Over the past two years, our staff worked closely with our district coordinator for Mental Health, Social Emotional Learning and Counselling programs. Many of our Professional Development opportunities have had an Indigenous learning or SEL focus and were co-designed with our Pro D committee and district coordinator.  

Our staff completed the E.A.S.E training (Everyday Anxiety Strategies for Educators) and worked with our new district resource, Pillars of Literacy to explore SEL lesson planning.

In 2022-2023, we also looked at teacher self-care and participated in an SEL book club which met regularly to discuss and review Dr. Jody Carrington’s book, ‘Kids These Days’.

In 2023-2024, we had two book clubs blending Jo Chrona's book, WAYI WAH! and Lisa Baylis' Self-Compassion for Educators.

We had a team committed to an SEL inquiry grant and worked closely with our IST consultant as well as with our district coordinator to begin to explore: How an SEL focus within our practice and pedagogy might increase student emotional literacy and self-regulation skills. We wondered what impact this would have on student success and engagement.

Many teachers & classes explored integrating more SEL focused pedagogy: beginning & ending the day in circle, incorporating a feeling check in, using the mood meter, creating calming corners/spaces, and having easily accessible self-regulation tools. As well, our Family Teams committee designed numerous SEL focused school wide activities.

We interviewed students & surveyed students. We then had teachers meet in grade groups and work with our district coordinator to review our student voice and determine where we have been with SEL, where we are now and where we need to go next. Please see the evidence post for more detailed information.

We found that most of our students feel safe at school, like coming to school and believe their teacher likes and cares about them. These findings align with our collective school focus on belonging.

In April and May of 2024 we collected and analyzed our new student data from our spirals of inquiry scanning, DESSA and CASEL survey information. This led us to notice the following:

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 to help 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 patricians 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, 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 indicates a need to strengthen literacy strategies and supports. We checked our student feedback with our term two learning updates and found that a need to add 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 want to work on:

“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 consultant expertise to support staff  and student learning

-providing collaboration time for teachers to support deeper learning 

-continuing to embed First Peoples Principles of Learning 

-aligning our professional learning to our focus areas

-working to strengthen family engagement to support learning, connectedness and belonging

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