At the OEYC Ottawa South, we have done a good deal of work on aligning our programming with ELECT. But we have realized that it is time to take a step "back to basics" and review the principles together as well.
At our monthly team meetings, we will take the time to review and discuss one principle at a time. How? We will view a video from the Ministry of Education website (click here to view site and videos) and use the accompanying questions as a starting point for a quick brainstorming session.
Our goal will be to identify our strengths as well as ways we can improve. Most of all, this should help us ensure we are on the "same page" as a team and that we fully understand the framework. Our next meeting is scheduled for May so stay posted for an update on this exercise!As planned, we viewed the videos at the end of our team meeting in May. However, we quickly realized that leaving it to the end of our meeting didn't leave us enough time to properly discuss the videos and the related principle. Since this is one of our priorities, our program supervisor allowed us to dedicate the first hour of our next team meetings to this exercise.
In June, we met again and we were able to have a great brainstorming session. We discussed what the principle meant to us, what we were doing well and how we could improve. Finally, we agreed upon 3 objectives to work on and review at our September team meeting.
We will continue doing this until we have reviewed all 6 principles.
I'd love to hear how other workplaces are reviewing the principles. We can all learn from each other!
The Parenting and Family Literacy Centres have been doing the same - we are focusing on one ELECT principle at each of our team meetings, as a standing agenda item. This provides us an opportunity to reflect on how we are integrating the principles in our day to day and what we need to pay more attention to. Copies of the ELECT document are also strategically displayed in each Centre so that parents and caregivers can review it. It is a good way to start a dialogue about our programming, child development and the importance of the play-based environment for learning as many families will have children enrolled in full-day kindergarten.
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