When two students perform the same academic task, the patterns of activity in their brains are as unique as fingerprints.David H. Rose & Anne Meyer
The education of students has fundamentally shifted as a result of information technology and globalization. These global changes have necessitated modernizing the curriculum and teacher practice to ensure learners can meaningfully analyze, synthesize and communicate effectively. Alongside these changes is an increased understanding of diversity and the need for the personalization of learning. To this end, the North Vancouver School District is committed to the ongoing development of employees around current educational practice.
Areas For Focus
New Curriculum Essential Understandings and Practices
To enhance the modernizing of the curriculum, it is essential to assist teachers with: promoting deep student thinking; enhancing student understanding; and transference of learning to real world situations/applications.
Goal: Develop and enhance teacher’s ability to teach conceptually to promote deeper levels of student understanding.
Key Actions:
- Teacher leader in-service sessions
- Establish collaborative teacher teams
Measure of Success/Indicator of Progress:
- use of backwards design planning
- ongoing implementation of the new curriculum
- collaborative teacher teams
Instructional Planning and Design
To ensure students are exposed to curricular competencies and content, teachers intentionally design lessons articulating learning intentions, success criteria and means by which the students will be able to attain them.
To assist teachers with this task, North Vancouver has developed the Curriculum Hub.
This key tool supports not only instructional planning, but also assists teachers with designing units to enable students to become active learners and engaged citizens.
Goal: Promote and support the use of the North Vancouver Curriculum Hub to assist in the development of units of instruction that align with curricular competencies, First People’s Principles of Learning, and quality assessment practices.
Key Actions:
- Provide professional learning on current instructional practices
- Ongoing development of the Curriculum Hub to support intentional planning
- Promote collaborative planning
Measure of Success/Indicator of Progress:
- use of the Curriculum Hub to support curriculum development
- establishment of professional learning grants
- Teacher Leader led collaborative planning sessions
Communicating Student Learning
Communication between home and school needs to be effective and timely. Well informed parents are able to support their child’s learning where needed. To move beyond traditional report cards, the North Vancouver School District actively promotes innovative assessment and reporting practices.
These practices include, but are not limited to, regularly providing descriptive feedback on student progress on the learning standards (curricular competencies and content), articulating the student’s next steps for learning and providing meaningful, relevant descriptions, concrete evidence/artifacts that allow students to demonstrate their learning.
Goal: Ongoing communication of student learning in alignment with the curricular competencies.
Key Actions
- Enhance teacher understanding of assessment practices
- Enhance teacher capacity to use evidence to support learning
- Provide in-service on standards based assessment
- Enhance self-assessment of the core competencies
Measure of Success/Indicator of Progress:
- established protocols for communicating student learning
- explore alternative methods to communicate with parents
- explore MyEducation BC assessment and reporting tools
← District Priorities ← Complex Learners Indigenous Education → Career Development →Social Emotional Learning →
