Blog Posts

Reflecting on the teaching and learning that is happening in our middle schools, there are many bright spots among the challenging territory we have been navigating this year. This confirms the commitment and dedication that our teachers have towards ensuring equitable and inclusive classroom environments. As we continue our progress towards our collective goals of improved reading, numeracy, and social-emotional competence, it is essential to anchor this work in our understanding of how our actions impact students and their success in our schools.

This year, secondary schools are engaging in professional inquiry questions that help educators learn about the inquiry cycle and experience strategies that they can use in their classrooms with students. Teacher inquiries focus on the five key underpinnings of inquiry: questioning and curiosity, engagement, student agency, assessment and evidencing, and competency development. Keeping true to our triple-track agenda, where we model and experience what we want for our students, teachers exercised their agency by selecting which underpinning they wished to focus on.

Kaitlyn Yates, LSS Teacher at Dr. R. Bondar Elementary school recently experienced the power of student involvement while including her student in his IEP meeting. The student was able to share insight to some of the concerns staff was observing, was open to acknowledging his challenges and eager to collaborate in co-planning a signal to draw upon when feeling overwhelmed, like a break system.

It is an exciting time to be a literacy teacher. Teaching literacy is a complex job, as it encompasses many discreet parts, each being an important piece in developing a skilled reader. If you visit our elementary schools, you will see many examples of how our teachers are meeting the literacy learning needs of our students in engaging and joyful ways. The Scarborough Reading Rope helps to illustrate these essential components of learning how to read and how interdependent they are.

The ELL Department has continued to build our relationships and learn from colleagues locally and worldwide who are leading culturally sustaining pedagogy. We are continually incorporating, modelling and developing practices that embody all aspects of the Abbyschools Equity Framework. Below are just a few examples of some of the great work that is happening in our district.

This year, as part of our Secondary Operational Plan and in partnership with the Curriculum Department and Trevor Mackenzie (author of Dive into Inquiry), we are working towards implementing structures and strategies that support inquiry based instructional practices … practices that align with our competency-based curriculum. Through our monthly Staff Learning Opportunities (SLOs), we are providing support and space for our learning communities to collaborate and share ideas.

Over the last three years, our district has moved from a literacy intervention model that required identified elementary students to be bussed to another school for an entire school term to a model that provided literacy intervention at their own school. But how do we ensure students receive the necessary tools to be successful in literacy without the specialist teachers? The secret is in the classroom teacher! 

As the end of the year inches closer, a group of leaders and teachers are in the process of building something amazing for our students. It started back in March as group of leaders formed an inquiry around two simple questions:

I had the pleasure of visiting W.J. Mouat Secondary school to spend time with students in Connect 12. Connect 12 is an integrated Indigenous course that blends Indigenous ways of knowing with social justice. In a talking circle, I shared my experience growing up in Abbotsford as an Indigenous person and my experience as an Indigenous person working in the Abbotsford School District. I then asked the students what we as educators could do to make schools better.

We are grateful to have a provincial curriculum that prioritizes the intellectual, human, and social development of each of our children. In addition to ensuring our students master the critical literacy and numeracy skills necessary for success, we have time, space, and tools to develop each student’s understanding of themselves, others, and the world around them. In a world of increasing complexity and polarization, building these core competencies has never been more important.