Title: Camerise-WRDSB Partnership: how to roll out a similar project

Authors: dsdunand@yorku.ca (Author)
Licence: CC BY-ND 4.0

The Waterloo Region District School Board has partnered with York University Camerise FSL Hub and the Ontario FSL Community to explore a pilot project focused on the creation of accessible Open Education Resources: specifically, the development of Grade 9 single-streamed lessons that embed culturally relevant and responsive practices (FSF 1D, FEF 1D, FIF 1D). This project aligns with three of the WRDSB’s Three-Year FSL Plan goals:
1. Increase student confidence in oral communication in grades 4 - 9 Core French
2. Improve retention of students graduating with French courses beyond the Grade 9 level
3. Build administrator capacity about FSL topics

How can your Board roll out a similar project? Read on to see what we've accomplished.

2023,05 to 2023,06: Connection made between Board FSL Consultant and Camerise

At this time, we made the connection between the Board’s FSL consultant and Camerise regarding interest to join the pilot project and the growing network of passionate collaborators, co-creators, and co-authors for next school year.

2023,05 to 2023,09: Creation of Camerise-WRDSB Partnership Agreement

During this time, coordination of Camerise goals and the school board goals helped draft the Camerise-WRDSB partnership agreement, signed by the Board Principal of Learning Services / Superintendent. In some school boards, this decision-maker and their title will vary.

2023,11 to 2023,11: Planning the pilot

We planned a series of dates, and layed out a date-by-date roadmap for the creation of our projects. This included factoring in the days of the week we could book our meetings, any cap on number of attendees, and room availability at the Board office as well as recruitment via system memo, email, and word of mouth.

Ideally, this would have been completed in October or even September in order to have more time to execute the project.

2023,12 to 2023,12: Team formation

Participants signed-up and we formed the team before Christmas Break. We were able to ensure a broad cross-section of schools were represented: amongst the nine members of our team, teachers represented 5 different schools as well as Immersion, Extended and Core French. Three teachers also had some experience with similar initiatives at the college level, with Camerise Plongeons or with participation at previous conferences. Most had no experience with Open Educational Resources - and that's fine!

Ideally, we would have set the team up in October-November in order to have our first meeting in November.

2024,01 to 2024,01: What is an Open Education Resource?

Dominique Scheffel-Dunand, Associate Professor at York University and Co-Lead of the Camerise project, joined us to teach us about Open Education Resources (OER): what they are, why they should be adopted, created and used, and how to use them. We brainstormed to establish what our most significant problems have been in teaching (our 'wicked problems'), created mind maps to elaborate them, sought out resources to complement them, and noted our cognitive deficits -- the unknowns.

2024,01 to 2024,06: Project Creation

We created our projects even as we continued learning about OER: creative commons citations, using H5P and the Lumi app, and the Camerise FSL Studio platform. Our projects evolved from the initial brainstorm and mindmaps as we pitched our ideas to over 50 educators from four school boards in March and used their feedback to refine our ideas into first drafts. In April, we presented to a few FSL teachers in our Board in order to further refine our ideas and prepare our second drafts. In May, we presented to over 50 people at the Camerise Symposium at Glendon College, enabling us to hear about other school boards' initiatives and begin to forge inter-board networks of educators. In June, we presented our projects to our Principal of Learning Services as well as inviting all board administrators (by board memo) and personally inviting our own administrators to discover what innovation and support exists in FSL within our school board. Finally, we wrapped up the final drafts of our projects in June, uploading them to the Camerise FSL Studio platform as well as an internal Brightspace (D2L) resource repository.

In retrospect, starting our projects earlier in the year would have alleviated the time crunch of finishing our projects in June: the busiest time of the year.

2024,09: The future

Pending the renewal of ministry funding and board direction, our team has several exciting possible paths to continue on next year:

- continuing with our Camerise team while recruiting a second team of beginners within our board, especially as word spreads from us and from administrators
- expanding our project to include grade 8 teachers as many projects focussed on the grade 8 to 9 transition
- expanding our project to collaborate with other school boards as the Camerise Symposium revealed many common themes amongst the five participating school boards and our needs