Sullivan Heights Secondary 23-24

Why Literacy as an Over-Arching Goal?

In developing literary skills our students are engaging in the Core Competencies (Communication, Critical and Creative Thinking, Personal and Social Emotional). At the beginning of our over-arching literacy goal, teachers began a lot of collaboration in the use formative of assessment, learning rubrics, and Standards Based Assessment in their practice. The goal was to enrich students' understanding of their own learning; we embarked on a path to ensure they could identify what they know, what they need to improve on, and what steps they need to take next to get there.  This has been an ongoing goal at Sullivan Heights for several years.

A Brief Overview: 

In professional spirals of inquiry, every goal achieved prompts a deeper and more focused question. As our work in building literacy has progressed over the last several years, we have discovered that every year's new literacy goals are built from the embedded learning and successes of the previous year.

Our English and Humanities Departments have been collaborating for many years on developing consistency in assessment by using shared learning goals and language.  

In 2020-2021, we followed a learning cohort consisting of one Gr. 8 English (24 students from February - June 2022) and one Gr. 9 Humanities class (23 students from September-June 2022) respectively).  The focus was  to improve students' written communication. These skills were taught and expanded on from Grade 8 to 12.  We worked on student understanding of the proficiency scale, self-reflection, and the ability to analyze text and communicate ideas in oral and written form.  

In 2021-2022, our focus at Sullivan Heights was to improve students' written communication through creating original ideas, defending a position, and communicating their thinking in a well written composition (paragraphs, essays, poetry, personal narratives, and/or short stories).   Each year students are introduced to the basic foundations of the writing process.  Teachers explicitly teach:

•  topic sentence/thesis
• writing formulas (Point, Evidence, Analysis (PEA)) to defend the topic sentence/thesis)
• how to accurately use, and reference, quotes from text in order to support their topic sentence/thesis
• creating/analyzing/identifying figurative language (symbolism, metaphors, similes personification)

Above are the process and skills students are engaging into develop proficiency in the writing process.

In 2022-2023,  our goal was  to achieve more of a consistent literacy focus across all subject disciplines, with an intentional focus on maintaining the above established goals (topic sentences, effectively communicating thinking, defending a position) consistently across subject areas.  We tracked 2 cohorts of Science 10 comprised of 29 students each and worked on continuing to develop expository and persuasive skills within a scientific context.   The Science teacher worked with the same annotation, thinking and thinking structures for their writing processes. We discovered that using the same pedagogical language was crucial in maintaining student progress and understanding.

(A student's scientific essay planning sheet demonstrating the goals consistent with the English/Humanities disciplines) 

By the 2022-2023 school year, we were starting to see results of our literacy focus.  The following graph also shows an increase in more students achieving higher grades (more are scoring at the proficient and extending categories at both Grade 10 and 12 levels) on the Provincial Literacy assessments:

Our Goal for the 2023-2024 School Year:

To improve literacy confidence in a group of Grade 8/9 students at Developing level on the proficiency scale 

The data we collected from the 2022-2023 school year indicated that there was still a key group of Grade 8/9 students who were only at a developing level.  19% of the students surveyed at the end of our cohort focus last year identified that they were not confident in writing a paragraph. The Department Heads of English and Humanities looked at statistics with the Vice Principal. Teachers were then asked to refer students who would benefit from a summer course to build literacy confidence, and key skills were identified for a an intensive summer Literacy program.  Our JumpStart Program in literacy was aimed at those students in Gr.8/9 who were still "developing" their literacy skills on the path towards "proficiency."   Students conducted one on one interviews with their teacher(s) on day one to the site in order to develop and recognize individual goals for their summer enhancement.

Teachers developed a nine-day, intensive literacy course intended to allow students to "play" with literacy, with the goal of increasing their enjoyment of literature.  Jumpstart teachers met individually with each student and set individually focused goals.  They then provided a mindful approach for the whole group,  emphasizing oral reading and fluency, having fun with narrative, fluency skills, comprehension strategies, and formulaic writing approaches, intent on building learner confidence in organizing their thoughts and substantiating their ideas.  

At the end of the intensive JumpStart course, students participated in a survey to assess their progress through JumpStart in reference to the same literacy goals that were outlined for previous cohorts of students in Gr.8/9. 

We continued to track this focus group throughout their Grade 9 and 10 years respectively to assess levels of confidence and achievement in their English course at the next grade level.

This graph notes that the students became slightly less confident throughout the year, but it the generally were much more confident than before the intensive literacy course. It is also important to remember that this in the face of harder work in a grade above where they were at the end of June and before JumpStart. 

