanding of the material, which is almost four times the percentage of students assessed to be at these levels in October. This represented significant improvement! Unfortunately, this also meant that about 43% of our cohort students had only a partial or initial understanding of the material. Looking for ways to help more of these students gain a "Proficient" or "Extending" grasp of the concepts will remain an area of focus for us heading into our next school year.
When looking at student abilities to explain and justify their mathematical ideas and decisions using mathematical arguments, all teachers noted improvement across their classes. On average, over 70% of students demonstrated "some" or "much" growth over the course of the year, which is quite remarkable given we have a high proportion of ELL students who often struggle with language-based tasks.
MOVING FORWARD
Using the progress we observed in our cohort students this year for inspiration, we plan to continue to use Three Act Tasks, Number Talks, and other instructional methods that encourage discussion with peers and the growth of new mental math strategies in our classrooms going forward. Our learners are analyzing their own work and the work of others to assist and grow their own banks of knowledge more consistently. We believe that continuing this work next year will compound the effect of our efforts across grades.
That said, we will continue to look for new professional development opportunities and carry on our work with the numeracy district helping teacher to explore other potential methods for developing the numeracy skills of our students.
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.
