A One Room School

1. A One Room School What Differentiated Instruction/Personalized Learning in Tatla Lake looks like.

2. What are my goals? • Teaching the students how to learn, not necessarily what to learn. This is student driven and teacher supported/guided. • Helping students develop critical thinking skills so they can take control and responsibility of their learning path.

3. Students must be at the centre of their learning (BC’s Education Plan) • Students becoming invested in their learning. • The process, not the end product, has become more important. • This is where the real learning is happening

4. What does that look like in Tatla?

5. The Revolving Door Teacher Allows us to conference (constant assessment and feedback) If we work hard and invest in the process so will the students.

6. The Diversity of our School Community • Students from Kindergarten through Grade 10 • Students who struggle with the very basics both academically and behaviourally right through to students who excel way beyond grade level expectations

7. What Does This Diversity Allow? • Students who truly understand themselves and each other, their skills and their needs. • Students who support the learning of their classmates. From an outsider's perspective, it should be mentioned that there is a genuine and obvious bond between all of the students at Tatla Lake School regardless of their age or grade level. By implementing personalized learning practices, the need for negative competition, petty jealousy, bullying and the myriad of other causes of a poor school environment amongst the students become dampened. One almost always sees friendliness, respect, tolerance and acceptance of others from the students. One immediately thinks: "how can I help my school become as evolved as Tatla?"

8. Teaching the Basics Reading, Writing, Arithmetic

9. Literacy Instruction • The Daily Five • Read Aloud • Word Work • Read to Someone • Read to Self • Writing

10. Reading Instruction • Modelling Reading Behaviours through Read Aloud • Allows for whole group lessons as well • Learning How to Choose “Just Right Books” • Reading for content/understanding, not just for the words/decoding • Literature Circles • Guided Reading

11. Writing Instruction • Teaching the Writing Process • Pre-write, Draft, Edit & Revise, Publish • The process is stressed, not deadlines • Continual personalized feedback provided through conferencing • Whole group lessons limited to writing process ideas

12. Math Instruction • Focused on moving from the concrete to the abstract • Teaching how through manipulative use before being asked to do • Students rotate through lesson time, paper work and manipulative play-based learning

13. Struggling Learners • Focusing on functional skills • Asking the questions: why are we teaching this? what is the purpose? What skills will be retained? • Knowing that what we do for struggling learners benefits all learners

14. Assessment • AFL practice used on a daily basis during conferencing time • Student developed criteria used • Particular attention paid to individual student levels, needs and strengths • Formal Assessment also done regularly • School-wide writes, Reading Assessments, Unit Tests, Project Evaluation

15. Parent Involvement • Working with parents to help them understand the purpose, validity and importance of hands-on, personalized learning • Getting parents on board is powerful I am writing with regards to my son’s progress in his research and writing skills. He recently completed his Socials Studies project and I was very pleased and surprised to see a huge change in not only his ability to form coherent paragraphs, but his motivation to research the subject. He was genuinely excited to work! Did he just suddenly understand how to group information into paragraphs? Why is he so willing to research and conscientious about plagiarism? I was blown away by the changes and would like to know more about how you are getting these results.

16. Community Involvement • Learning facilitated and supported not only by school staff and parents but also by community members • Custodian volunteering to teach the grade 8 foods class (integrated German Language support during this time) • Parent Participation Play Group for preschoolers • Play group integrated into school activities • Community Members volunteering for theme days, hot lunch etc.

17. How a Project Morphs • Spirit Animals – personal planning – identifying who we are, what are our strengths, our defining characteristics. Also used to point out each other’s strengths • Led into discussion about culture – what is culture, what isn’t culture (this led to some debate with parents about the validity of the topic) • What is culture? How do our presumptions, biases (what we think we know) affect what we really know – opening ourselves sup to accept new information while retaining our opinions in a respectful way. This led into discussion on how to support our opinions with valid information (fact versus opinion) • Cultural Universals • Project – criteria setting, working through the process rather than providing the template (this is a struggle with staff and parents out there because past practice etc), allowing students to make mistakes so that they can learn from them (importance of paying attention to lessons) – min- lessons throughout – conferencing throughout, scaffolding for those who were struggling • Led to an art project – Lowry Olafson (songwriting), printmaking.