Closer to achieving our education goals
When you left the house this morning, did you leave with a neatly made bed? Or is it a tangled pile of bedsheets for you to try and smooth out when you flop down later tonight?
You might not know that there is a wealth of evidence that shows that people who make their bed in the morning are happier and achieve more.
Though most of us don’t worry about hospital corners, making the bed reminds me of something important: when you make your bed, you are really setting your intentions for the day. You are saying that you are ready to get things done and you leave home knowing you have already achieved something that day.
This is what I told 300 principals and managers at the Waterloo Region District School Board school-year-kickoff meeting in August.
The idea of setting your intention for the day resonates with us in the school system as we think about the process of strategic planning to ensure we help each and every student in Waterloo region achieve their potential.
When I joined this board as Director five years ago, our strategic plan had six highly important directions, but no real shared accountability structure or process to guide its implementation.
Today, we have a strategic plan constructed in dialogue with trustees, students and our whole community. It has clear intention and direction for us and includes operational goals that we have developed in dialogue with all our partners. Over the last year, we have learned a lot about monitoring the work we need to achieve our aggressive targets, while staying focused on the needs of all of our learners.
On Wednesday, we got one of the first measures of our outcomes and our effort to improve student achievement. The Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) released data on how our students did in those standardized tests.
That data shows we have improved in seven of the 10 measures and that we closed the gap to the province in five out of those seven measures. Importantly, in one area — Mathematics for Grade 9 (Applied) students — we now lead the province where previously we lagged by nearly 10 percentage points.
This is important, because our work to improve student learning and turn around test scores for that group started three years ago when we launched a project to focus on and support Grade 9 (Applied) math teachers.
Research shows that in school districts it typically takes three-to-five years to introduce a strategy and bring it to the stage of full implementation and then on to sustainability. We set our intention, implemented change and three years later, we achieved the result we wanted.
Our plan to make sure more students feel well and succeed — fulfilling their potential and graduating from high school — started in earnest last October. As effective strategic planning is an iterative process, we continued to seek input and feedback throughout last year and we’ve come into this year with a clearer, more precise plan to bring about more improvement.
Our staff strongly believe in the need to continue to monitor the implementation of our strategies that will help us achieve our goals in the 2019 to 2020 school years.
So, while our results this week haven’t all reached or exceeded the provincial average, we’re encouraged by the news. But we have more work to do. I am so proud of all staff, every part of the organization, who have committed themselves to ensuring that we give every student an opportunity to be part of a caring, safe, inclusive learning community where they design and fulfil their dreams.
I said last year that our performance across many measures raised questions for every educator to discuss. The results this year tell me that our educators have started to ask and answer those questions. And we have started to do the things that move us down the path toward better achievement and well-being for each and every student.
Just like needing to make and remake the bed every day, we also need to continue to look at our long-range plans to refine our approach to our work. When we do that, we can have confidence that at the end of the planning cycle, we’ll be closer to achieving our goals.