I. General Information
School Name: Evelyn Dickson Elementary
School District: SD#91 Nechako Lakes
Inquiry Team Members:
Stephanie Carpenter: scarpenter@sd91.bc.ca
Kari Ephrom: kephrom@sd91.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: scarpenter@sd91.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE Case Study
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Intermediate (4-7)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Other: This applied to all content areas
Focus Addressed: Core competencies (for example, critical thinking, communication, problem solving)
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? We focused on student engagement with the core competencies and goal setting.
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
View our Celebration of Learning presentation here.
Scanning: We interviewed 12 students from my grade 5/6 class for this project. This represents half the class. We identified that they could identify adults who believed they would be a success, but tended to choose adults who had recently been a part of their schooling rather that those who may have been impactful earlier in their schooling. Most students were familiar enough with our digital portfolio system that they could easily identify what we were learning and why it was important, because we’ve spent time talking about learning goals and even specific language of the curriculum. They did not all understand how to answer the questions about where they are going next in their learning, but could identify their strengths and stretches. Since they were quite aware of the curricular competencies and content, we decided to focus on the core competencies. As an essential, but often overlooked, element of the new curriculum, we felt it was important to have students invest in their thinking about these competencies.
Focus: We’ve been working on setting core competency goals for a number of years now. This year, our district decided to choose the competencies that students would be working on for them, and have them set learning goals that they would set and reflect on as part of their student self-assessment, which is an important part of the new reporting order. Rather than reflecting and reporting on these only at report card time, we decided to set up a digital space for students to regularly interact with their goals and where they could monitor their own progress. We hoped that students would be inspired to set goals based on the core competencies chosen by the district. Regular reflection on the progress of these goals would make them more meaningful to the students and allow for more meaningful connections to them.
Hunch: We’ve been looking for a way to make the student self-assessment of the core competencies more meaningful for students. Noting that most students do not actively engage with the competencies, we wanted to find a way to create ongoing self-assessment and reflection using digital portfolios.
New Professional Learning: We’ve been reading peer reviewed articles about using e-portfolios as a reflective tool. We’ve also been reviewing the Ministry of Education’s publications on the purpose behind the core competencies. In our reading, we’ve been reflecting on the original purpose of the core competencies, which is to serve as a backbone to the other learning students do through the curricular competencies and content sections of the curriculum. Since this was not how we’d been using the core competencies, this learning impacted our inquiry and our teaching practice.
Taking Action: We wanted to align the student self-evaluation practices to the wording of the new reporting order. By using Spaces – a digital portfolio platform – we were able to tag those core competencies, which brought awareness to students of what they were assessing. Within Spaces, we created a Core Competency space where students could post their goals that aligned with the districts chosen competencies. Here they could reflect on them regularly and update them as needed. These goals were copied from the student self-assessment, as we still had to document their reflection in both places. Students were responding to my feedback with more regularity and refining their goals, but they weren’t necessarily more engaged.
Checking: Students were responding to my feedback with more regularity and refining their goals, but they weren’t necessarily more engaged. They had trouble creating meaningful goals that they wanted to follow through with and struggled to track their progress. They were so used to hoop-jumping with this that they didn’t know how to make it something they connected with. Additionally, because we still had to track these goals on paper, the quality of the responses students put on paper was diminished because they’d already reflected online and did not like the process of doing it again.
Reflections/Advice: I began offering smaller prompts within the core competency space that allowed students to make comments that related to the core competencies, but not necessarily their goals. These smaller prompts worked much better and elicited more authentic reflection from the students. This will be the basis of my plan next year. I will offer weekly prompts for them to reflect on. Some of these will be in their individual space, and some will be in the class space where they can build upon each other’s ideas. At the end of the year, they will create a reflection presentation to share some of the thinking they’ve been doing around the core competencies, using the work they’ve already done as the basis.
I think the work we did this year was a good first step, it just didn’t go far enough. Our students did more reflection than previous years, but it was not necessarily more meaningful to them. Our next step is to break it down further so that the core competencies become something they connect back to the work they’re already doing and think about them in other ways.