This indicates that students were feeling equally confident or more so in formulating and defending an argument in the face of harder and more difficult work.

This response shows that the students generally the students are still feeling the same level of confidence or more confident almost a year later.  

Achievement in the Subsequent School Year (after JumpStart: Intensive Literacy Remediation)

Other data supporting these anecdotal survey responses are student marks.  In addition to feeling more confident with literacy skills such as reading, analysis and writing, students marks in the 2023-2024 school year indicated greater success across writing based subjects, or in some cases, maintaining the same level of achievement in the face of higher level work. 

The above graph is illustrative.  Of the 6 students who withdrew from the JumpStart Intensive Literacy course, five attended for the first week, withdrawing to attend a refreshed learning course for another subject such as Math or Science.  Of the 15 Grade 8 students (including those who may have only attended a few days of JumpStart), four had marks remaining in the same range during their Gr. 9 year., three students scored more poorly in Grade 9, and the rest of the students did better across the academic disciplines in the subsequent year.  Of the Grade 10's who took Jumpstart, the two who attended only partially, maintained the same grades the subsequent year (Gr. 10) despite the fact the work was harder.  The other five students improved the subsequent year, with three improving substantially. Our conclusion is that when teachers recommend struggling students (Emerging/Low Developing on the Proficiency scale) to a summer intensive literacy course (where their challenges are addressed), it helps them acquire the confidence and skill sets to succeed in the following year.

Our next steps are to take what we have learned about augmenting reading and writing skills at the Grade 8 & 9 level, & what we have learned from augmenting the literacy of struggling students to  try broadening our literacy goals across subject disciplines ( a second time).  We learned in 2022-2023 that using the same pedagogical language for reading, annotating and writing processes across several disciplines (Humanities [English 8, 9 and Social Studies 8, 9]  as well as English 10 and Science 10]) was crucial in helping students to better understand these processes and remember them. Our goal is to take this knowledge to diversify it even further across more subject disciplines.  In order to do this: 

• The Humanities and English Departments met in late April after the Term 3 report card to identify key learning outcomes that still need to improve across Grades 8 - 12 in both reading and  writing.  
• The Humanities Department met again in May to design an diagnostic assessment to collect data on student ability to read and analyze a non-fiction text and formulate a response in paragraph form at the end of  Grade 8.
• We gave the this diagnostic on June 12 and the Humanities teachers marked this sample together on June 13th 2024, using exemplars against a common proficiency scale to:
  •  develop a collective understanding of the different proficiency levels
  •  and align marking practices with one another for consistency.  (This will allow us baseline data for comparison to a future assessment, thereby providing us with a snapshot of improvement within a one semester time period (dependent on when the student takes their English course in Grade 9.  It will also provide us with before/after exemplars for a large group of students, with the hope that we can then track this cohort over time (longitudinal study in literacy acquisition and improvement).   

The results were disappointing and not reflective of  literacy gains we have seen on provincial assessments or the sub group of students in the JumpStart program :  

Analysis: The students did not score as well as teachers had seen them score during the year.  After consultation with District Helping teachers, we learned that our diagnostic measured writing more than reading and that we may have to consult with them for better diagnostics.   A key reason may be that this is the cohort of children that were in Grades 3 and 4 during COVID;   the school disruption may have affected their literacy in a key stage of development. Another factor considered was that the students may have scored better had the diagnostic been given a month or two earlier, and not in June at the end of the school year.  The teachers felt students were scoring higher in other class assignments. Regardless, it is an interesting data set to use for comparison after their Grade 9 year is complete. 

More Next Steps:

• To augment the school goal of reading across subject disciplines, we will be taking what we learn and sharing it with all teachers within the building across all subject areas. ( This is a revisit of  2022-2023 school goal but more in depth with intentional Professional Development and targeted strategies each month presented to staff).
• Professional Development in September will target reading strategies and how to explicitly teach, use and embed them in every subject discipline. There will be two workshops, including:
  • Reading Strategies Across Subject Disciplines
  • Aligning Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Practices  with our increasingly complex class compositions. This is so that teachers will know how to design differentiated units "from the ground up" for all types of learners.  
• We hope to review one reading strategy each staff meeting to keep the focus targeted throughout the school year.

In addition, as this is the last year of a five year literacy cycle, we will also be sending out a survey for teachers to work with staff in identifying a new topic for growth within our professional learning community.  We are interested in a few different topics, including Equity and Diversity or work in Cultural Competency.  But we would like to survey staff to see what other areas of growth and learning emerge as areas of interest.