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Setting the Bar High ~ Lynda Pressey ~ Learning Supervisor, Languages

May 11th, 2012 by

In 1981, a young 24-year old from Saskatchewan named Arnie Boldt raised the world high jump record to 2.04 metres. This may not appear to be a noteworthy accomplishment; however, Arnie had only one leg. When he was three years old, he had lost one leg during a farm accident. According to Arnie’s story, he learned to accomplish this unbelievable high jump record because of his belief in himself. He set high expectations for himself and then surrounded himself with people who believed in him and provided the support he needed to achieve his goal.  Thirty years later, his unbelievable accomplishments are still posted on YouTube. 

 

In his book How to Change 5000 Schools, Ben Levin uses this as one example of the power of an individual’s personal expectations.

All too often, students hear messages that suggest that they will never be successful in life. They hear comments such as “You will never amount to anything.”  Parents/Guardians are often heard to say “She/He will never be good at Math because I failed Math when I went to school.” Our expectations as teachers, parents/guardians do influence students’ self-confidence and beliefs in themselves. 

 

In his book titled Visible Learning for Teachers, John Hattie states “These expectations of success (which are sometimes set lower than students could attain) may become a barrier for some students as they may only perform to whatever expectations they already have of their ability.”  Perhaps we should ask ourselves why we would ever intentionally limit someone else’s potential.

When exploring the factors having the greatest effect on student success, John Hattie has discovered through his study of over 800 meta-analyses, students’ predictions of their own performance ranked the highest overall.  What does this mean to us as educators and as parents/guardians?  When considering John Hattie’s findings, we conclude that we may be missing a critical factor in student success.  When asked, students are very good at predicting their level of achievement on a task or assignment.  However, there are many students who underestimate their ability to perform at a high level.  Often disadvantaged students such as those from minorities or those who live in poverty, face a world of barriers and challenges that may appear to be insurmountable – particularly if they hear that message from significant adults in their lives.  As adults, if we don’t believe that students can be successful, then they probably won’t be!  All too often, we underestimate our students’ potential.  On the other hand, if we believe in the student’s ability to achieve high results, they are more likely to believe in themselves.

 

As you view the YouTube video, you will see that Arnie Boldt set a goal for himself, but did not achieve it the first time. It was his sheer determination and his unwavering belief in himself that lifted him over the bar. What we don’t see is all of the people who supported him up until that memorable day when he achieved the unbelievable accomplishment. We also do not see the many hours of hard work and the many failures that occurred before this success.  Someone believed in Arnie Boldt and encouraged him to believe in himself!  

Who contributed to you achieving your goals as a student?

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A Shining Example of Inclusion~ Laura Elliott ~ Executive Superintendent of Program

May 6th, 2012 by

This weekend, I had the privilege of getting a sneak preview of the Abilities Centre, in Whitby Ontario.  This brand new $40M facility is a shining example of what a community is able to do with lots of hard work by community members who have the passion and devotion to improving the lives of those of varying abilities.

Open to the public on June 2, 2012, the Abilities Centre is a fully accessible, state-of-the-art multi-purpose facility committed to the development of an inclusive and integrated environment, where respect, understanding, cooperation, innovation, and education form the core values of the facility and people within.

The universal design, 125, 000 square foot facility houses three full basketball courts surrounded by a 200 meter, six-lane track. Fully equipped and universally accessible cardio/fitness and weight and sensory rooms offer unparalleled opportunities for physical activities for people of all ages and abilities. Drama, music, art and life skills programming will take place in the performing arts theatre, music studio, library and life skills room. 

Resource and meeting rooms will provide space for the Abilities Centre to be a knowledge hub of disability services, program information, participation and inclusion research, and fully integrated community capacity building.  The Abilities Centre has collaborated with world-class institutions to develop programming that meets the needs of people of all ages and abilities to help them reach their potential in the areas of sports/fitness, arts, life skills, research and education. 

Check out their website at www.abilitiescentre.org or watch their YouTube video to learn more about this incredible facility.  It will leave you breathless!

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Creativity and Mental Health ~ Jeanette Johnston ~ Learning Supervisor ~ Special Education

Apr 27th, 2012 by

There is a Crack in Everything.

That’s How the Light Gets In

Marcel Proust wrote “Only through art can we get outside of ourselves and know another’s view of the universe which is not the same as ours.”

