In September 2021, we knew that students had been isolated and were lacking social connection. We felt like our sense of community had been fractured as a result of the challenges of the past two years and wanted to shift our focus to acknowledge this and address our students' need for more social emotional learning.

Our hunch:

1. Students are lacking in their ability to regulate themselves in order to interact positively with others.

2. Students are lacking a sense of belonging and a sense of community.

Our school FESL committee met to discuss what questions we would ask as part of our scanning process. In considering the questions to pose, we asked ourselves how we would be able to gather authentic data from our students, especially at the primary level. We came up with three different sets of questions — primary and intermediate as well as teaching staff (see image below).

From our Scanning, we came up with a new School Story Focus:

To grow our social and emotional skills to build our school community based on the belief that inclusion, kindness, and responsibility all happen through the understanding and care of self, others, and the world around us.

Our scanning process for this year is described in more detail in our Action Post.