Over the past four years our community has been on a journey.  We have spent considerable time supporting students in their social/emotional learning through the use of our common language "We Care for Self, Others and Place."  This language has become a core set of the values that we have as a school and it is now embedded into the way we are with one another.  Currie students and staff have embraced the language and are using it more widely to describe how we interact with one another.  The language has also helped students contribute to our community in positive ways and has moved us forward to being an even more inclusive community.  We are all proud of our efforts!  As a staff we felt that it was important to learn from our upper intermediate students, through the scanning process, what they know about our common language and how they are using it to support their learning.  We surveyed 135 students in Grades 6 and 7 to gain a better understanding from them about our Cares common language.  We decided to scan our older students since they had been through the development and implementation of the common language over the past four years.

What we noticed is that student depth and understanding of the language has increased.  Students are not only aware of the language but they are able beginning to see the connection between inclusion, community and equity.  They are also able to now identify ways to Care for Self by identifying strategies to remain calm and to solve problems in peaceful ways.  This is a great improvement from our early scanning when students rarely identified strategies.

As we move forward we want to gain a better understading through scanning of how our students learn.  We hope that this information will be helpful in determining next steps in supporting our learners and also help link social/ emotional learning to other aspects of childhood development.  The following slides summarize our learnings and also capture student voice.