Some of the artists we now think of as the world’s greatest are commonly believed to have had mental health needs, as children or adults or both.  Vincent Van Gogh reportedly had bipolar disorder.  What did he see when he painted those colours, those exploding shapes in the sky?  And how was Mark Rothko, who apparently had clinical depression, inspired to layer that brilliant paint and create those huge colour block abstractions?  Jackson Pollock,  also bipolar, threw paint splatters right from the can onto giant canvas and created massive paintings unlike anything seen before.

We celebrate these and so many other artists and creative people for their original work, and perhaps for the unthinkable prices their work now commands. They aren’t defined by their mental health challenges, but by their ability and unique creativity.  We don’t say “Vincent Van Gogh, manic depressive,” we say  “Vincent Van Gogh, extraordinary painter.”

 

Many children with mental health needs receive services and supports to be successful at school, and their disability or diagnosis becomes a key piece of information for the school.  Our schools and school board provide many supports for children and youth who are struggling with possible mental health concerns, whether or not they have a diagnosis.  Some young people demonstrate external behaviours we can’t fail to miss in the classroom.  Others have internalized their behaviours; they’re quiet around others, maybe angry or sullen, maybe depressed, or maybe just want to be invisible.

 

The reality in education is that more supports and services may be available when a student has a diagnosis, whether that is mental health, hearing impairment, autism, or another exceptionality.  We also spend time understanding children’s strengths as well as their needs.  It is this focus on strengths that must be a priority in the classroom.  Everyone needs the opportunity to explore or practice activities that might become strengths.  Sometimes this can take place effectively at school.

 

Pollock, Rothko and Van Gogh found their escape in making art.  For the next person, it might be music, writing, computers, cooking or sudoku puzzles. What will you do today to encourage the development of a child’s strengths?



“Thanks to art, instead of seeing a single world, our own, we see it multiply until we have before us as many worlds as there are original artists” (M. Proust)

(Title from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”) 

 

 

 

 

 

~ Jeanette Johnston

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Talk or Text ~ Diana Goodwin ~ Learning Supervisor School and Community Services

Apr 20th, 2012 by

The rapid advance of technology has allowed new forms of communication to emerge.  The ability to send and receive messages through e-mail, text, Twitter and Facebook has revolutionized conversations to the point where land lines in homes are being replaced by cell phones with text features, BB messaging, instant text chat (sometimes with video) and a host of other assorted applications.  Today’s youth rarely see the purpose or need to use a conventional telephone and much prefer to text their conversations via their various hand held devices.  The concern is that this is coming at the expense of person to person dialogue.
In recognition of the limited opportunity for oral, face to face communication, I am encouraged by the work of Thames Valley (TVDSB) educators who are becoming intentional in creating rich classroom experiences supporting time on task for engaging oral discussions.  The Kindergarten Program document (2006) notes that “oral language is the basis for literacy, thinking, and socialization in any language.  All young children need learning experiences that help them understand, acquire, and build on oral language.”
In my role of supporting the implementation of Full-day Kindergarten, I have visited many Early Years’ classrooms and am excited to find that these educators are creating purposeful “talk spaces” where young children are invited to converse with each other in comfortable, open settings. I was very inspired by a conversation between two SK students who were debating what colours existed in a rainbow.  The vocabulary in this discussion was very rich.  The educators knew how to effectively ask provoking questions to extend the learning.  In these environments, educators support inquiries  based on student interests, choice and voice through conversation between the students and the adults in the classroom.
In my visits to various classrooms I’ve seen educators plan and focus instructional time on asking thought provoking questions that lead students to discover, explore and problem solve. Rather than giving students the answers, many educators are becoming highly skilled at observing and listening while students dialogue with one another and then search for the key moment to enter the conversation for the purpose of  extending and challenging student thinking.  A walk through the halls in many of our schools will immediately demonstrate intentionally and carefully designed learning opportunities evidenced in  posted documentation of learning where educators have recorded student thinking through oral opportunities.
Lucy McCormick Calkins notes that “talk, like reading and writing, is a major motor of intellectual development.” Promoting classroom talk involving rich educator-student discussion supports the development of student cognitive reasoning and allows for students to express their reasoning skills.
Grand Conversations In the Junior Classroom (Capacity Building series, 2012) speaks to research supporting the use of dialogue to enhance students’ thinking for deeper understanding.  Many Thames Valley classroom environments are no longer quiet, but rather “buzzing” spaces with teacher talk  being replaced by student talk.  Conversation cafes, debates, learning through inquiry, play-based environments, asking effective questions and instructional strategies such as think-pair-share, are all explicit examples of classroom practices encouraging productive oral language skills.
Although it can be argued that technology has opened up opportunities for new forms of communication, it might also be suggested that it has shut down other forms. What can educators and / or parents do to bring balance to the question of text or talk?

