This year, Cambie Secondary made meaningful progress in fostering cross-departmental collaboration, guided by the leadership of our Literacy and Numeracy Helping Teacher, Stephanie Paukov. Despite facing challenges such as limited time for collaboration, varying departmental approaches, and the need to support staff through change, Stephanie helped bring teachers together around a shared vision for improving student literacy and numeracy.

A key outcome of this work has been the creation of “Command Term Posters” aimed at reinforcing academic language across all subject areas. Terms like analyze, justify, and compare and contrast—often seen in literacy and numeracy assessments—can be difficult for students to interpret. These posters, now displayed in classrooms across departments including English, Resource, and ELL, help students recognize and understand these terms in multiple contexts. Feedback from students has been positive; many have shared that seeing the same terms in different classes serves as a helpful reminder of what is expected when responding to prompts. While some departments are still in the process of developing their own posters, the initiative has already helped build a common language across the school. Looking ahead, our goal is to extend this work by sharing the posters with families so that these academic terms can also be reinforced at home.