The Northwest Catholic District School Board’s priorities for its Math Achievement Action Plan will remain mostly unchanged in 2026 compared to previous years, but minor adjustments are being made to finely tune in on areas of improvement and focus teachers’ professional development.
“The only thing that’s really changed is from the ministry’s perspective, and the number of KPIs [key performance indicators] that they’re looking for boards to touch on,” said Mandy Whitehead, Math Action Lead for the board.
“Our math achievement action plan is aligned with the three priority actions, which are the fidelity of the curriculum, ongoing professional learning and knowing our math learners. With our board, we’ve maintained the three consistent board priorities over the last three years to continue to build a strong foundation for math achievement.”
While the plan does not contain any major changes, rather a dialling in of existing practices, Whitehead said she believes a shift in parental attitudes to math could help boost student confidence. She noted that parental modelling around difficult subjects is often picked up by students and that the best thing parents and caregivers can do to help build students’ confidence in mathematics is to unlearn some biases they might have had in their youth.
“Many of us grew up hearing phrases like, ‘I have math anxiety. I’m just not a math person,’ and it’s often because math was taught to us as memorizing steps without actually understanding them,” Whitehead said. “So, if you missed a step, you lost marks, and you didn’t like it because no one took the time to explain the concept.”
“If we contrast that with reading and writing, we never really hear people say, ‘I have reading anxiety!’ or anything like that, because we recognize that those skills are necessary for everyday life. Even something as simple as deciding what coat to wear because of the temperature outside is all math.”
Whitehead said that high-impact instructional practices set out by the Ministry of Education remain a priority for the board.
“One of the key strategies is presenting clear learning goals and success criteria at the beginning of each lesson, so students know what they’re working towards,” she said. “We have also been prioritizing timely, descriptive feedback because feedback is so critical. It helps students correct any misconceptions right away, and then it also reinforces their accurate understanding and builds confidence in their ability to learn.”
The board continues to fine tune its practices during the school year to address any gaps in resources, Whitehead said. “We’re just continuing to monitor the progression as we implement and refine our Math Achievement Action Plan at both the classroom level, the school level and, of course, the board level.”
This refining has led to identifying some areas of improvement.
“There definitely are some trends across the three divisions. But one strand specifically is data. It continues to be an area of focus,” Whitehead said. “It’s provincial, too. So it’s interesting that our data is very similar to provincial data. Spatial sense has been an area of focus as well, but it is very apparent that data continues to be an area of focus.”
This data isn’t just from EQAO test results, as the board also considers its own data.
“We have our own diagnostic, formative and summative assessments that are based on our scope and sequence as well,” Whitehead said. “The diagnostic assessment in September definitely identified that for us.”
