Chantrell Creek Elementary 22-23
OUR CONTEXT
Our School
Chantrell Creek is a dynamic school where students are engaged in learning that is focused on Literacy, Numeracy, and Social-Emotional Learning. Our vision is for every student to feel connected and be able to reach their full potential. The school motto is “Let your spirit soar!” At Chantrell Creek, we believe and value working together as a community to support our learners. Our students are creative, musical, energetic, and empathetic.
OUR LEARNERS
Social Emotional Learning (SEL) is the process through which all children learn the skills and attitudes to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, achieve personal and collective goals, build empathy towards others, make responsible and caring decisions, and to establish and maintain healthy relationships. SEL skills allow students to engage successfully with learning opportunities that foster communication and collaboration across all curriculum areas. At Chantrell Creek Elementary, SEL is embedded in all areas of the curriculum based on the CASEL Framework.
Below are examples highlighting our students’ strengths as they demonstrate SEL skills in a variety of learning experiences.
Literacy
Students engage actively as listeners, viewers, and readers to develop an understanding of self, identity, and community.
Students share some flashlight reading together as buddy classes pair up for Cozy Christmas reading. Ensuring that reading experiences are enjoyable for students helps to develop lifelong readers.
Numeracy
Students develop, demonstrate, and apply mathematical understanding through play, inquiry, and problem solving. 
Students explore various math stations during the Math Festival held in the Gym. Students were challenged think critically to problem solve a variety of different numeracy activities.
Fine Arts
Students experience their chosen forms of creative expression as an important part of their identity.
Music
The grade 6 classes practice and perform a Taiko drumming presentation.
Drama
The school-wide musical production of Treasure Island allowed students from Kindergarten to Grade 7 perform on stage, in front of an audience. From initial rehearsals to the final show, students worked together to bring the story of Treasure Island alive.
Visual Art
Students express their creativity in different ways with visual arts.
Sports
Participation in sports helps develop learners that have the knowledge and skills they need to be safe, active, healthy citizens throughout their lives.
Chantrell Creek athletes in Grades 5 to 7 participated on school volleyball, basketball, ultimate, and badminton teams. We also had over ninety students in grades three to seven develop track and field skills and compete against other schools at district track meets.
Outdoor Education
Learning is holistic, reflexive, reflective, experiential, and relational. Learning is focused on connectedness, reciprocal relationships, and a sense of place.
Using the eagle nest that sits high in trees surrounding the school as inspiration, students in grade one work together to build an eagle nest of their own. By learning about the animals and the lands that make up our communities, students are able to develop a relationship and sense of connectedness to these places. By participating in learning experiences outdoors, students can become lifelong environmental stewards.
Indigenous Education
Strong communities are the result of being connected to family and community and working towards common goals. Family and community relationships can be a source of support and guidance when solving problems and making decisions.
Parents and grandparents are invited to participate in morning math games.
OUR FOCUS
Our Learners and Social-Emotional Learning
Our student learning plan is guided by the evidence collected through data from the BC Ministry of Education and Childcare’s Student Learning Survey for Grades 4 and 7. Below are examples of the findings in regards to Chantrell Creek Elementary students.
Teachers used the data from the Student Learning Survey to guide our inquiry question into how direct instruction of SEL skills, especially in social awareness, could improve student collaboration in curriculum areas.
Our Focus
As one of the Core Competencies in the BC Curriculum, collaboration is a crucial skill to develop for students to be successful learners. Students are expected to work collectively, support group interactions, and be able to determine common purposes. Strong collaborators rely on social awareness to be able to navigate working well with others. Collaboration is part of all curriculum areas.
Social Emotional Learning is embedded in all areas of the curriculum. The focus for the students was on building social awareness to ensure students developed the abilities to understand the perspectives of and empathize with others, including those from diverse backgrounds, cultures, and contexts. Increased social awareness will help students feel more compassion for others, understand broader historical and social norms for behaviour in different settings and contexts. Students will learn to recognize family, school, and community resources and support.
