Creating Community



For the first week of school, students were organized into 10 multi-aged “family groups” with approximately 20 students in each group (kindergarten children were not included) for activities designed to: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Activities included fine and performing arts, physical education, mathematics, science, land literacy, and concluded with a community potluck picnic.

 

The following excerpt from the school newsletter highlighted the importance of social responsibility:

 

Focus on Social Responsibility

 

Please notice that there are 10 Family Groups, each with a different theme focused on social responsibility. Human and Social Development is one of the goals of the BC school system. This broad goal further specifies that students are expected to develop a sense of social responsibility, and a tolerance and respect for the ideas and beliefs of others. Socially responsible individuals show community-mindedness in their responses to school, local, national, and global issues and events. This attitude is the basis of functioning and flourishing democratic society.

 

When schools create a socially responsible learning community, learning is enhanced for students. One of our goals is to make a positive difference to student learning. This is one reason why social responsibility will be an ongoing focus at Blakeburn.

 

Family Groups will discuss their specific social responsibility themes (e.g., respecting others, caring for others, including others) and what it looks like and what it sounds like at Blakeburn. Family Groups will create representations (e.g., poems, songs, drama, collage) of their themes and present them to the whole school at our Community Picnic on Friday.

 

Each day, the principal led a short whole-school session that focused on some area of social responsibility (e.g., How we welcome people; What does it look like to include others; How do we solve problems; What are the rules at our new school; How can we a good audience for each other?) These sessions included some direct teaching, role-playing by the leadership team (by the end of the week, students often volunteered to participate in the role-plays), and began to introduce the language of the social responsibility (but not the standards themselves.)

 

In their groups, students focused on one specific aspect of social responsibility, brainstormed what it looked and sounded like, talked about why it was important, asked questions, engaged in role-plays, created their representation for the whole school session, and reflected on what they were learning. They also became observers or ‘data collectors,’ looking for evidence of positive socially responsible behaviour on their playground.

 

The student reflections included the following letter to families:

 

Dear Families,

The following are self-assessment activities that require children to pause and think about their own learning. Each activity is brief and engaging. The activities are designed to: 

Our awesome teaching staff have had meaningful and purposeful conversations with your children. It sounded like this:

Children, it is always important for you to know the purpose of all our activities. The purpose of this activity is to provide you with opportunities to reflect on your learning and to encourage you to think about what you learned. You learn far more when you understand the focus of every activity because you understand why you doing what you are doing. It is so valuable in life to stop and pause and think about what you are learning. When you pause and think, you give your brain time to process and to make sense of new ideas. Our whole school community is going to set aside time for you to do these activities every day this week, because we value reflection. Reflecting on your learning helps you to achieve excellence in everything you do in the world.

You are asked to think about many things during a school day. You think of one experience, then another—your brain is continually asked to change gears very quickly. To help your brain focus on what we are learning, what your questions are, and what you learned, we will ask you to record your thinking.

 

[Note: Students responded to three of these questions each day.]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The week featured a number of guests, including a quilter and an artist-in-residence who introduced students to some of the techniques they would later use in creating self-portraits for a school display quilt.