Year: 2020 — Province: British Columbia
Certificate of Achievement Recipient
Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith Elementary School
Resource and English language learning, grades 5 to 7
Vancouver, British Columbia
One message that is clearly communicated through Mrs. Robinson's teaching is that every person within a community is valuable and everybody has an important role to play.
Robyn Robinson's lifelong involvement in athletics—she and her husband Bill run the Vancouver Community Baseball League—has helped make her a strong believer in the importance of team spirit. Colleagues remark on how she has energetically nurtured a cohesive community of students, families and staff in a very diverse school in which 68 percent of the students speak English as an additional language.
Teaching approach
Many of Robyn's students have learning differences or special needs, or are learning English, yet many also have strong visual-spatial, kinesthetic or interpersonal skills. She explains Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences to the children, so they know there are many ways to be smart and to learn.
In the classroom
- Helps students share their work: uses All the Right Type to improve their keyboarding skills; teaches them Word, PowerPoint and other software; trains them to use the school's PA system; displays their work throughout the school; students' self-esteem rises.
- Ensures her instruction reflects students' unique abilities: uses storytelling to teach order of operations in math; gives frequent body breaks to help students re-energize; students often work together standing at whiteboards rather than sitting alone at desks.
- Supports parents: spends hours after school in family meetings and phone calls; creates clear plans to support children; listens closely to parents' hopes and concerns; fosters faith in their children's abilities.
- Creates a supportive atmosphere: many of her students once covered up their learning difficulties by hiding in the background or becoming class clowns; in her class, they feel safer to take risks than they did in classrooms with more advanced peers.
Outstanding achievements
- Works with school's limited technology resources and advocates to improve them: adapts lessons and approaches to work on the school's out-dated desktops and tablets; uses online literacy programs; serves on the school's technology fundraising committee.
- Organized open house for school reopening: tracked down past and present staff, students, and families; invited VIPs, including the 86-year-old son of the school's namesake; involved parents and every student; boosted morale after a long school renovation.
- Runs a resource math group: provides targeted extra help on concepts struggling students haven't learned; most students improve; 25 percent catch up by two or three grade levels and no longer need extra support.
- Developed the Green Team to make math learning concrete: students design, cost, order promote and sell t-shirts, count cheques and cash, and do banking, all as part of raising $5,500 in four years while students' confidence, and math and leadership skills soared.
Get in touch!
Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith Elementary School
6901 Elliott Street
Vancouver BC V5S 2N1
604-713-4746
kingsford-smith@vsb.bc.ca
https://www.vsb.bc.ca/schools/sir-charles-kingsford-smith/Pages/default.aspx