Errington is a wonderful learning community with enthusiastic and positive students, caring and devoted educators and supportive and helpful parents working together to make life and learning a special experience for all.

Our School Focus is:

To improve student connectedness to themselves, to each other and to their community

Our Inquiry Question is:

How can we better connect our students to their learning, to each other, to their school, and to their community?

The Core Competencies within the provincial curricula include: 

Communication and Social Responsibility

In September, our staff formed a Social Responsibility Committee to look at creating common language and shared understandings of some choices that are socially responsible and help to build a feeling of connection and belonging within our learning community. 

In October and November, this committee met on several occasions and recommended that we create an acronym of values that both exemplify our strengths as a community, and affirm the choices and actions that we feel will deepen the feelings of connectedness and cohesion for the students, staff and families at Errington. 

At our November staff meeting, and on the November 25th professional development day, the SR Committee recommended an Errington "CARES" acronym that highlights 5 key values / actions that will help to build a school-wide understanding of pro-social choices that we can all make to make life and learning at Errington a positive experience for all - and to help all of the members of our community feel safe and connected to one another.

The CARES acronym is designed to teach, foster, acknowledge, value and celebrate the following attributes within our learners:

As Eagles...
 

We are C aring

We are A ccountable 

We are R espectful

We are E mpathetic

We are S afe

The five values highlighted in the CARES acronym provide common language and opportunities for learning within the core competences of Social Responsibility and Communication. At our Pro-d day on November 25th, Teacher Consultants from the District helped our team of educators to explore ways to explicitly teach our students what it means to be Caring, Accountable, Respectful, Empathetic, and Safe - in our classrooms, and throughout the school.

This model for building more connected learning communities is a teaching and developmental framework that believes that all students can learn to be socially responsible through a consistent and systemic approach within the SR core competency.

We also discussed ways to help our students to reflect on their choices through the lens of this common language.. For example, "was your choice Caring: was that choice Accountable, Respectful, Empathetic, or Safe...?"

Stay tuned for more information regarding this exciting teaching and learning focus.