- Taking others’ perspectives
- Recognizing strengths in others
- Demonstrating empathy and compassion
- Showing concern for the feelings of others
- Understanding and expressing gratitude
- Identifying diverse social norms, including unjust ones
- Recognizing situational demands and opportunities
- Understanding the influences of organizations and systems on behaviour
To determine how specific instructional strategies can support growth in social awareness, we focused on three cohorts of early primary learners. The students were representative of the larger school population.
Below are examples of students’ classroom experiences with developing social awareness.
Taking Other’s Perspectives
Students engage in story workshop for English Language Arts. Students picked two characters and then chose partners. They collaborated to develop and tell an original story together. Students need to be able to take turns, and listen to and value other’s ideas.
Showing Concern for the Feeling of Others
Students are often asked to work together either in a partnership, small group, or as a whole class. When working with others, students are expected to show kindness, awareness for others, an understanding that we are all learning and growing differently, and to be respectful of others. In these examples, students were asked to read a class poem that was created together. As a class, students were given individual words that were part of a larger poem. Students needed to sit patiently, wait their turn, listen for the words, and problem solve when trying to figure out the words they had. Students had to work together to create the poem as a class; and when finished, students were asked to take turns practicing reading the poem to each other. Each student had to demonstrate respect by listening to their partner and allowing them the space to work through the words.
Recognizing Strengths in Others
Students engage in building rockets together for an ADST lesson. When having to work with a partner, students had to follow the design process and recognize each other’s strengths to be able to successfully create one rocket together that could be launched. The design process incorporates trial and error, and each individual partner had to be respectful of the other partner’s suggestions and ideas.
OUR NEXT STEPS
Chantrell Creek Elementary students are building SEL skills across all curriculum areas. Over the year, students demonstrated growth in developing their social awareness skills and abilities to:
- Take the perspective of others
- Show concern for the feelings of others
- Recognize the strengths of others
Evidence of Growth and Areas of Focus
In September 2022, early primary teachers used the BC Ministry of Education and Childcare’s Quick Scale: Grades K to 3 Social Responsibility performance standards to assess students’ level of social awareness in four areas: contributing to the classroom and school community, solving problems in peaceful ways, valuing diversity, and exercising rights and responsibilities. In June 2023, the teachers used the same criteria scale to assess students and measure their growth over the school year. Results are presented in the graph below.
Over the year, teachers provided regular, direct instruction in social emotional skills, including building social awareness. From September 2022 to June 2023, there was an increase in the number of students fully meeting or exceeding expectations in social awareness. In September, only 45% of students were fully meeting expectations with no students exceeding expectations. In June, 77% of students were either fully meeting or exceeding expectations. As students learned about positive ways of working together, problem solving, and respecting each other’s differences, teachers observed improvements in students’ abilities to complete curriculum tasks in literacy, numeracy, and other content area subjects.
Moving Forward
Our school community is stronger and more connected due to our students’ progress in building social awareness skills. Students have been successful communicators and group collaborators based on the skills they have learned and practiced. As we continue to keep SEL at the centre of teaching and learning at Chantrell Creek Elementary, we will continue to build on our progress by focusing on responsible decision-making.
Responsible Decision-making – The ability to make caring and constructive choices about personal behaviour and social interactions across diverse situations. This includes the capacities to:
- Demonstrate curiosity and open mindedness
- Learning how to make reasoned judgement after analyzing information, data, and facts
- Identifying solutions for personal and social problems
- Anticipating and evaluating the consequences of one’s actions
- Recognizing how critical thinking skills are useful both inside and outside the school
- Reflecting on one’s role to promote personal, family, and community well-being
- Evaluating personal, interpersonal, community and institutional impacts
Students will continue to work on these areas through implicit learning opportunities embedded in the lesson designs and supported interactions between staff and students. Staff will also continue to provide explicit instruction of these SEL skills through the school-wide use of educational resources designed for SEL instruction.
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.