~Diana

Additional Related Links:

  • Lucy Calkins speaks to Young Writers
    (YouTube Video – click her image above or click here!)

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Posted in Full day Kindergarten, Practice, Social Media, Student Learning | No Comments »

Reinterpreting Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder ~ Barrie Evans ~ Coordinator, Psychological Services

Apr 14th, 2012 by

With that lead in and apologies to Monty Python, my  Program Ponderings  blog  is a little different from previous blogs.   I am not an educator (although I am a professor in two departments at Western).  I have the honor of being the Coordinator of Psychological Services, which is part of Special Education  Programs and Services under the umbrella of Program Services.   My wife, the English teacher, taught me the adage  (quoting from Mark Twain), “Write what you know”  so I am writing about what I know.

ADHD has had a chequered history which goes back over a hundred years; yet not everyone believes in the diagnosis of ADHD.  Some parents (or teachers) may feel that this is just an excuse for either an unmotivated child or a school system that has not met the child’s needs.  The diagnosis has been criticized for being overused although some experts believe that ADHD is under-diagnosed.  ADHD is probably the most studied childhood psychiatric disorder with prevalence estimates ranging between 3-7% of all children meeting the criteria (more than twice the number of boys than girls).  (For more information see: http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html)

If you don’t like the term wait a few years and it will change!  Consider that in 1902 a British doctor first described the symptoms giving them the name “Defect of Moral Control”. He believed that the symptoms of impulsivity and hyperactivity were due to some imperceptible brain damage and hence the term MBD or minimal brain damage or dysfunction gained currency during the last century. The problem was that there was no firm evidence to link the problems observed to any history or physical evidence of brain injury.  Fast forward to today and we do have tools to look at brains such as fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) that have shed light on how brains actually work and what may be different about the ADHD brain.   More about that later.

In the 1960’s the term “Hyperkinetic Reaction of Childhood” was introduced in the second edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-II) used by psychiatrists and psychologists.  The symptoms of overactivity, restlessness, distractibility and short attention span were still linked to organic brain damage but the emphasis was placed squarely on the hyperactivity (hyperkinesis).

In DSM-III, the term “Attention Deficit Disorder” was coined and it was recognized that the condition could occur with or without hyperactivity. In 1987, it was changed again to the current term, ADHD.  The hyperactive-impulsive (ADHD-H/A) and inattentive (ADHD-I) sub-types were described with some sharing of core symptoms but some differences.  The focus was now more on the problem being one of attention rather than overactivity.

This brings us up-to-date although DSM-IV(TR) is now being replaced with DSM-V which will see the light of day probably within a year.   The proposed DSM-V criteria for ADHD have changed somewhat in subtle but important ways although the core symptoms: hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention remain . (See: http://www.dsm5.org/ProposedRevisions/Pages/proposedrevision.aspx?rid=383 ).

The problem with DSM-V, although there are hints to suggest that this is changing, is that the focus is still on the symptoms and not on the underlying processes which are causing the symptoms.  Hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention are the tip of the iceberg. They are the visible by-products of an absence of behaviour that is intentional, goal-directed and purposeful.  There is a corresponding absence of thinking that is effortful, organized and reflective.  Furthermore, for the person with ADHD, immediate rewards will always trump delayed rewards and there is an absence of the skills relating to delaying gratification.  In truth, the “absence” is relative, depending on the severity of the problem and there may be more of a developmental lag.   This view of ADHD is supported by recent fMRI findings which link ADHD to the seat of these executive  functions in the front

|| click to view video ||

part of the “thinking” brain (particularly, the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex).  Dr. Russell Barkley, from whom I have drawn a great deal of my inspiration, has referred  to ADHD informally as an “Intention Deficit Disorder” . (click image to watch the video)

Despite all the research and all the recent findings, we still cannot say for sure what causes ADHD in any specific child.  Like most other human conditions, there is probably not just one thing at play but a “perfect storm” of determinants which may be a combination of genetic, prenatal, early experiential and proximal environmental conditions.  The exact amount that any one of these elements contributes to the problem may differ from child to child.  There is also an inter-play between brain structure and function and environmental factors such that we can no longer separate what goes on inside the head from what happens outside the head.

