POPEI's Redesigned Curriculum Support

The Redesigned Curriculum is a popular topic for POPEI workshops so far this fall.

We have already completed several workshops on this topic, with many more planned throughout the school year.

We will also be hosting two full day Regional Workshops on the topic of the Redesigned Curriculum and K-3 Literacy. We will be in Burnaby on February 17, and then in Abbotsford on February 24. These will be open to all educators. Stay turned for registration information that can be shared with anyone who may be interested.

Last year, we launched a section of our website dedicated to the redesigned curriculum, where we shared "user & printer" friendly versions of the K-3 ELA curriculum, and the Core Competencies.


This Spring, POPEI created a Literacy Planning Guide that we have been excited to share with BC educators. It is now available in Word format, (linked on the website) for those who want to customize the guide for other subject areas or grades. 

Feedback from educators has been extremely positive so far.

It has been very rewarding to support BC educators during the first few weeks of implementation, and we look forward to continuing to do so, throughout 2016-2017.

Kindergarten Literacy Assessment Tools

Delta just rolled out a suite of tools for Kindergarten teachers for Literacy Assessment and Evaluation. The suite was designed by a team of K, Grade 1 and Learning support teachers. We aimed to provide useful tools to teachers to enable us to share common language and expectations for K that both reflect the new curriculum and dovetail into our Grade 1 literacy benchmarks.

Underlying this work is a Print Acquisition Continua that the team created to capture the developmental stages of children discovering how print works and using it for their purposes.  One of the main reasons we decided to create a new continua was to be able to describe where kids are at on the journey based on what they CAN do.

We know how important it is for us as early learning teachers to help kids crack the literacy code. We also know that this is one small piece of the broader literacy competencies that we want for out kids. Teachers asked for and we gave them a set of term by term benchmarks that includes both the Print Acquisition skills and the broader literacy understandings, competencies and knowledge captured in the new curriculum.

To go along with these common standards and continua, we've provided 6 optional assessment tools for teachers to use or adapt for their purposes. The 6 optional assessment tools are focussed on the Print Acquisition continua. We think this is information teachers need to have about all their students. How teachers are able to get that information can change from class to class and from student to student.

For each area of Oral Language, Reading and Writing, teachers have access to an Observation Frame, a Class Profile, and an Interview Protocol. Each interview protocol includes both metacognition/self-concept questions, feedback and goal setting.

The entire collection of tools and resources can be found in the google folder below:

Delta Kindergarten Literacy Assessment Google Folder

We view all these documents as works in progress and are actively inviting feedback from our teachers as they implement this year. Other thoughts and feedback are also welcome :)

Language Arts Curricular Competencies

To help folks understand the new English Language Arts Curriculum and facilitate cross grade understanding here is an excel doc with K-7 curricular competencies arranged to show how they progress from grade to grade
K-7 English Language Arts Curricular Competencies

StrongStart Learning Standards

Last year our StrongStart facilitators wanted to focus their professional learning on the Early Learning Framework and ways it could inspire their practice. This year to help communicate StrongStart objectives to families we decided to take what we know about the Early Learning Framework and present it in a one pager that summarizes the elements of the framework that feel most applicable to StrongStart.

To help us align with the K-7 curriculum we decided to use the Understand-Do-Know framework of the transformed curriculum. The result is 1 pager with 4 Big Ideas (one for each ELF domain) many competencies and even a few content objectives.

We're currently focussing on documentation and are using the competencies (turned into I can statements) to gives us some common language with parents and between StrongStarts.

Click here for the learning standards in a Word document

Core Competencies and the New Curriculum

At Delta's recent NID, some of our workshops focussed on the Core Competencies. We've made the content of those workshops available to schools and teachers in the district and are happy to share them with others in the province as well.

As part of one of the workshops I have taken the competencies apart into their individual facets. By separating them from the other facets, and removing them from their profile number I think this makes for a more useable format to share with students to help them identify where they are at and what their next step is.

The Core Competency materials can be found on our Innovative Teaching Toolkit website.

https://deltalearns.ca/toolkit/core-competencies/

Comparing BC's Transformed Curriculum (Language Arts)

At our September in-service Delta Kindergarten and K/1 teachers spent some time working with the new language arts transformed curriculum drafts that were released in August.  To help teachers process the new curriculum we worked with one pagers for both the new and current curricula (English and French Immersion). We spent the bulk of our time comparing the big ideas which is why the first page of each document just has the big ideas (goals from IRP docs) listed. The second page of each document has all the detail including the pop-ups/elaborations added from the newest drafts so that teachers can see all the detail in one place and easily cross reference different pieces. Not all of the transformed English Language Arts curriculum fit on the one page so the overflow definitions are included in a glossary page.

Transformed Kindergarten English Language Arts (08/2015)

Transformed English Language Arts Glossary (08/2015)

Kindergarten English Language Arts (2006)

Transformed French Immersion Kindergarten Language Arts (08/2015)

French Immersion Kindergarten Language Arts (1997)

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.