I. General Information
School Name: Twain Sullivan Elementary School
School District: SD#54 Bulkley Valley
Inquiry Team Members: Brittany Huson: Brittany.Huson@sd54.bc.ca
Cindy Pottinger: C.Pottinger@sd54.bc.ca
Mary Neto: Mary.Neto@sd54.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: Mary.Neto@sd54.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: Indigenous Education Impact Initiative
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Intermediate (4-7)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Language Arts – Literacy, Language Arts – Oral Language, Language Arts – Reading, Language Arts – Writing, Mathematics / Numeracy
Focus Addressed: Self-regulation, Other: social emotional; sense of belonging
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? Implementing the direct teaching of social skills and the creation of lunchtime social activity groups will build a sense of belonging and diverse social connections in the larger school community.
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning:
- Completed personal interviews to have student voice and understand student perspectives.
- When we completed our scanning, we focused on basic needs:
- Are they hungry? We offer a breakfast, snack and lunch program. Students are able to ask for sandwiches throughout the day.
- Are they tired? Students used the medical room or Indigenous support room to rest or nap if necessary. What emotions are they feeling? (body language) Students would become angry and slam doors, cry, yell and throw things. Safety plans were necessary for some students.
- How are they communicating? (verbal and non-verbal communication) Students would often ignore adults or answer a question with a sigh, scream or negative behaviour. Some students would seek out time alone or become above baseline/agitated.
- Who are they socializing with? The students had a group of peers with similar socio-economic backgrounds. They were unfriendly to other students and kept to themselves. They were not open to having others join them or to join in with others.
- What adults are they connected with? Limited. Some spent time with the Indigenous Support Worker. Some staff felt intimidated to redirect or interact with these students.
- Are they regularly attending school? Generally, the students regularly attend.
Focus: To provide structure for social times at school and give the students social skills so that they could expand their social circles and have a sense of belonging at school. We selected this area because we noticed that we could better support students to be connected to a wider group of peers.
Hunch:
- not having high expectations for all students
- noticing that the students played separately from the rest of the student body, but didn’t take action to improve this
- unconscious bias of staff
Reflections for Year 1: We learned that the following are imperative…
- Checking our own unconscious biases and privilege
- Checking with families before providing supports rather than assuming it is needed
- Having high expectations for our learners
- Providing professional learning for all staff (teachers and support staff)
- As trust is developed and students share with us, we honor that trust and act where needed
- Aiming for systemic change, exploring this idea/goal
Through taking the following actions, we learned that students became more connected to adults and peers. We know this because we observed them being more engaged in activities and choosing other peers during recess and lunch. It would have been beneficial to ask the eight students the 4 questions at the end of the school year in-order to compare their responses.
The following actions were taken:
- Personal schedules with adult support during unstructured play time and social emotional supports
- Modeling social skills by adults
- Lunch clubs with peers (drumming, basketball, sewing, music, chess)
- Introduced cultural perspectives (learning through modelling)
- Regular TEK (Traditional Ecological Knowledge) Whole School Days (seasonally)
- Visuals for learning
- Regulation (sensory room, sensory tools)
- Purposeful relationship building
- Connecting families with community supports
- Communication with families (asking permission from parents before providing support, not assuming family’s needs)
- Checking our own biases
- Weekly cultural learning in each classroom by Indigenous Support Worker
- New male Indigenous Support Worker, supporting his learning and growth
- Brain aligned discipline
- Looping students in classes so that they have repeated years with the same teacher
Plans for Year 2:
- Transition plans for students going to high school and coming into Twain as grade fours
- Continuous scanning to update action plans
- Updating data interviews to identify areas that are working and areas needing support and plans
- Involving students in their learning (Personal Responsibility- decision making)
- Including district core values (compassion, honesty, respect, responsibility and fairness) when modeling and teaching social skills more directly to the students we are tracking
- Ask 4 questions at the beginning and end of the school year