Even among those who accept the reality of ADHD, some have questions and concerns about the use of medications (such as Ritalin) to treat the disorder. Stimulants were first used to treat hyperactive symptoms in 1937 by an American physician, Dr. Charles Bradley.  Almost immediately people started to talk about the “paradoxical effects” of giving stimulants to already overactive children , This introduced an unnecessary mystery and also reinforced a complete misunderstanding of the nature of ADHD which has persisted.   Ritalin was marketed first in 1956 and remains as one of the oldest psychotropic medications  for children still in current use.

 

There are many new medications, some which offer timed release over the day and others which combine the active methamphetamine and dextroamphetamine ingredients. There are also some which are not stimulants at all but have a different pharmacology, affecting norephephrine levels in the brain rather than the combination of dopamine and norepinephrine levels which the stimulants affect.   There is no paradoxical effect.  The medications activate the areas of the brain which are responsible for executive functions (the previously mentioned pre-frontal cortex). Although these medications are known to be helpful, they are not the only answer. They may enable a child to benefit from teaching, and create an increased readiness to learn but it is the learning that takes place that is important.  Long term studies have shown no long term benefit of stimulant medication on educational outcomes.

So where does this leave us in our quest to help each student, every day, including those with ADHD?  We need to support, encourage and of course, at times, provide accommodations for students who face challenges in sustaining focus, organizing their thoughts and who may give up too readily because of the mental effort required.  We can coach students to become more organized and there are lots of assistive technology programs that aid the organization of work.  The biggest challenge is often in sustaining mental effort without immediate gratification.   It’s far easier for a student to fall back to playing fast-moving, instantaneously rewarding game rather than persisting with something that requires sustained mental effort.   But there are rewards in putting forward just that little bit of extra effort and persisting just that little bit longer.  Students who are able to persist, with or without medication (which is more difficult) will reap the rewards of success in learning.  Adolescents and post-adolescents can succeed when they accept their challenges and understand what they need to do to meet these challenges and  take control over their lives. There are many examples of successful people with ADHD.  You may know one of them.  You  may be one of them.

To access practical suggestions, every teacher in the Board will have recently received a copy of Making A Difference: An Educator’s Guide to Child and Youth Mental Health Problems.  There is a section on Attention Problems (E1).  There are many good suggestions in this guide about this and other topics.

If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to respond to this blog and, time permitting, I will try to respond.

P.S. That’s John Cleese at the desk, not me, just in case you were wondering…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. Barrie Evans, C.Psych.

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THE LONG AND WINDING ROAD ~ Melanie Ferdinand ~ Coordinator, School Counselling and Social Work Services

Apr 6th, 2012 by

I recently read a newspaper article titled the “Ten Best Roads to Drive”, which contained pictures of “breathtaking roads from around world.”  All of the roads depicted were full of curves, turns, twists, bends, danger and challenges.   It struck me as I was reading the article that, just like these roads, the road to student achievement is not always a straight journey. There are many ways to reach the destination of graduation.
For some students, they jump on the expressway.  From kindergarten to Grade 12…zoom!   For others, they run into detours or hit potholes, throwing things out of alignment. Some choose to take the longer scenic route, some take the toll road, which may be a quicker route, but with a fee to pay. Some students get caught in gridlock, some encounter slowdowns.  
Last week, I had the privilege of hearing a group of secondary students from the TVDSB School within a College (SWAC) program speak about their journeys.  The SWAC program  is a Ministry of Education funded joint initiative between the Thames Valley District School Board and Fanshawe College. Both secondary and college level credits are administered at Fanshawe College.   These students had all embarked on different roads, some by choice, and others by circumstance.  A key part of their message was that with help, understanding, and listening to what they needed, and by challenging them to be part of the solution, all of these students will be able to complete their road to graduation in June.
Sometimes as adults we get frustrated with children and youth who do not respond to our direction, efforts and interventions.  It is important to look beyond the overt behaviour, to hear what that behaviour is trying to communicate, to listen to their solutions, and to help them draw a new map.    It is important to acknowledge what it takes for some students just to get to school.
Many of our students face obstacles and barriers.  Many students lack basic supports. Many lack emotional and familial supports.  Yet, they continue to inspire me on how they cope each and every day, how they continue to have a desire to learn and grow, although outside influences can often make that difficult.
We need to remember that their roads may all be different, and we may need to ask them how we can help them navigate.  As the Beatles song says, “The long and winding road that leads to your door will never disappear, Lead me to your door.”
~Melanie

