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 on three literacy and three numeracy sprints aligned with our school development plan goals. In literacy, our focus areas included: 

• Writing complete sentences with proper capitalization and punctuation. 
• Generating two ideas, independently, for writing assignments. 
• Incorporating relevant supporting details into writing. 

In numeracy, our focus areas included: 

• Decomposing and composing numbers. 
• Explaining the differences between two numbers (connected to the concept of value and quantity). 
• Understanding and using benchmark fractions on a number line. 

Through these sprints, teachers identified key strategies with a high success rate in supporting students' achievement of the outlined outcomes. For instance, in literacy, targeted skill practice based on teacher feedback and the use of exemplars and non-exemplars linked to the rubric proved highly effective. In mathematics, promoting discussions where students explain their thought processes or utilizing various manipulatives and visuals were also found to be effective strategies.  

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.