The District’s commitment to Truth and Reconciliation, including Indigenizing and Decolonizing practices, is foundational and embedded across all areas of planning and decision-making. This reflects our responsibility to honour our values while aligning resources to best support students in achieving our learning goals.

Our Strategic Design Principles

Inclusion

We honour diverse learning needs and respect every child’s dignity and unique gifts. Each student is seen, heard, and valued, driving the creation of compassionate learning environments that promote belonging, positive mental health, and deep, meaningful learning. Socially and emotionally safe spaces ensure the right tools, resources, spaces, and access points are available.

Personalized Learning

This principle fosters student agency, encouraging creativity and inquiry through individual choice, voice, relevance, and engagement. Continuous feedback and reflection support progress along each student’s unique learning journey.

Student-Centered Assessment

This approach provides students with voice and choice in demonstrating their learning. It prioritizes formative, peer, and self-assessment, goal setting, co-creating criteria, and descriptive feedback.

Social Emotional Learning (SEL)

SEL is a design principle that advances educational equity and excellence and the promotion of positive mental health. It aims to assist all students to acquire and apply the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to develop healthy identities, to manage emotions and achieve personal and collective goals, to feel and show empathy for others, to establish and maintain supportive relationships, and to make responsible and caring decisions.

SEL can help address various forms of inequity and empower young people and adults to co-create thriving, safe, healthy, and just classrooms, schools, and communities.

Experiential Learning

Experiential learning involves collaboration, communication, reflection, and hands-on, real-world learning. It connects learners with their gifts, strengths, and interests, creating time and space for relationships with the community, land, and natural environment. This approach is inclusive of diverse perspectives, interconnected with an Indigenous worldview, and incorporates the First Peoples’ Principles of Learning.

Flexible Learning Environments

These settings offer various learning spaces, resources, equipment, and approaches that honour and respect each student’s unique gifts and diverse learning needs. They engage students collaboratively and create reciprocal relationships with each other, the land, and the community.

Digitally Enhanced Learning

This principle supports access to information, collaboration, knowledge construction, innovative design, computational thinking, and creative communication. It prepares learners for a technological landscape, providing digital tools that amplify engagement and make deeper learning accessible and learner-centered.

Land-Based Learning

Honouring our connection to the land of the K’omoks peoples. Land-Based Learning fosters a respectful and reciprocal relationship with the natural world. This relationship nurtures individual well-being, identity, and strengths, encouraging stewardship for future generations.

More information around the Boards’ Strategic Priorities can be found here.