Coquitlam report to May 2014 meeting

This year our SS centres have been focusing on aboriginal circles. The aboriginal district resource teacher first worked with facilitators at a staff meeting to demonstrate how a circle would work in a way that was generalizable to their circle times. Then the other district aboriginal resource teachers started site visits to work with children and families. They conducted circles, read aboriginal stories, did drumming and worked with puppets. 

We will continue this focus next year with more emphasis being placed  on the aboriginal ways of knowing as they relate to outdoor learning.

Curious about new reporting on quality tool. Discussed need to get interested district people together to discuss what this will look like in districts in the future. How the information will be gathered to report on using the tool, etc.

Community Connections: Our ECD table and MDCM table is working on a children’s charter. We have done visioning with our tables and kids from our two rights respecting schools (one at elementary and one at middle). We are hoping to have our charter completed by spring 2015.

Our social marketing committee has spent the last year working on key messaging that will be used with the public in terms of what we stand for and believe in. For example: Play: everyday, everyone, everywhere. 

MNMF (My Neighbourhood, My Future project. Funded by United Way of the Lower Mainland and sponsored by UW, Help and Sparc BC. We were one of two districts selected and the neighbourhood we are focusing on is called Coquitlam River. The neighbourhood includeds 3 elementary schools and one middle school. It is a five year funded project to build neighbourhood capacity (and reduce early childhood vulnerabilities) by engaging people who live in the neighbourhood to support one another through innovative ways that will be self sustaining when the funding stops in 5 years.

We have also applied for a 20,000 grant which will be applied to providing pop up play grounds from July through to next February. In the summer in local parks and in the fall in 3 local schools where there is a high level of vulnerability, no StrongStart and no proximity to local services for families.

Curriculum Projects: This year we have had focus groups of teachers (K-12) and administrators meeting 5 times (with release) to examine the curriculum (math, science, social studies, language arts) and Communicating Student Learning for the purpose of trying out the concepts and giving feedback to the ministry. One of the 5 releases included a ministry presentation on the new curriculum. Last meetings included the completion of the ministry feedback surveys.

LIF: This year we had a coordinator and 2 support teachers take the lead on this work. We took our LIF funding and schools were able to apply for the funding to support their work on more inclusive approaches to learning. This might include money for collaboration time, money for an extra bit of staffing. We also provided district pro d to support inclusive practices. We had three pro d days with Leyton Schnellert, Miriam Miller and Faye Brownlie and all teachers who attended also participated in learning teams at their schools in order to begin trying out some of the practices. We also had 3 district sessions (each time 2 elementary, 1 middle and 1 secondary) with a principal and 2 teacher reps from each school. At these sessions we had Faye Brownlie for one and Leyton Schnellert for one again reiterating inclusive practice and the focus on inclusive support. The learning services team visited all schools in the district in the spring to talk to school teams about their work and the data was rolled up so we had a district vision of the progress being made towards in class support models.

In Coquitlam we have created 5 focus groups to begin "playing" with the new revised curriculum. There are groups for Communicating Student Learning, Language Arts, Science, Social Studies and French. Each group includes teachers with their administrators and they will meet 6 times this year (with release time) to explore the new curriculum and ways of working with it in their classrooms. The Communicating Student Learning group will be examining one curricular area as well but using it as the lens for ways to communicate this both to the students and their families. These will include documentation (videos, photos, learning stories, student work, etc.) 3 way conferences, templates and more. We are hoping to scale this up next year to a district level.
Currently each team has approximately 10 to 12 members from 4 schools.

We are also working on a new model of inclusive practice that puts the teacher at the core. (aka less pull out). Support teachers are providing more in class support through team teaching models. We are also using our LIF funding to provide professional development series to support this work with Faye Brownlie, Leyton Schnellert and Miriam Miller. We have also hired 2 district LIF learning support teachers that go into schools to help them with their school LIF plans. We are also conducting visits to each school to discuss where they are at and what support they would like from our department this coming school year.