What does a school look like? For most of us, the image that first comes to mind is very much like the school our parents went to. The blackboard may have been replaced by a Smartboard; there may be new elements like computer tablets in the classrooms, but the basic structure is the same. Chances are that you, like me, most easily envision a blocky building with strings of square single classrooms, an office, a gym, a library, a playground.
Is this what a school has to be? Not anymore. Architects have understood for decades that form dictates function. While creative educators do find ways to work around the limitations of a traditional building, it’s also true that new approaches to teaching and learning can be either fostered or hindered by the building where they take place. As Zoe Branigan-Pipe points out in her Viewpoint column (p. 10), it’s high time our learning spaces were designed for the activities we want to take place in them.
The examples showcased in this issue are truly inspiring in their exploration of possibility. From Zoe’s demonstration classroom in Hamilton, Ont., to the multi-room, multi-age Kindergarten at St. Gregory’s Catholic School in Hinton, Alta., to the Ottawa Catholic board’s brand-new schools, educators across the country are re-imagining what a school can be. All three of these examples have been recognized by the CEA for their transformative potential, while in Building Capacity (p. 14), Stephen Hurley takes us inside Canadian schools designed by the architectural firm Fielding Nair to see how these spaces enable a more creative and collaborative approach. In all of these examples, the design followed from the pedagogical goals and learning vision of the school community.
Exciting as these new buildings are, they are not where most students and teachers spend their days, and so we would like to invite you to read, and contribute to, our blog series supporting this issue. In it we ask: How can we re-imagine, reconfigure and reorganize our traditional schools (and school grounds) so that they work better for today’s teaching and learning activities? We look forward to reading about, and seeing photos of, your creative solutions!
Photo: Dave Donald
First published in Education Canada, September 2016
Write to us! We want to know what you think. Send your letters or article proposals to editor@cea-ace.ca, or post your comments about individual articles on the online version of Education Canada at: www.cea-ace.ca/educationcanada
Fairy Tale month is being celebrated at St. Gregory Catholic School and at its Happy Creek Learning Center, a large castle constructed from cardboard serves as a focal point to inspire and engage the 65 students, aged four to six, in their education.
Dressed up in their armour, three princes discuss how they are going to slay the dragon and save the princess from her impending doom. Nearby, adventurous mountain climbers find safe passage to the top of the mountain and place their flag on its peak. Imagination soars, creativity abounds and friendships are forged!
Following the principles of an emergent curriculum, where students drive their own learning based on their interests and passions, the Happy Creek Learning Center is a unique program existing in contrast to the more traditional junior and senior Kindergarten programs currently offered in Alberta.
A multi-aged approach to Kindergarten is only part of the uniqueness of the Happy Creek Learning Center program. It was created out of a desire to provide students at St. Gregory Catholic School in Hinton, Alberta (a pre-K to Grade 4 school) with the best possible learning environment, based on current research regarding early childhood learning. Sharing the vision that guided this change, we wanted to provide an environment that inspires our students and provides flexibility to their learning, that impacts a broader range of social skills, and that allows teachers to create and adapt both individual learning opportunities and small group instruction. The goal of quality learning based on research that reflects best practices is what inspired us to move in this direction.
Three years in the making, the Happy Creek Learning Center is a play-based, multi-aged, team-teaching, hands-on learning program. A play-based pedagogy, infused with a Reggio Emilia philosophy, is at the core of the student learning. This new approach presented the administration with their greatest challenges. We needed to help parents understand the importance of play and why it is such a vital piece of the puzzle. Parents often view education through the lens of their own past experiences and many of them had difficulty believing in the benefits of play for their children. To overcome this, we started a campaign of sharing research-based literature with parents at every opportunity in all aspects of the program. We had parent meetings to discuss concerns and fears, we had many one-on-one meetings, and we conducted multiple walk-throughs and allowed parents a voice to share their concerns. In the end, we asked that they give us their trust to create this type of learning environment for their children, one that we knew would be based on best practices. Ultimately, the parents trusted us.
