Week #4 – January 27, 2022
Briefly summarize your PD activity and key take-aways. What connections, if any, to assessment and/or motivation can you draw from your professional development activity?
I attended the Kevin Lamoureux Keynote Presentation for School District #28 and the workshop on Finding Balance with Katie White. There is no way that I can limit myself to one page with two incredible Professional Development seminars in one day.
I was especially pleased that the Keynote was introduced by the School District’s new Indigenous Education Principal, Joanne Moise. It was my first time seeing the new Principal and my first impression of her is that she will bring a fresh and much-needed positive energy to the AB ED department. While working at McNaughton, our interim Principal was inspired by Kevin and had the staff meet to watch some of his pre-recorded presentations. I had not made that connection until the Pro-D presentation began. Our EDUC 346 class is reading the book he contributed to, authored by Jennifer Katz, “Ensouling Our Schools” (2018). I love that now that I recognize him as the author, I will see his passion behind the words and be able to hear his voice in his chapters.
Some of my favourite things Kevin did during his presentation that stood out to me were how he: challenged his audience and put them to task (add to my to-do list: Read the TRC 94 Calls to Action); acknowledged negative aspects while promptly moving forward with positive intentions for the future; and took complicated subject matters and broke them down into logical chunks ensuring he reached as many people as he could (UDL???). In hindsight, you can tell that he has likely given that keynote presentation many times with only slight regional adjustments, but the impact at the moment was still powerful, and I’m sure to leave a lasting impression on all those who attended.
My two biggest takeaways from his presentation were the concept of reconciliation as a gift to heal and that I can still love Canada. Last term, I struggled to come to terms with all the actual historical facts I was learning about our country that I love so dearly. Kevin’s presentation today has allowed me to see that Canada was founded with good intentions, led astray for a while, and now it is time to get back on track. I know that I will be able to teach Canada’s history in a much more positive frame of mind now that it has been restructured through his lens.
Katie White’s Finding Balance in a Shifting Assessment Landscape was an interesting afternoon, especially because I only saw the “Finding Balance” title and thought it would be about work-personal life balance (hahaha). I don’t know if I learned more or left the workshop with more questions. Most of the big takeaways for me came around the topic of Proficiency Scales. I connected with her definition of a proficiency scale being “a tool to describe degrees of quality and/or consistency to a learning goal.” It was a lightbulb moment for me to see that the Emerging-Developing-Proficient-Extending scale was relational to the consistency scale of Rarely-Sometimes-Often-Always. Separating a Proficiency Scale from a quantitative 1-4 scale into that of only qualitative also impacted my understanding of non-letter grade reporting.
I hope that one of the tidbits that I don’t lose is Katie’s idea of how to remember what competency is. I plan to practice asking myself, “what makes a driver competent?” the next time I have to look at the Curricular Competencies for a lesson plan activity. Unfortunately, that is also where one of my questions and frustrations comes from. I’ll try my best to explain… I think she hinted at it slightly but then got back on track. So we, as teachers, take the time to break all of the curricular competencies down, as she did in her presentation example of an Art Unit. Then we are to thoughtfully tie them into the very vague Content points/tasks that we are given in the curriculum, which are generally not much more than subject headings. Next, we create proficiency scales for each of these and then track those across multiple opportunities to create an amazing base of evidence over time. Then… we just smush it together for reporting??? Like a simple: Science 5 Meeting Expectations with a comment. I don’t get it.
Or… Do all these competencies break down on the new report cards for each subject area? Maybe, I just haven’t seen an elementary school report card in a few years. It seems like a tonne of work for one out of four possible outcomes. This makes sense why portfolios go hand in hand with a Proficiency Scale model report card. If I can just have my elementary students work with me through formative assessments building their skills, and placing all their work into a portfolio, then when it comes time for reporting, I can either choose to do a summative assessment, or I could use the collection as evidence of growth over time. I could even have the student go back through their work and have them pick their best work to showcase as evidence of their learning. There must be more for me to learn on this subject, so I will remain open and hopin’ for good things to come!