It’s nearly time for students to take the Grade 10 literacy test, but this year’s group at Collingwood Collegiate Institute (CCI) is in for a different experience.
They will be the largest group at CCI to take the test, and they haven’t done any provincial standardized testing on literacy since Grade 3, but they do have a coach who’s been injecting literacy lessons into all of their subjects.
Last year, 399 students enrolled in Grade 9 at CCI, which is the largest cohort in the school’s history. Most of those students were in Grade 6 four years ago during a work-to-rule action by teachers, thus they did not write the Grade 6 mathematics or reading and writing standardized tests.
Therefore, teachers and school board administrators don’t have the usual benchmarks heading into the OSSLT this year.
Dawn Stephens is a superintendent of education with the Simcoe County District School Board, and her portfolio includes the OSSLT. She’s been working with schools across the province to implement a Lead Literacy Teacher, whose work involves helping students prepare for the OSSLT in grade 10.
“It’s important for all schools to do diagnostic work to ensure a really good understanding of the needs of students,” said Stephens, adding the schools would typically use the benchmarks from Grade 6 testing as indicators for focus areas. This year, they’ve had to improvise to make sure they’re helping kids prepare for the OSSLT and learning literacy skills.
“A majority [of the help] is about literacy skills,” said Stephens. “A minority is getting little tidbits of information that’s going to help them be successful on the test.”
At the end of last year, CCI’s teachers, principal, and vice-principals met to discuss what they thought was the greatest educational need of the current group of students.
According to CCI principal Charlene Scime, the common ground across all subjects was a need to help students grow in their ability to write clearly and support their writing through evidence, reading comprehension and inference.
“The resounding piece was we all believe we need to work on literacy,” said Scime.
The OSSLT tests the ability of a student to read, comprehend, infer, and use information to support written opinions. The test evaluates these skills with 49 multiple choice questions (nearly half the test) as well as short answer and essay questions. Students are required to pass the test in order to graduate.
Allan Coukell, head of the CCI English department and a cross-country running coach, is the Lead Literacy Teacher at CCI. This year, his work has included support and encouragement to CCI’s faculty to add more literacy practice in every subject, even those that wouldn’t characteristically include a lot of reading and writing assignments.
“It’s getting the students to see that literacy is more than an English thing,” said Coukell. “Our goal since September has been building capacity with literacy activities and skill-based activities.”
For example, a group of students in the mechanics class read an article about the possibility of provincial legislation requiring snow tires. Students were then asked to write a paragraph about their opinion on the matter, using what they learned in the article and the class to support their argument.
In health class, students read about the new food guide recommendations and used the reading to come up with suggestions for proper nutrition options.
Coukell has also spent time in various classrooms to lend his experience to the students and teachers as they work through literacy activities.
“Being able to work with the students is fulfilling,” said Coukell. “And it’s rewarding to watch teachers become that much more confident in it.”
Vice Principal Tyson Maxwell said another goal of the program is to create consistent messaging across all teachers and subjects when it comes to feedback and a properly-structured paragraph.
There are three components the teachers at CCI – and those marking the OSSLT – are looking for, including a clear topic, evidence to support the topic, and a connection between the two.
“A well-written paragraph has the same components in science, tech, physical education,” said CCI Principal Charlene Scime. “If you can write one paragraph well, you can write multiple paragraphs well.”
Students will be writing the OSSLT across the province on March 27.
