School Development Planning
We will share our 2018-2019 School Development Plan (SDP) at our meeting this Wednesday evening.
At our last School Council meeting all parents participated in an engagement session around our SDP. We examined the gains we made in relation to our SDP from last year and discussed the focus of our SDP for this year. We examined PAT Data, discussed the strengths of our school community and the areas of growth that we identified in the data. At the end of the meeting, many participants identified questions they would appreciate responses to. Below are the responses to their questions.
How do you plan to integrate kids on IPPs into our SDP?
A SDP is intended to address all students in the school. An IPP is written for the specific needs of a student where as the SDP generates goals for the entire school. Currently, with both math and literacy goals on our SDP, these are inclusive of all of our students therefore, all of our students will receive the impact of this focus.
How does your plan fit in with the new curriculum?
Our SDP does not relate to the new curriculum. The new curriculum will become effective in the fall of 2019. Our SDP, while more general than any specific learning outcome in the Programs of Study, is based on the current Programs of Study.
Focusing on sentence fluency is important, but to build sentences younger students really need a strong understanding of letters and sounds to make words. Will this be focused on?
Yes! Each grade level focusses on how the SDP is meaningful to their learners. Sentence Fluency to a Grade 6 student, who is writing many paragraphs on one topic will look considerably different than a Kindergarten student who is also working on sentence fluency when someone scribes for them or they sound out the initial letter of each word in their sentence.
Do you plan to use different math strategies to teach math concepts?
Yes! All of our teachers use many, many different strategies, materials and approaches to teach their students because we believe children learn in many different ways and at different speeds. It can take many different approaches and techniques to tap into the successful way a child learns. If we take a step back and look at our school as a whole, with a Montessori, Community, and Literacy & Learning program, and a Vision Cohort – there are four philosophies that ground the approaches we take to instruction and the strategies we might use to ensure all students are successful. In all of our programs we personalize the learning to meet the needs of our students.
In the achievement targets it would be good to have targets for all grades from 1-6 for Report Cards and PAT results.
In Alberta, we only have Provincial Achievement Results (PAT) for Grade 6 and Grade 9 students. As a result, we only have Grade 6 PAT scores to share. In regards to Report Cards, we seek to balance the data from the PATs with Report Card Data. This is why we report out on Grate 1/2 and Grade 3/4 with Report Card Data and Grade 6 for PAT. Then each of the three cohort groups have a piece in the data collection used to represent our school in the SDP.
