Myrtle Philip Community School

A safe environment for students and staff 

 

In light of COVID-19 and the ongoing pandemic, the number one priority for our team continues to be to provide a safe, and secure working/learning environment for staff and students.  Above all other efforts, this strategy for long term staff and student wellness sets our precedent.  Adjusting our expectations of ourselves and, insuring staff and students feel supported throughout the pandemic becomes our number one strategy.   

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The Love of Literacy  

 

Coming back from the pandemic teachers identified a widening gap between students in their ability to work with text (reading and writing).  Some students excelled with the online learning, yet many got further behind their peers.  The gap seems to be widening.  

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Our plan to address this is to foster the "culture of literacy" the extends beyond our school.  Our plan is to get students excited about literacy and see themselves as; 

     1) ferocious readers that think critically about text

     2) capable authors that have a voice in their writing  

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Our plan to address this is to include staff in the planning, and project tuning of a school wide text to text project.  Where themes of social and environmental justice are pulled from literacy expeditions in classroom activities.  These are then met with a critical thinking activity and then students are given the opportunity to publish a class book around this theme discussed in the classroom.  This way all students see themselves as published authors.  

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Collaborative Expertise & Team Leads 

 

Collaborative Learning Teams and Team Leads. 

 

During the first wave of developing online learning systems, we built structured collaborative learning teams with rotating team leaders and SBT members.  Each week the team would meet to build their practice on-line.  Each week we would also hold a team lead meeting, where we could work together to ensure there is consistency and continuity with the whole school.   This restructure of planning and collaborative team building has shifted the way we operate, and provided a framework for continued practice.  

 

Learning teams of 3 classroom teachers and a SBT member.  

 

These learning teams will continue to meet and collaborate. And teacher lead meetings will be held. 

 

Teachers can get together and co-plan real authentic projects and tune up existing projects to ensure student success.    

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Team Lead Professional Development

$ will be put into professional development for either:

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* Team leads 

* Whole teams 

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Co-designed School Wide Projects & exhibitions of learning for building reflection,  rigor and re-occurance  – Teachers have co-design projects to do with intermediate and primary classrooms that focus on elevating the “rigor” in the work that we do, and going deeper into the metacognition of learning. 

 

Students will need to identify; 

1. What is their personal learning objective is 

2. How they will measure it (and obtain evidence to support their growth) 

3. Who they will use as their sources of feedback (school, home, community) 

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By ensuring every student and teacher is working with setting their own learning targets, we will be able to focus on this skill set, and with continued perseverance in this development, we believe we will see a growth in the students’ ability to do this effectively on their own and with meaning.   

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What new strategy or structure are you most excited about? Why?

• All of them make us very excited.  We believe that the combination of these structures will all support each other in the development of making students embrace challenges, and give them the confidence and efficacy to do so.

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How do you monitor strategies and refine them as required?

• Professional dialog with staff

• Monthly afterschool collaboration team sessions (pre-planed dates for all team members to plan around)

• Continued assessment of our triangulated data