École Crescent Park 22-23
OUR CONTEXT
“What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools is narrow and unlovely” ~ Dewey
Crescent Park is a community-oriented school with a rich history dating back to 1917 and the Crescent Park Annex. Students at the school have a growth mindset, and they approach learning with an open mind and positive attitude. As tradition plays a prominent role at Crescent Park, we are fortunate to have generations of families return to our school and continue reinforcing the feeling of a Crescent Park family environment.
Many staff have children that currently attend the school, graduated recently from Crescent Park, or will soon be attending, to continue to foster the feeling of family within the school walls.
Crescent Park students are incredibly involved in their local community, and the feeling of family resonates through the school halls. Crescent Park students enjoy being immersed in the beautiful nature that surrounds them, and it is embedded in the student learning at the school. Through engagement in nature and outdoors, students have opportunities to use all five senses and truly become active and engaged learners. In addition, when students are actively connected with nature, they can grow in their understanding of themselves and their relationships with other living things.
As Crescent Park students believe in spreading kindness, being involved in the community, and supporting others, we are fortunate to receive support and be involved with many local businesses that share the same school outlook.
Crescent Park emphasizes building healthy, positive relationships and interpersonal connections among students, staff, and families. These values are considered fundamental to creating a school community that nurtures the well-being of the Crescent Park students.
OUR LEARNERS
Our school is home to 350 students who are eager to learn and apply foundational Social Emotional Learning (SEL) skills that are integrated within the classroom and can be used to increase success in other academic areas.
“SEL is an integral part of education and human development. SEL is the process through which all young people and adults acquire and apply 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.” (CASEL Framework, 2020)
By emphasizing the development of SEL, it enhances each students’ mental health, which will result in improved overall wellbeing, emotional and physical health, and academic achievement.
At Crescent Park, we strive to meet each learner where they’re at with their emotional intelligence by engaging in activities that utilize team work, to help build collaboration and a sense of community so learners feel safe taking risks in their learning.
Our learners utilize text to expand their understanding of SEL.
ELA Competencies:
- Using personal experience and knowledge to connect to text and deepen understanding of self, community, and world
- Recognize and identify the role of personal, social, and cultural contexts, values, and perspectives in texts
- Questioning what we hear, read, and view contributes to our ability to be educated and engaged citizens
Our students engaged in stories shared in class and at home that contained themes within the SEL Framework. With this explicit exposure, dialogue and discussions were created to further develop our students’ understanding of the various components of SEL and the widespread impact they can have.
Our learners collaborate together to build a sense of belonging and inclusion.
PHE Competencies:
- Applying strategies for developing and maintaining healthy relationships
- Promoting health and well-being of school and community
- Demonstrate respectful behaviour when participating with others
With a congruency between PHE & SEL components, advocating for content integration has positive wide-spread effects with our school population. Our students worked to build a sense of belonging and inclusion by teaming up with buddy classes, having weekly school-wide walks, multi-cultural event celebrations, and more.
Our learners feel safe to take risks in other areas of learning.
ADST Competencies:
- Develop new skills through play and collaborative work
- Working as a group using the skills needed to complete a specific task
- Learning to fail, persevere, and move forward with planning
By committing to developing SEL skills, our students have learned that failure is a natural part of learning. They are developing their abilities to work together and persevere, moving forward by accepting feedback. Students have engaged in ADST challenges that require them to work together to come up with a plan, test their hypothesis, receive feedback, and analyze and re-evaluate their initial plan to make necessary changes. Some challenges are directly related to the school-wide SEL themes, while others are integrated within other curricular areas.
OUR FOCUS
While realizing the importance of Social Emotional Learning (SEL) and its place within our school communities, we have slightly shifted our focus to connect how SEL can positively effect students’ other academic areas, specifically Physical Health Education and Applied Design, Skills, and Technologies.
By building our foundational SEL skills, we strive for our learners to innately apply these skills in all areas of their education, growth, and development. Opportunities to display their understanding is all around us, both in the classroom, on the school yard, at home, and in the community.
This year, we focused on our intermediate students and their ability to transfer this skill-set. Our student learning goals, as connected to the curriculum were:
- Promoting health and well-being of school and community
- Working as a group using the skills needed to complete a specific task
- Develop new skills through play and collaborative work
One of our intermediate classes participated in this focus explicitly, with other staff engaging in the learning and planning that took place. As an upper intermediate class, these students were already familiar with working together collaboratively while learning new tasks, so in order to target the learning goals as outlined above, we:
- Utilized both whole class and small group teaching, both in the classroom and in collaboration with other teachers/classes
- Required students to explicitly reflect on their experiences following each task (either orally or in written form)
- Limited our assessment areas to only 2 curricular areas
OUR NEXT STEPS
While the school team worked together to plan and organize activities that would be meaningful and applicable to all students beginning in January. Evidence that was collected with this newly shifted focus occurred within the timeframe of April-June.
April 2023 | Emerging | Developing | Proficient |
PHE Curricular Competencies | 7% | 24% | 69% |
ADST Curricular Competencies | 13% | 30% | 57% |
June 2023 | Emerging | Developing | Proficient |
PHE Curricular Competencies | 6% | 17% | 77% |
ADST Curricular Competencies | 10% | 29% | 61% |
During this short collection period, there was a positive improvement noted across both PHE and ADST Curricular Competencies. More specifically, it was noted that:
- Students demonstrated more explicit use of key vocabulary words within their reflection
- Students shared that they felt more comfortable when placed in “uncomfortable” situations (eg. Not having specific answers or strategies shared or required for particular activities/tasks)
- Students felt they worked more collaboratively as a team
Moving Forward
With this being a new shift for our student learning plan, we strive to have more staff join the data collection portion of the plan so we can see if the positive results we have seen in this short amount of time is widely reflected among other learners. Also, by embarking on this inquiry early in the school year, it will be interesting to see if the results reflect the same growth trajectory.
While the starting curricular competencies assessed are important components of the curriculum, we would like to expand our inquiry into the Literacy framework. More specifically, we plan to use reflective writing.
- Using personal experience and knowledge to connect to text and deepen understanding of self, community, and world.
- Recognizing the role of language in personal, social and cultural identity
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.
