School Focus:  At Dixon, we are embarking on creating and improving positive relationships between each other.

What targeted actions are being taken?

What gap or problem does this action aim to address? Why was this particular action chosen?

Based on quantitative and qualitative data, how effectively has this action addressed the identified gap or problem?

How will we move forward accordingly? What are our next steps?

As we continue our early work with our students, we are wanting to gather some data from students to determine whether they have some of the basic understandings of how to build positive relationships with others.  During our scheduled collaboration times, we are presenting and reminding students about “bucket filling”, which is giving another person positive feedback and what are some of the things students can do to make this happen.  As building a more positive community is a very large, multifaceted task, we are trying to start small, determine what skills our students have and target the gaps that exist.

The gap identified remains the same – we have wonderful students at Dixon who, one-on-one are very kind and respectful.  What we have noticed is that these same children, when out of the watchful eye of an adult, will often struggle to extend this same courtesy to their peers.

We chose this action because we have been inundated with helping our students solve social issues that occur in the classroom, outside at recess and lunch and online.  For several of our students, coming to school has not been an enjoyable experience and couple with that, some of our students seem to be stuck in repeating the same patterns with a variety of students.  Our goal is to be able to address both sides of this issues in a meaningful way.

The quantitative data is based on the number of students who are requiring adult support, either outside or in the office to see if instances of ‘bucket dipping – the opposite of bucket filling, is occurring.  Based on our data, we are dealing with fewer issues now than we were in the fall and there are fewer students reporting.

Our qualitative data is largely based on our observations of our students as they interact with each other.  It is during these moments that a great deal of incidental learning takes place.  That said, teachers report that they see many moments of genuine kindness within the classroom. 

The first piece to keep things moving forward is for staff to continue to talk about the variety of skills and behaviours that we are wanting our students to learn – keep it relevant and in the forefront of what we are doing.  This involves having the adults in our building using the language we are learning with students – in this particular case, talking about ‘bucket filling” when opportunities present themselves.

Next is to continue to work with those students and their families (if necessary) to highlight the issues we are seeing and provide some concrete suggestions on how we could work together to develop these important life skills.

Next is to continue to scan our students for “lagging skills” and determine our next area of focus.  We believe this may be student connectedness but are continuing to gather data to support this hypothesis.