Rethinking Character Matters

Our quest to re-connect with our sense of purpose and passion that brought us to education has caused us to think deeply about what kind of student we want to graduate from our school after potentially being with us for 10 years. "We asked ourselves what kind of human being do we want to graduate from Aldergrove Public School?" As we continued to talk about this we looked at the research around the kind of world our children would be graduating into. While we have a great deal of respect for the 10 Character Matters traits, somehow they did not resonate with our shift to Inquiry and using 6 Social Justice frames. A team of staff worked on answering the question- does this work for us or do we need to look at other traits for our students and context. After some time, we decided we needed to re-think these traits.

We spent some time starting with the Sacred teachings of the Seven Grandfathers. It became our starting point because we wanted to start with our ancestors who welcomed all other Canadians to this great land. Then we began exploring UNICEF's Rights of Children, the work of the World Health Organization, the IB Learner Profile, YRDSB priorities and the Learning Skills on the Ontario report card. What would emerge was 7 key values/ways of being we felt our students needed to have to best prepare them for life in a shrinking and rapidly changing world. They reflected a blend of Character Matters, the teachings of the Seven Grandfathers and so much more:

Self-Awareness, Optimism, Empathy, Inclusivity, Innovation, Relationships and Citizenship.

We worked on creating "look fors" for each of these from an assets-based lens. We wanted students to be able to articulate what they can do in terms of each of these 7 that could be built on each year over a 10 year continuum. we then worked with a First Nations artist to make these come alive in a way that was meaningful for us at Aldergrove.