| HOME |
| EQAO - Success Story. |
|
In appreciation of our school’s commitment to excellence and student achievement, EQAO is publishing a book of school success stories collected over the last five years. In 2007, EQAO collected Streetsville's OSSLT story and will be publishing the attached document in this book.
EQAO collects and publishes school success stories as a way of delivering on its strategic priority of building respect for and capacity for the use of data among teachers, administrators and stakeholders. These stories provide the agency with an opportunity to connect with educators and create a resource for celebration and inspiration. Congratulations to all of our staff, parents and students for your collective efforts to continually improve our learning, and thank you for your contributions to Streetsville's Professional Learning Community. Brian Landriault
Principal
Streetsville Secondary School Success Story Streetsville Secondary School, Mississauga Sitting on the Credit River, in the northwest corner of the City of Mississauga, the town of Streetsville has preserved many of its centuries-old buildings, giving the town a quaint and historic feel. Streetsville Secondary School serves a multicultural student population and has undergone significant changes over the past three years. When a new secondary school opened in the area in 2004, 400 students transferred out of Streetsville Secondary. The mass departure also included 24 staff members and resulted in a loss of momentum for educational initiatives that were underway. EQAO data revealed that the school’s students had difficulty with reading—specifically with respect to drawing inferences. (The teachers themselves expressed a desire for greater “data literacy” so that they could better make use of the abundance of data available to them.) With a recommendation from the superintendent to focus on literacy, principal Brian Landriault and his teaching staff identified three factors affecting their students’ performance—the staff’s awareness of the content of the assessment, students’ literacy skills and test-writing skills—and set about developing strategies to address them. The staff has bought into [the plan]. We have a collective commitment towards improving the school .Brian Landriault, principal The school team adopted a cross-curricular approach to literacy, wherein all staff was considered to be responsible for literacy and part of the literacy team. The staff embraced anew the school’s Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) program. Department heads settled on twice-weekly DEAR sessions for all students. A data wall was set up to monitor the progress of students who had experienced difficulty with the assessment and provide educators with evidence to guide any adjustments to their programming. The school developed a Focused Day package for teachers, which contained lists of major tasks to be undertaken, transparencies for use with overhead projectors in the classroom and lists of appropriate responses to literacy-based questions. Streetsville Secondary also worked with its feeder schools, giving presentations aimed at helping primary- and middle-school teachers prepare their students for the secondary-school curricular expectations for literacy. The 2006–2007 OSSLT result – 92% of students were successful – showed a 24-percentage-point increase over that of 2002–2003. Working with data has become a focus for Streetsville Secondary Principal Landriault and his team recognize the need for better data regarding the significant number of students who are learning English and a second language, as well as the need to make information for parents available in their own languages. They are working on this and their students’ continued success.
|