As a school within the CBE, we embrace the value of “learning as our central purpose,” which extends to both our students and our staff. One of the ways we support our teachers' ongoing development is through learning sprints. These sprints are a structured process where teachers target specific areas of student learning that need improvement. Through collaborative discussions, teachers explore relevant research to identify effective strategies to address these areas. Over the course of six to eight weeks, teachers implement and refine these strategies, culminating in a review and reflection phase to strengthen their teaching practices.
This year, we engaged in reading and numeracy sprints. In numeracy, our focus areas included:
- understanding how numbers can be composed and decomposed to make bigger and smaller numbers;
- understanding of the relationship between multiplication and division; and
- identifying practical applications of the math concepts they are currently working on (ie. a story or a situation).
In reading literacy, our focused included:
- building students’ inferencing skills;
- building students’ ability to pull evidence from a text to justify their answers; and
- building students’ ability to use contextual clues to determine the meaning of words.
Through these sprints, teachers identified key strategies with a high success rate in supporting students' achievement of the outlined outcomes. For instance, in mathematics, promoting discussions where students explain their thought processes, using student derived definitions to describe math concepts, or providing more time for students to engage in the concept vs. giving the answer to quickly were also found to be effective strategies. In literacy, targeted skill practice based on the Scarborough Reading Rope (p.8) proved highly effective. We take great pride in the hard work of both our students and teachers, whose collaborative efforts have made learning sprints an import process that positively influences everyone's learning journey.