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Posted in Personal Learning, Student Learning, Student Success | 1 Comment »

Collaborative Inquiry for Learning in Mathematics ~ Janine Pitman ~ Learning Supervisor, Math & Sciences

Mar 30th, 2012 by

Taking the subtitle of this page: What Inspires Us as my guide, I am sharing a math initiative which has  inspired me due to the work of our teachers who have been involved in a math professional development model called Collaborative Inquiry for Learning in Mathematics (CIL-M).  What has been particularly inspiring is the high degree of involvement of teachers in the work of changing their math practice from teacher-focussed classroom teaching to student-focussed teaching, which starts with teaching through problem solving.

For at least thirty years, much of the western world has been trying to change the way we teach mathematics to reflect the ultimate outcome of our teaching: to have adults who are good problem solvers in their daily lives, and who see math as the useful tool it is for everyone.  At present, our province, like most of the world, is trying to lead this change.  Within our board it is the focus of most of the math work we support and guide.  This focus is reflected in all Ministry math resources, and the provincial testing done by EQAO at the Primary, Junior and Grade 9 levels, and in international testing.  Our province values this highly as it includes 5-8 Open Response problem-solving questions in EQAO worth 53% of the assessment.

This methodology is constructivist, with roots in the work of Piaget and Bruner, and more recently the work of math researchers like Cathy Fosnot and Lucy West.  It starts where students are and empowers them to solve problems using any method they can at first.  This idea, when applied to teacher learning, is found within the CIL-M model, a collaborative approach which starts where teachers are and values their input about their own students and their own readiness for change.  What has particularly inspired me over the past three years in particular, has been teachers’ positive responses and openness to change as we have worked together within this math professional learning.

When students’ methods of solving problems are valued, students see their efforts as having worth.  This leads to more successes, greater student self-efficacy and belief in their own ability.  As parents have commented to some of the teachers involved in this work, “I don’t know what you are doing differently in math, but my child is coming home excited to tell me about what he learned in math today and is really positive about math learning.”

So to return to what has inspired me ………… I have been inspired by so many teachers’ efforts within this project to make moves to try to teach in this way.  Where they have, they are telling us that student engagement is growing, students’ problem-solving methods are being valued, and greater success is being seen all around.  This has implications for some different assessment practices in line with Growing Success, classroom dynamics and grouping of students.  These all form the context for student learning in math using this approach.

Not only does the nature of this professional development work inspire me, I am thankful to numerous teachers who are trying this methodology in their classrooms, and who are risk-taking enough to persist with it for the betterment of their students’ engagement and learning.It is my math dream that we will see this work bear fruit in increased student achievement, and that we will not hear people saying “I don’t like math.”

What inspires your math teaching?  Do you have a math dream for your students, or your own children?
Janine~

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The Power of Partnerships ~ Sue Bruyns ~ Principal of Wilfrid Jury

Mar 25th, 2012 by

One thing that I learned early on, in my administrative career, is that in order to be able to effectively support the staff that I worked with, I needed to ensure that they were connected to the right people.  We then set out to create a school culture where everyone from coordinators to coaches,  TSAs to TOSAs and everyone in between were welcomed, appreciated, held to a high level of accountability and basically…. put to work.

The size and expanse of  Thames Valley is such that there is never a lack of need for our Program personnel to support students, teachers, educational assistants and administrators in all schools, so we needed to make sure that working with the Jury team was a positive one for all partners.  We know that their support is paramount to the success of any school.

In the last three years, we have worked with the IT Department in Program Services to create a school that is proud of their use of a vast array of technologies to engage not only students, but all teachers.  We are honoured to host Summer Institutes and various other technology conferences. That level of commitment to ensuring that all of the technologies are working at optimum efficiency is not for the faint hearted TSA.

Our community is blessed with every type of diversity, including many families whose first language is not English and we are proud of the strong partnership that we have developed with our ESL department and most recently our Settlement in Schools Worker.

Housing three of the system’s Developmental Education programs, a STEPS for Success Behaviour program and a staff of seventeen Educational Assistants demand a significant partnership with our Special Education Department. Through that partnership, we have created a school culture where we have quickly learned to access support from all branches of their various departments.

Not unlike other schools within Thames Valley, we find ourselves in a position to embrace the challenges of numeracy instruction as we recognize that our students need to be better prepared.  The math department is always there for formal and informal advice, support and resources.

