SUPPORTING STAFF DEVELOPMENT provides resources for leading professional learning and implementing promising practices.

ARPDC Facilitator’s Guide for the Foundational Knowledge Conversation Guide Series

The ARPDC Facilitator’s Guide is designed to provide principals, coaches, and teacher leaders with processes, strategies, and protocols to effectively facilitate professional conversations around the Foundational Knowledge Conversation Guide Series.

The intent of the eleven ARPDC Conversation Guides is to create teacher, school leader and system leaders’ awareness and understanding of First Nations, Métis and Inuit:

• Perspectives, experiences and ways of knowing
• History and legacy of residential schools and treaties
• Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations for education

Find the eleven ARPDC Conversation Guides in Digging Deeper.

Successful facilitation of meaningful professional conversation is complex work. This facilitator’s guide is not intended to provide a specific approach to these professional conversations. Instead, it offers a menu of processes, strategies, and protocols to allow you to make decisions tailored to the content of the work and the unique context of the participant learners.

The First Nations, Métis and Inuit Professional Learning website provides numerous professional learning resources and supports that represent a collective endeavour to navigate what success and support looks like when finding ways to include First Nations, Métis and Inuit perspectives and content in all aspects of educational programming.

The Process Resources webpage provides tools and templates that reflect that collective journey and guide you through a professional learning process. It is suitable for school and jurisdictional leaders and facilitators.

The tools and templates in the professional learning process support the goals of Learning to Be, Learning to Know, Learning to Do, and Learning to Relate and culminate in the design and implementation of a professional learning plan.

The Learning to Be pillar webpage provides a wide range of professional tools and supports that ask you to reflect on the things you do that define who you are as an educator in your educational community. This webpage includes features to help you self-assess your capacity and a photo resource gallery with numerous links to sources, websites and resources, including the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Find Strategic Pathways on this webpage to help you explore promising practices.

The Learning to Relate pillar webpage provides provides tools and supports that foster a sense of belonging by creating spaces and places that acknowledge and honour First Nations, Métis and Inuit people. This webpage includes features to help you self-assess your capacity and a photo resource gallery with numerous links to sources, websites and resources.

Supporting Awareness, Understanding and Application of Indigenous Foundational Knowledge: A PLANNING AND IMPLEMENTATION TOOL

This document, developed by the Alberta Regional Professional Development Consortium (ARPDC), in collaboration with a number of school partners, is a planning and implementation tool for schools and school authority leaders to develop awareness and understanding of Indigenous Foundational Knowledge, which includes:

• First Nations, Métis and Inuit historical, social, economic and political perspectives or ways of knowing the true spirit and intent of treaties and agreements
• Residential Schools and their legacy
• The impacts of intergenerational trauma
• The social inequality experienced by First Nations, Métis and Inuit communities

This document was also developed to strengthen instructional leadership to lead learning related to Indigenous foundational knowledge and its application within classrooms and the larger school community. As well, this document supports teachers in their work with and through curriculum to design meaningful learning opportunities for the benefit of all students and support the process of reconciliation.

How Communities of Practice Can Support Educators in Building Indigenous Foundational Knowledge

This video shares insights from Indigenous lead teachers from two Alberta school districts, who participated in separate communities of practice during the school year, to deepen their understanding of how to effectively build and apply Indigenous foundational knowledge in their classrooms and their schools.

The video builds upon the ideas presented in the Supporting Awareness, Understanding and Application of Indigenous Foundational Knowledge: A Planning and Implementation Tool and the Creating and Sustaining a Community of Practice for Instructional Leaders: Acquiring and Applying Indigenous Foundational Knowledge documents.

Connecting as a community of practice with the seven essential conditions, these districts explored practical supports that would sustain their journey in building and applying Indigenous foundational knowledge for the benefit of all students and their collective journey towards reconciliation.

The accompanying Building and Applying Indigenous Foundational Knowledge through a Community of Practice Conversation Guide to this video provides a context in which educators and school leaders might explore this video for their own use, or it can be used to guide deeper conversations within a school community.

First Nations, Métis and Inuit Literacy and Numeracy Promising Practices

This ARPDC learning guide focuses on key promising practices related to First Nations, Métis and Inuit literacy and numeracy learning, from First Nations, Métis and Inuit perspectives. This learning guide is designed for use by instructional leaders and learning communities or as a self-paced study. The resource provides a link to the Empowering the Spirit website that viewers are encouraged to explore. Key understandings from the website are provided along with questions for reflection and discussion.

Empowering the Spirit Literacy Video Series

Go to the Empowering the Spirit Literacy Video Series, in which literacy is explored through storytelling as a way of sharing culture and values, understanding ourselves and others, and as an important form for expressing personal voice and connecting to others.

Empowering the Spirit Numeracy Video Series

Go to the Empowering the Spirit Numeracy Video Series, in which students explore numeracy through Traditional Games, an elementary math class on probability and a high school physics class examining the structure of a tee pee and rocket nozzle.

Ensuring First Nation, Metis, and Inuit Education for All Module Participant Guide

This CASS participant guide asks leaders to draw upon their professional experiences, learn from Indigenous perspectives, stories and lived experiences, analyze case scenarios and case studies, and collaboratively examine research to design action plans that address self-identified living cases: practice within system-level leadership.

Professional Learning Pebbles: Activities to Build Teachers’ Foundational Knowledge 

Professional Learning Pebbles is a collection of 24 short activities created by the Alberta Teachers’ Association Walking Together Project to support certificated teachers on their learning journey to meet the First Nations, Métis and Inuit Foundational Knowledge competency in the Teaching Quality Standard.

Impact of Residential Schools Workshop Facilitator Guide

This workshop facilitator guide provides content and process for Impacts of Residential Schools. The content in this workshop provides participants with experiences of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people in Alberta. It is through the telling of stories on the residential school experience that implications of intergenerational trauma will be understood.

Supporting First Nations, Métis and Inuit Learners – In Conversation with Mayor Don Iveson

Explore the importance of supporting First Nation, Métis and Inuit learners by viewing this series of short videos with accompanying learning guides. Mayor Don Iveson shares his perspective on our roles in supporting the success for First Nation, Métis and Inuit learners.

Aboriginal Perspectives and the Curriculum – Discussion Papers

The discussion papers, written by Dwayne Trevor Donald, are intended to stimulate conversation among teachers, pre-service teachers, administrators and members of the community about Aboriginal perspectives and the Social Studies curriculum.