In February 2021 I was able to carve out one day a week from my Transitional Learning duties to work on some district numeracy projects.
K-12 Numeracy Vision and Framework
Our school district’s board has a new strategic plan for 2020-2025 and the first priority is Inspired Learners. One of the goals for this priority is: the district builds literacy, numeracy and digital literacy through innovation and a commonly held vision. And the objective I have been focusing on is 2. develop and implement a K-12 numeracy vision and framework. The team I have been working with includes secondary curriculum teacher consultant Shaheen Musani and Kate Campbell of the District Support Team. We have had regular meetings this last term with the district executive team and our parallel literacy team to develop a vision statement and framework, including a visual image that we hope will be “clickable” online and lead to resources and supports for educators and family and community members. We have been able to get feedback from teachers in the district who have been involved with numeracy working groups and projects over the last two years and look forward to continued development of the framework and stakeholder feedback. The overall goal of this vision and framework is to consider what is a numerate learner and how do learners experience numeracy across all areas of learning and contexts.
Ministry Proficiency Project
The BC Ministry of Education is developing new literacy and numeracy performance standards. Last summer myself and some other teacher consultant colleagues were in the first development group and shared literacy and numeracy tasks from Richmond classrooms. A provincial K-5 working group has further refined what are currently being called proficiency benchmarks and this spring several teachers in our district trialled numeracy tasks and provided evidence/illustraitons of learning for the different numeracy aspects and sub-aspects. The provincial working group will continue to refine the proficiency standards this summer and the grades 6-12 proficiency standards should be available next year with final numeracy performance standards available by 2023.
The following table shares the current numeracy aspects and sub-aspects that are included in the assessment tool:
Update K-2 Numeracy Assessment Resources
With a focus on early numeracy, our district developed a K-2 numeracy assessment resources from 2017-2019. Those resources can be found here: https://blogs.sd38.bc.ca/sd38mathandscience/sd38-k-2-numeracy-assessment-information/
This spring some updates, revisions and additions have been made to the resources and they will added to the above link as well as to the Mathematics and Numeracy tile on the portal.
Numeracy Presentations from May 21
On our district professional learning day on May 21, I shared a short informational session for K-5 on the different numeracy initiatives and projects in our district. Shaheen Musani joined me for a second session with grades 6-9 teachers. The slides from both sessions can be found on the district portal in the Mathematics & Numeracy tile.
SD38 Numeracy Tasks and Resources
On the portal, under Learn 38. under Resources for Teaching and Learning 2020/21, under Curriculum Specific Links and then in the Mathematics & Literacy tile, you will find several links to numeracy resources. A direct link is HERE for SD38 employees.
Also on the portal in Learn 38 are all of this years’ weekly math plans for Transitional Learning. For each grade, in each week, there is a numeracy task. Some of these tasks are intended to help students build their understanding of what numeracy is and others are tasks that students need to use the numeracy processes of interpret, apply, solve, analyze and communicate.
What are some actions you can take to support the development of numeracy within our district?
#SD38numeracy
~Janice