Our partnership with the Language team has had a significant impact on improvement at Wilfrid Jury.  We work closely with our Literacy coaches, who provide support to all levels of our school team and we have expanded our partnership to include the Literacy and Numeracy Secretariat, in the form of our Student Achievement Officer. Their combined knowledge about best practices and the most effective resources are welcomed by our school team.

Henry Ford’s quote about teamwork embodies our journey with Program Services, “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success”

It is through working together with Program Services that Wilfrid Jury continues to improve and shine as we meet the needs of our students, our staff and our community.

Sue Bruyns
Principal of Wilfrid Jury Public School

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Commercialization/Democratisation of End Points. ~ Stephen Young ~ Manager, Information Technology Services

Mar 9th, 2012 by

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ITS departments around the world are wrestling with a recent trend in technology that sees technology users wanting to use their own devices in the execution of their responsibilities. Or if not their own device, these users are requesting a greater flexibility in the types of devices that organizations supply and support.

In education we are experiencing this in many areas.

Most obviously is the desire by students and teachers to bring their own devices to school and use them in their learning and teaching activities. The Thames Valley District School Board recognized this need in the “Information and Communications Technology Strategic Plan, 2009-2014” and has begun the deployment of infrastructure to support the connection of student and teacher owned devices to the Internet from school.

The more challenging area for IT originations is the movement from supporting a standard endpoint device to a model that would allow more flexibility over the type and make of the end point. Clearly driving this is the need to support tablet and smart phone type devices. For many years IT departments have clung to standardization of endpoints and operating systems as a mantra in being able to provide effective IT support.

The challenges presented by this loosening of endpoint and operating system standardization are many, especially in an environment of limited and shrinking resources.

A number of questions need to be considered.

How does ITS support a greater variety of devices without increasing resource levels?

How does the organization provide appropriate, secure access to data and applications from devices of which it cannot control the configuration?

I am confident that solutions will be found to address these and the many, many other issues that surround this movement to a greater flexibility and choice in the use of technology.

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Posted in Change, Technology | 2 Comments »

RESILIENCY ~ Karen Edgar ~ Superintendent for Special Education Programs and Services

Mar 2nd, 2012 by

As the Superintendent for Special Education Programs and Services, I have the wonderful opportunity to observe students, teachers and classrooms accomplish remarkable feats in the face of great adversity.  I have often asked myself what these students and classrooms have in common… and the answer is resiliency.

As outlined in the book, Resilient Classroom by Zucker, Doll and Brehm, resilient students are successful despite the odds.  They do well academically and socially.  The greater question is why do some vulnerable students learn and experience success while others do not?  What can we, as educators and as school systems, do to harness those factors which have proven to help foster resiliency?

For a long time, when faced with students experiencing challenges, the focus has been on changing the child.  As we have learned over the years, there is much less success of change sticking if we send a “changed student” back into an “unchanged environment.”

As a school system, we can change the way we view the role of the classroom.  In their book, Zucker, Doll and Brehm have focused on six characteristics of resilient classrooms:

  • academic efficacy
  • behavioral self-control
  • academic self-determination
  • effective teacher-student relationships
  • effective peer relationships
  • effective home-school relationships.

Few could argue that each of these areas is an essential characteristic of an effective classroom.

How do we get there?

Two things have been shaping my thinking in this area a great deal over the past couple of years.  One is the development and implementation of our school board’s mental health strategy.

Mission: The Thames Valley District School Board acknowledges that mental well-being is an enabler for school success.
Vision: Every school in the Thames Valley District School Board will be a mentally healthy school.

The second is a book we have been reading as a senior administrative team.  In Simon Sinek’s Start with Why, he focuses on the reasons why we do what we do.  Too often, companies and organizations focus on the “what and how” and lose sight of the “why” they do what they do.

Combining these two gets to the heart of creating resilient schools, classrooms and developing resilient students.  Developing resilient classrooms is a key factor in fostering resiliency in our students. The comment below from a school principal highlights the importance of the changed environment in developing resilience in our student population.

Are we up for the challenge???

A middle school administrator explained it this way:
It’s like a fish bowl.  All the other people come into our school and try to fix the fish.  You’re trying to clean up the water.  Cleaning up the water does not always fix the fish, but’s it’s almost impossible to keep the fish healthy until the water is clean.

Resilient Classrooms, p.122

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