The 2015/16 was an exciting and eventful year in my role as Director of Instruction with the Chilliwack School District. There were many highlights – a new strategic plan was completed (18 months of hard work together), the roll out of new provincial curriculum, and the continued teamwork of our larger leadership team (Board, Executive, PVP, & Partner Groups) to focus on what matters most – teaching and learning.

However, the focus of this post will be math assessment. In particular, Chilliwack’s new district math assessment – The SNAP. SNAP stands for “Student Numeracy Assessment & Practice”. We are very pleased to have been able to incorporate “practice” into the name of the assessment as we believe this to be a very important piece. The idea of practice supports a spiraling approach to teaching and assessing numeracy skills. The SNAP is an assessment that can be used over and over again – to build student fluency, confidence, comprehension, and skills.

The SNAP had its philosophic underpinning based in The ANIE (by Pembroke Publishers). Our teachers were having great results with the ANIE as an assessment tool, and we wanted to make an assessment that was our own and, as per our strategic plan, was catered to our exact context.

After a year of hard work, multiple drafts, piloting and prototypes, The SNAP was born.

We believe that The SNAP will have a dramatic effect on student math achievement in Chilliwack. Next year, all of our students from grades 2-7 will be using the SNAP on an ongoing basis. With thanks to the support from our Board of Education, we have funding and staffing in place to support our teachers in using The SNAP starting in September 2016. This initiative will impact over 5,000 students and we anticipate it will significantly improve their academic trajectory. We look forward to reporting our progress in the spring of 2017.

Included in this post below is our Strategic Plan Update #1 presented to our Board in June 2016, which outlines the SNAP journey thus far in a one-page overview. It describes the alignment with the new curriculum, gives an overview of the outcomes focused upon, and recognizes the educators who teamed together to create it.

Currently, The SNAP is bundled together in a PDF Portfolio format due to the complexity and size of the document. Feel free to download a copy and try it out in your classroom, school or school district. Let us know how you make out.

Update May 2017. The most current version The SNAP and supported documents (including the SNAP Training Video) can be accessed on the new SNAP website – found here: https://snap.sd33.bc.ca