Carman Collegiate Purpose (August 2008)
Mission:
Carman Collegiate students will grow and develop holistically through a combination and variety of curricular, co-curricular, and leadership learning opportunities that ultimately prepares them for a responsible, productive and successful life path guided by respect for themselves, others and the environment.
Vision:
Holistic growth encompasses academic, physical, creative, and social-emotional learning needs.
Learning opportunities will occur in a safe, supportive learning environment which appropriately recognizes and accounts for student’s individual needs, abilities, interests, and learning styles.
Carman Collegiate students will graduate with a knowledge base, skill set, and ability to communicate that will allow them to be both independent and employable.
Code of Conduct:
- Being present and on time.
- Striving for personal best.
- Having respect for yourself.
- Respecting the rights and safety of others.
- Respecting your environment.
Professional development will make the connection between teaching practice and student learning more direct and clear.
Learning Principles:
- A key goal of school learning is fluent and flexible transfer – successful use of one’s knowledge and skill on worthy tasks in situations of importance.
- Engaged and sustained learning, a prerequisite for understanding, requires that learners constantly see the value of their work and feel a growing sense of efficacy when facing worthy changes.
- Success at transfer depends on understanding the big ideas that connect otherwise isolated or inert facts, skills, and experiences so that new challenges can be met and new experiences understood.
- An understanding is a learner’s realization about the power of an idea. Understandings cannot be given; they have to be engineered so that learners see for themselves the power of an idea for making sense of things.
- Learners need clear, completely transparent priorities and a practical understanding of how learning goals are to be met in terms of work products and standards of excellence.
- Learners require regular, timely, and user-friendly feedback in order to understand goals, produce quality work, and meet high standards.
- Understanding can be attained by regular reflection, self-assessment, and self-adjustment in trying to apply prior learning to new situations and tasks via activities and assessments that demand such reflection and transfer.
- The capacity to deeply understand depends greatly on the capacity to think things anew (and other related habits of mind), because any insight typically requires the refining of earlier ideas. Becoming willing and able to rethink requires a safe and supportive environment for questioning assumptions and habits.
- Learning is enhanced when it is personalized – that is, when the learners’ interests, preferences, strengths, contributions, and prior knowledge are sufficiently honoured.