This section outlines our school’s key areas of focus. It reflects our commitment to continuous improvement and responds to the evolving needs of our students. Whether centered on student engagement, social-emotional well-being, or academic growth, our focus guides our learning journey and informs the strategies we implement throughout the year.
2025-2026 School Learning Story Focus: Strengthening Literacy Skills in Different Contexts
| For the 2025/2026 school year our school’s learning focus is: |  Literacy goes beyond reading — literacy is grounded in everything we do. To have literacy skills is to be able to participate in the world around us by making meaning and contributing ideas. It’s a tool to empower learners. |
| The data that supports the need for this school learning focus is: | This goal stemmed from a literacy scan conducted in September with a sample of grade 8 students. While the over half of the students achieved an overall score of ‘proficient,’ when the data was broken down, higher-order literacy skills such as inferencing, making connections, and responding had a higher proportion of Emerging to Developing learners. All students are language learners, and all subject areas have a literacy component. As such, our focus is on having students broadly apply their literacy skills learned in one class to other classes. |
| Actions that the school will take to achieve the goals of our school learning focus include: | Over the last few years, teachers have noticed students struggling with executive functioning skills, especially in grade 8. Executive functioning skills include organization, task initiation, time management, goal setting, and memory and these are the skills that lay out the foundation for success in school and beyond. They also enable readers to focus, remember what they’ve read, and stay on task which is crucial for understanding texts of all types. As a result, this school year:
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| The intention of these actions is to make the following difference(s) for learners: | The intent of this data is to inform and mould practice beyond simply providing strategies. This data should begin changing the way our school approaches literacy as a team effort in better servicing learners and teacher professional development. At different times throughout the year, other formal and informal assessments will be used to verify the efficacy of the strategies and interventions implemented. |
| We will know our actions are making a difference when we have data that demonstrates the following: | Students demonstrate effective literacy strategies learned in one curricular area and apply them to multiple curricular areas. After an initial scan in English, a second scan in Science will assess how effectively students transfer these literacy skills between contexts. |
