Action Plan for Learning
School Name: Hillcrest Middle School
School Goal: Social Responsibility
School Year: 2014-15
Goal / Inquiry
Student learning
To focus on ‘building community’ within our school, and surrounding local and global
communities, in order to increase our students’ personal and social responsibility skills.
Rationale
1-3 reasons for choosing
goal
We continue to recognize the need at Hillcrest for students to take responsibility for their
learning and actions via common school-wide values, systemic language, and
opportunities for practice and review. As per the MDI report, the students at our school
are feeling more connected to adults, yet some worry about others’ perceptions of who
they are. In the same report, it’s also noted that although a number of students reported
that they do not feel cyber-bullied, some struggle with verbal and physical bullying.
This year, we have continued to introduce curriculum opportunities that build resiliency,
belonging, and interpersonal/intrapersonal skills within our students. A school-based
classroom assessment that ultilized the BC Perfomance Standards, showed that this year,
more students are doing better at “solving problems in peaceful ways” than last year.
However, the data for ‘not yet meeting’ through to ‘fully meeting’ could be increased.
Research and references
that support our rationale
(links provided)



Planned Actions
Continuing practices
working well (1-3)
 What will we do
differently? (1-3)
 How will we provide for
staff development and
collaboration?
 How will we involve
parents?
 How will we involve
students?
 How will we monitor
progress and adjust
actions?
www.casel.org
Fostering Resilience: Expecting All Students to Use Their Minds and Hearts Well, by
Martin L. Krovetz
Safe and Caring Schools Framework
One practice that is continuing to work well for Hillcrest is building on the Habits for
Successful Teens. By using systemic language, students are provided with a focus on
specific skills that support leadership, positive behavior, and academic success. The
learning is visible within the day to day curriculum (ie., HACE), morning announcements (a
habit mentioned periodically to the school at large), as well as daily conversations in
classrooms, hallways and in the office.
This year, we continued our second practice, of built in staff development/ collaboration
time, made a huge difference in moving teachers ahead as a staff. We also continued the
“Big 3 Committees” focused on our Social Emotional Learning, Communicating Student
Learning and Revised Curriculum. Throughout the year, we have regular updates at staff
meetings of the goals and objectives. Staff meet in one of three committees monthly to
access, to review and to plan. Information from these meetings is shared at the Team
Leader Meetings and/or Staff Meetings. The Team Leaders oversee the school goal and
are responsible for communicating, facilitating and monitoring progress of the goals and
objectives thoughout the year.
During this past year, a double block assembly was set aside each month where teachers
had a chance to meet together while students participated in social responsibility
workshops hosted by the administrative team and various organizations such as The ODD
Squad, The Children of the Street Society, as well as a former Olympian talking about the
merits of recycling, as well as striving to be the best you can be. Through staff discussion
this year, we decided that for next year, we will have smaller groups of teachers meeting
for the Big 3 sessions. On other months, we will hold whole-school full assemblies so the
larger Big 3 commitees can meet. This gives us a chance to get deeper into supporting
students and build staff collaboration, tied into our goals.
Parents were involved via newsletters and invitations to numerous activities such as an
evening with Colleen Drobot, who led an informative presentation on the topic of
‘anxiety’ to hundreds of local parents and educators.
Our largest planned action involved the agreement of all staff around the use of
restorative circles as part of their regular class meetings. Training and follow-up support
was provided by Darcy Ellis (Ad Ed) and Marna MacMillan. The original plan called for the
use of the circles weekly but, as the process became familiar to everyone, staff began to
use the format on a daily basis. It’s not unusual to walk down the hallways and see classes
sitting in a circle to explore issues such as friendship, belonging, resolving differences as
well as empthy. It was exciting to see a classroom use circles to examine the process of
Page 1
learning, to reflect on academic choices and challenges through units of study. In the
office, the administrators and the counsellor also make use of restorative practice by
using circles with students.
