Prime Minister's Awards for teaching Excellence

ARCHIVED—Recipient Bios

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Year: 2001 – Province: Nova Scotia

Certificate of Achievement Recipients

Joanne Cameron

School: École Shannon Park School
7 Iroquois Drive
Dartmouth, Nova Scotia  B3A 1B4

Principal: Darrell Samson
School Telephone: 902-464-2084
School Fax: 902-464-2866
School Website: www.shannonpark.ednet.ns.ca
Grades/Subjects Taught: Grades 1 to 6, resource teacher, language arts (French immersion)

Teaching Approach:

  • Strive to improve the learning environment for all students.
  • Strive to improve your own skills, knowledge and training.

Outstanding Achievements:

Guides students to take responsibility for their own learning.

  • Students choose curriculum outcomes, set interim outcomes, track their success and adjust goals accordingly.
  • Students develop and learn evaluation rubrics, participate in peer, self- and teacher evaluations of their work, create portfolios of their work and present work to classmates and parents in a variety of media.
  • Students also participate in Class Council to determine class events, and discuss behaviour, conflict resolution, and mediation techniques.

Advocates for at-risk students, develops programs to respond to specific needs, and integrates phonological awareness, comprehension strategies and reading techniques.

Stresses the ability to speak and write well in both official languages; students listen to professional storytellers, analyze story development and speaking techniques, and then write their own stories. These stories are peer-edited and -presented. One student won an award in a local writing contest.

Rave Reviews:

On many occasions, parents approached me to share not only their satisfaction, but also their joy, for the extraordinary things that their child was experiencing in the classroom with Joanne. Principal

Joanne is the only educator I have known who has demonstrated the ability to lead in a truly exemplary manner in any role she assumes in the hierarchy of positions available to teachers in our profession. School board superintendent

Last year at the beginning I wasn't doing well and she encouraged me to do better and that's how I got to Grade 5. Former student