Schools in our division create a yearly Continuous Improvement Plan (CIP). The CIP is the driving plan for the school. We do not follow a deficit philosophy of something is wrong and needs to be fixed. It is more, we are always learning and we want to improve.
Our first step in creating our CIP is to simply ask. We need to ask our stakeholders for input. We ask our staff, our parents, and our students. For our staff and parents we use a web tool called ThoughtExchange (formerly ThoughtStream). Our community is committed to Catholic Education and implementing our provincial Inspiring Education, therefore the questions we asked focused on these:
The ThoughtExchange tool is like a ‘dot democracy’ activity where participants assign ‘stars’ to submitted thoughts. Here are the results from our ThoughtExchange:
Our next step will be to ask our students. For this we will not be doing a ThoughtExchange, but simply having some discussions with them on how to improve our school.
After looking at some learning data and examining what our ThoughtExchanges tell us, our next step will be to build our goals. Next, strategies and measures. First we asked.
Greg Kostiuk
Greg Kostiuk 