The Lakeland Catholic School District (LCSD) is putting a focus on improving literacy and numeracy skills for students and teachers.
On May 23, Instructional literacy coach Julie Chorney and numeracy coach Colin Desnoyers gave the district’s board of trustees a run down of the resources that are in place for teachers, and the tactics being used to support student learning.
Developing literacy and new teacher supports
Ensuring new teachers get off to a good start when they enter the LCSD has been a focal point. One of the ways they’re making this happen is by helping new educators get connected to the resources they need, when they need them.
“It’s very much about networking and a focus on the teachers networking for themselves, helping them be connected for themselves,” Chorney told the board.
This year, she highlighted the use of a resource known as Tools for Teaching to three district teachers. It lays out what an effective teacher does, and how to implement a sustainable classroom management style.
After getting positive feedback from the three participants, Chorney noted it’s a resource they’ll be using again.
“The whole point of this is that we’re all headed in the same direction, the focus is always on the student learning. It’s always on being part of that community of learners, it’s not just about growing an individual teacher.”
A new resource that was introduced in Lakeland Catholic this school year focused on giving educators a different approach to teaching literacy.
“We’re always working in all regards of literacy, not just writing. We’re working in all strands: listening, viewing, speaking, reading, representing, and writing,” Chorney explained to the board. “The work that we’re doing in writing spans our entire district. Some of the innovations that we’ve been implementing this year are at all sites.”
Empowering Writers helps teachers move away from telling students to ‘add more detail’ in their writing, and instead goes over what good writers do. The resource has spanned every age level from Grade 1 to 12.
“What’s wonderful is that veteran teachers are saying ‘sometimes I’m tempted to write add more detail,’ or ‘sometimes I have written that, and I understand why it doesn’t help kids,’” Chorney said.
To help students have a better grasp of the practices of good writers, they’ve also introduced mentor texts. Teachers introduce a piece of text and go over what the writer did to express a certain emotion through their writing. The class is then given an allotted amount of time to convey that same emotion in their own piece.
By using what’s known as a writer’s notebook, she said they’re trying to turn writing into something enjoyable for students that they’re comfortable with, instead of just a task they’re given.
“Kids can’t write once a week and get good at writing. They have to write often, often, often.”
Making the shift to numeracy
While literacy has been long included into every classroom, there is a push to start introducing numeracy into each class as well.
“The idea of numeracy is to really start thinking that it isn’t mathematics. They come off of the same basic knowledge, but they’re two different, separate entities,” Desnoyers explained to the board. “When we talk about numeracy, it’s to ensure that our students are engaged with quantitative and spacial information. Quantitative is dealing specifically with numbers. Spacial is when you start talking about measurements, length, things like that.”
Traditional math focuses on giving students step-by-step instructions on how to solve equations, such as using long division. Numeracy, on the other hand, takes mathematics and transitions it into everyday life.
“Why numeracy is becoming such a focus, is that we have a lot of students that graduate Grade 12 30-1 math class with extremely high marks. Now, they’re going out to try and further their education or get careers and they’re innumerate. They can do the mathematic algorithms, but to be able to apply the mathematics, they struggle,” noted Desnoyers.
To start out, he explained one of their “big rocks” was defining numeracy to teachers and how it’s differs from math. Talking with the principals of each of the division’s schools, Desnoyers said they’re working on bringing numeracy into all classes from English, to social studies, to phys ed.
“Making numeracy part of every child’s life requires numeracy to be embedded daily so that they’re seeing and using it every single day.”
Highlighting some of the accomplishments in numeracy throughout the district this school year, Desnoyers told the board that they’ve seen success in getting all teachers on board with the idea of numeracy.
Moving forward, numeracy will be a growing focus for LCSD. Next steps include firming up a mission and vision for numeracy in the district, and implementing an action plan, resources, and strategies to support achievement at all levels, and having the numeracy coach support staff and students with numeracy in all disciplines.
