As a new administration team to Westwind, we knew we had to find a way to quickly learn the history of the school, specifically:

            • Westwind traditions for staff and the community

            • the culture of the school

• what staff beliefs are for their learners

• what parent beliefs are for their children and their teachers

• how students learn and what they think it means to be a learner

As we continue to try and put the pieces together, it is our hope to support our staff and students be the best that they can be. By working alongside one another, we can collaborate and develop trusting relationships to work toward a common goal.

With a mix of new staff members and staff who have been at Westwind for most to of their career, we wanted to be respectful of where people are at in their practice. At our first professional development day in September, we took the time to work in small groups to discuss areas that we wanted to support our students with. After small group discussion, each staff member recorded one idea per sticky note that was of most importance to them when considering what they felt the students at Westwind needed. Each sticky note was then brought up to the board for sorting and categorizing.                                                                                                 

From the sort and categorize activity, staff agreed that going deeper with self-regulation and growth mindset was the goal that everyone wanted to work toward. Most referenced the importance of fostering resilience and perseverance with their students, but we are at the point where we need to tease a part the pieces of growth mindset that we want to focus on and commit to as a school.

In an effort to support the process of refining our goal, administration provided each staff member with the book Growth Mindset Coach. In speaking with our school counsellor, we intend to use some of our January professional development to look at pieces of the book that will help guide us further toward a common goal of how we will approach growth mindset with our students.

We also had 3 copies of Developing Self-Regulating Learners donated to us from Pearson so that we could have another lens to provide staff with.

So that was September and now it’s December. Where are we at now?

1. Through class reviews, we were able to gather more data about our students. Using Faye Brownlie’s class profile organizer, found in Learning in Safe Schools, we were able to help connect some of the pieces we had wonders about from our first professional development.
2. We created a growth mindset kit of picture books stored in the library for teachers to easily access and use in lessons. The intention of this kit is to provide teachers with an entry point for those who are still becoming familiar with growth mindset but also for those educators who are ready to go deeper.                                                                                        

Picture book titles include:

• Giraffes Can't Dance, Giles Andreae                                                                                          

• The Most Magnificent Thing, Ashley Spires

• The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes, Mark Pett

• Your Fantastic Elastic Brain, JoAnn Deaks

• Flight School, Lita Judge

• Rosie Revere Engineer, Andrea Beaty

• The Tree Lady, H. Joseph Hopkins

• How to Catch a Star, Oliver Jeffers

• The Dot, Peter H. Reynolds

• Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon, Patty Lovell

• Almost, Richard Torrey

• What do you do with an Idea?, Kobi Yamada

• It’s Okay to Make Mistakes, Todd Parr

• Only One You, Linda Kranz

3. We met with the PAC and asked for funds to create 2 carts of loose parts that teachers could use with their students in an effort to allow students to explore their thinking and understanding of growth mindset as well as other content areas.

As we move in to January, we are proposing the idea of using one of our empty classrooms to reimagine the space as a studio that will support hands-on learning and ADST with an emphasis on further developing rich learning opportunities to build language around growth mindset. Of course, as a staff, we can zone in on the core competencies that best reflects our goal. Our intention is to take what Anderson School has already implemented at their school and see how we can make it our own at Westwind. Weaving in our SPIRIT will also be important in the studio so that the work that the community did prior to our arrival is not lost.

This is a journey and together we will succeed. As with any new initiative, it takes time. For now, we are proud of our accomplishments.