Get Involved With The Mission Of Your School

Introducing the Practicing Faith Survey to your school community is one way to get everybody more involved with the mission of your school. Assessment is increasingly being seen as a practice to build institutional learning and shape educational culture too. Administrators are held accountable to students, parents, boards, associations and to government for the learning that happens in schools. In most Christian schools faith formation is as central to the mission of the school as learning.

You will need to be mindful that students, parents and teachers may have anxieties around the language of assessment. Many will have experienced forms of standardized assessment that are reductionist and punitive. Many are also rightly concerned about privacy and online data protection. This is why the Practicing Faith Survey is not a test, students do not receive a grade, and their individual score is not stored. They do benefit from descriptive and reflective feedback with examples and resources, and the school receives anonymous aggregate data. You should emphasize that students are not required to share their results with anyone, including parents. You should also be very clear with teachers about the ways you intend to use aggregate data and they should be invited into the process of reviewing it. We recommend that you hold an information evening for your community in which you discuss the survey within the context of broader communication about faith formation and schooling. We have provided the following resources to help you communicate with your school community about the Practicing Faith Survey.

We recommend that you point teachers to the teacher information pages on this site, and parents to the collection of answers to common parent questions.

If you would like to send an information sheet to parents before adopting or administering the survey, you can download a model for you to adapt for your school community.

We have also provided a model parental consent form to be used for securing parental permission for students to take the survey.