As a staff we have placed a lot of time into thinking about how to support our learners in their Social Emotional Learning and we are now in a place where we can think about how to bring life to our Wowk Cares language so that it becomes a part of how we interact and learn together in our wonderful school community. We have plans for school wide activities for the 2023 - 2024 school year where we will learn about the importance of Caring for Self, Caring for Others and Caring for Place.

When we met as a staff during our final professional development day in May of 2023 we took some time to reflect upon our year together and look at developing some professional learning goals through a staff survey. Our intention with was that the information shared by staff would help guide our professional development for this current school year and also name and identify strengths and stretches among our students. Staff were asked a variety of questions in a School Based Professional Development Survey, which included a variety of questions / sentence starters, including the following:

1. If we as a staff, were to focus on one aspect of student development that would make the most difference to learning in our school, it would be.......
2. To enhance our collective professional learning at this school and to further enable our students in their learning journey, on school based ProD days we might wish to
   • continue with the following ProD theme/focus........because.......
   • investigate the following ProD theme/focus .......... because......

Staff Responses

The vast majority of staff responses for what we would like to continue with indicated that it would be beneficial for our learners if we continued with our focus on Social Emotional Learning, and particularly how we can all work together to use the Wowk Cares language as a framework for this learning. Some samples of staff responses regarding our focus for this year included the following comments:

I would like to continue to explore building community and the Cares model so that it's a living document that we all understand and we can use as common language.

A continued focus on SEL can make a tremendous impact in fostering a positive learning environment.

To continue to with Wowk Cares but now develop ways to implement it across the school so that it becomes part of our common school language.

A continued focus on SEL to as it is more relevant and important than ever for our students.

A New Area of Focus to Investigate and Explore

What was very interesting from the survey responses was the number of staff who indicated that literacy should potentially be a new area of focus to investigate for our staff Professional Development. Teachers and staff had shared that they were noticing certain gaps with student learning when it comes to literacy, particularly in the primary grades. Staff had shared ideas, comments, questions, and thoughts such as:

What routines, programs can be implemented across the primary grades to support literacy?

We can look at literacy in the school and explore how assessment can inform us as educators what the next steps would be to support learning.

A focus on literacy can support our high population of ELL learners and students with learning differences.

With this survey information in mind we have set forth on keeping a strong emphasis as a staff on supporting our learners in their social emotional learning through our Wowk Cares language.

For this year we are also embarking on a pivot toward responding to our students and learning about how we can best address the gaps we are seeing among some of learners when it comes to literacy.