Backup Documentation to
support planned actions
Documentation of learning
Key evidence of change
 How did your actions
make a difference? How
do you know?
 Choose 1-3 pieces of
evidence to demonstrate
the impact your actions
have had on student
learning to meet your
goal.
 Documentation could
include video, survey
results, performance
standard data, anecdotal
evidence, work samples,
etc.
Backup Documentation to
show impact of actions
As the school year has progressed, we have experienced noticeable improvement in a
number of areas: increased collaboration among staff, greater staff involvement within
our community, improved staff collaboration with admin, and seamlessness
communication among our school’s Big 3 Committees.
Last year, our goal for this year we to see 95% of students fully meeting expectations or
better on the Social Responsibility Performance Standards, (as we only had 65% fully
meeting expectations or better). This year, we have seen 77% of students fully meeting
expectations or better on the Social Responsibility Performance Standards (which is an
increase of 12%). We still feel the need to focus on this area.
We have experienced many positive restorative circles where students used what they
learned in class-meetings to resolve issues. Students had the voice, the language, and the
process to sort through difficulties on their own. Students used words such as ‘confident’
and ‘empowered’ to describe how the process worked for their self- initiated restorative
opportunities. One piece that has reflected this is found in the end of the year data
gathered by our grade 6 teachers where well over 90% of their students are meeting (and
above) in ‘valuing diversity and defending human rights’. Themes such as these have
been woven throughout classroom circle time.
Video from Social Responsibility Week and Video from ‘What is Hillcrest ALL about?’Located on our school website.
Extended Version of
Documentation.pdf
Reflection Highlights
 Where are we now?
 What are some patterns
emerging?
 What surprised you?
 What conclusions /
inferences might you
draw?
 How does this inform
potential next steps?
Our social responsibility goal has tied in nicely with our LIF initiatives (inclusive
classrooms). Our major intent involved working positively and collaboratively together
within our school community and we are well on our way to building capability in this
area.
This year, the staff has worked to develop greater collaboration, building on each other’s
strengths. At this point, however, we feel we need to begin working on our own
individual and personal skills for dealing with student conflict, anxiety, and overall
learning habits. Anxiety is a major theme in many parent meetings. We have worked to
increase staff skills with anxiety and co-teaching opportunities to increase our capacity to
support the needs in our classrooms.
As we have formed so many new partnerships (Ab-Ed Dept., Best Secondary School, and
The Eagle Ridge Hospital Foundation), we feel it is important for us to meet with a larger
community advisory. It’s important to meet as a staff and PAC, but we also believe we
need to share information about our activities and have regular conversations with the
groups that support our school.
What’s next?
Next year, we would like to be more intentional and focus time on a daily basis within the
classroom to help with the complex composition model and continue building the coteaching model at the same time. Indeed, we are looking for spaces within the building to
enable co-teaching to be most effective next year. To this end, we will continue to teach
systemic language and strategies to help students cope, and to continue to reinforce
restorative circles and practices of building ‘voice’. Through focusing on co-teaching, we
want to continue to focus on different clusters of struggling learners, to work within the
classrooms to increase student skill sets. Our goal is to support students by increasing
their “personal tool boxes” so that they understand their own learning styles, improve
study habits, develop organizational skills, and learn to resolve conflict.
Academically, we have had a significant increase in student achievement in all areas and
we feel there is a direct correlation between students taking more ownership for their
learning and personal responsibility. For next year, we are planning on moving even
further with a focus on personal responsibility.
Page 2
Signatures
School Name: Hillcrest Middle School
School Goal: Social Responsibility
School Year: 2013-14
Submitted by School Planning Council:
Title
Name
Principal
Nadine Tambellini
Parent
Parent
Parent
Recommended by Assistant Superintendent:
Assistant Superintendent
Julie Pearce
Board and Superintendent Approval:
Board Chair
Judy Shirra
Superintendent
Patricia Gartland
Print this page, have it signed by
School Planning Council, scan it and
attach it here
Signatures.pdf
Page 3
Signature