Over the past few years our school focus has been on building community with a focus on Social Emotional Learning.

In 2022-2023, after surveying students using the 'Spirals of Inquiry' and the CASEL (Collaborative for Academic and Social Emotional Learning), we arrived at a focus area of Social Emotional Learning and Personal and Social competencies. We began the school year with an inquiry question that was responsive to the feedback we received from students and staff: “How might supporting learners social emotional learning & personal competencies as well as strengthening their sense of identity & belonging help them grow as learners and as individuals? Please see the 'Our Learning' section for our action and evidence in this area.

In 2023-2024, we resurveyed our students and found a continued need to focus on Social and Emotional Learning and building community. We refined our focus area within SEL to strengthening student social awareness and self awareness through the lens of the First Peoples Principles of Learning. We worked hard to align our inquiry work, district consultant support and professional learning to this focus area. 

We had four inquiry grants linked to our focus :

Our Library Learning Commons team asked the question "How can we celebrate the intersectionalities in our community by exploring stories and engaging with making?".

Our Social Emotional Learning inquiry team asked "How will Indigenous ways of knowing and seeing inform how we see ourselves and each other?"

Our Early Literacy Team asked "How will the creation of literacy boxes that incorporate SEL components and practices outlined in our district Pillars of Literacy help to increase student knowledge, social
emotional regulation, engagement and confidence?

And our Learning Environments team asked "How might incorporating more student voice continue to support our inquiry in creating flexible learning environments that foster self-regulation, student agency, collaboration and a deeper sense of belonging?

In the spring of 2024, our SEL inquiry team worked in collaboration with our school leadership team to resurvey our students and staff. We looked at our data on our May Pro D day.

As our school continues to be experiencing growth with the addition of two more portables this coming school year and six modular classrooms in September of 2025, we will continue to work on supporting and strengthening connectedness and belonging for students, staff and families. We understand our community is changing and many of our families may have limited outdoor play space. We are curious about exploring a deeper connection to land based learning as part of our SEL/building community focus. We will also be working to strengthen family engagement as we recognize the partnership between school and family is a critical component in helping to improve student learning. Students have indicated they would like more choice in their learning. We are hoping to involve our student leadership team as active participants in planning for our Family Teams events.

Our SEL inquiry question has been refined to "How will supporting parents and students with more SEL tools and incorporating First Peoples Principles of Learning impact student’s ability to be self and socially aware? How will this affect student learning and connection at Talmey?"

When we surveyed our students we also asked them what they considered to be 'stretches' or areas they wanted to strengthen. Our data indicated a need to strengthen literacy strategies and supports. We checked our student feedback alongside term two learning updates and found that a literacy focus was reflected both in teacher descriptive feedback and proficiency scale data as well as with what we heard from students. Here is some of what our students have identified as areas they would like to strengthen:

“talking in front of the class”

“Communicating with new people, making new friends, talking in front of people”

“I get shy when I talk to people”

“I have problems socializing with people I am not close with”

“making friends”

“focusing and remembering”

“making more friends”

“I am working on getting better at working with people that I don’t know very well”

“I am working on getting better at including others into my friend group”

“Sometimes I am not very patient”

We therefore will be focusing on strengthening SEL and Literacy for the 2024-2025 school year.

We plan to do this by:

-by accessing district consultants to support staff learning and allowing for collaboration time for teachers to learn from and with each other 

-continuing to embed First Peoples Principles of Learning 

-working to strengthen family engagement to support learning and connectedness

-providing students with more flexibility and choice including more opportunities for land based learning and student leadership and agency.

Please see 'Our Learning' section for more information.