In a multi-aged setting, the interaction between the older students and the younger students allows opportunities for positive role modeling, which in turn builds self-confidence and leads to a more positive school experience. Lee-Ann Cross, a key teacher with the program, also sees the benefits of having the same teachers work with students for two years in a row: “Since they have already formed a positive relationship with us, the September transition in their second year is that much easier, for them and for us as well.”
The program’s team-teaching model is a key difference from the traditional style of teaching Kindergarten: with two full-time teachers and three educational assistants, this model relies on finding each member’s strengths through an intimately collaborative process.
Nicole Woloszyn, a relatively new member to the teaching profession with three years of teaching experience, shares her experience with the team-teaching approach: “My professional growth has been exponential since we have started the team-teaching, and I have learned so much in such a short time. The opportunity to talk to each other, both informally and formally, about what’s happening in the classroom, about student growth, the opportunity to take on new responsibilities – and having the support of everyone – is unbelievable. I’m not sure that I would be the teacher I am today had it not been for the team-teaching approach.”
Lindsey Braucht, an educational assistant, appreciates the collaboration that happens amongst all of the team members. “I didn’t realize the amount of detail and specifics that go into planning for student success. We discuss each students’ individual needs as well each member’s roles and responsibilities for the program. I like the idea that we are not specifically assigned to an individual student, but rather we learn best strategies that work with each student while we are in a specific center or learning area during the day. This way we are better prepared for any type of situation that may happen. Having this weekly meeting really makes me feel valued and that I am a part of the team.”
The physical layout of the Happy Creek Learning Center is perhaps the most obvious difference apparent to visitors. The challenge stemmed from how to take inflexible teaching spaces (boxed classrooms) and convert them to flexible learning areas where students can move seamlessly around and direct part of their own learning. Ultimately, this required knocking down a wall between two classrooms and joining another one with an access door. There are three major rooms: the Main Lodge, the Mountain Room and the Butterfly Room. Each room is designed to serve different educational needs: the Main Lodge (previously two separate classrooms) is set up for the morning meetings, thematic centres, literacy and numeracy centres and the morning provocations. The Mountain Room (joined by an access door) facilitates gross motor skills, construction building, and music exploration, and is the noisiest of all the rooms. Lastly there is the Butterfly Room (directly across the hall), which houses creative and sensory experiences such as arts, crafts, cooking, light sensory, sculpting and discovery-based projects.
A huge concern for parents was the fact that there would be 65 students in at one time. How was the school going to be able to maintain order and provide quality learning? Nicole Fellows, a parent of a Kindergarten student, shares her initial reaction with the new programming: “I have to admit, I was one of the skeptical parents who did not believe that this type of environment would work for my child. I was worried that having 65 kids running around in the classroom would be overwhelming and had no idea how learning would happen. I thought my child would suffer and be left behind. I’ve changed my mind! It [the Happy Creek program] is an amazing program! At home, my five-year-old son said to his older brother, ‘I have two consonants and two vowels in my name.’ His older brother had to ask him what a consonant was!”
Caroline McDonald, the assistant principal, observes, “We recognized that with this many students we had to create an environment that minimized distractions, established routines and traffic flow, and was proactive with transition times to generate more learning opportunities for our students.” She adds that building “flexibility and fluidity” into the program has been important to its success. “A great example of this is when students enter the classroom following recess breaks. We run a slide show that rotates through photos of all of our students. Students come in and sit in front of the slide show, watching themselves. Without any prompting, they have gathered collectively at the carpet and are ready to learn. This effectively reduces behaviour problems before they get started during the transition back into the classroom.”
This new approach has been worth all the effort. There have been so many positives from the introduction of this program. We know that student learning has increased, based on early indications from our Grade 1 teachers and the timeframe for learning new concepts in comparison to previous years. Prosocial behaviours have increased, which allows for a more positive learning climate; the workload for staff members is less and is also better defined; and enrollment has gone up.
All of these indicators support our desire for changing how we deliver our programming for our younger students.
En Bref: Élaboré sur trois ans, le Happy Creek Learning Center offre un programme préscolaire d’apprentissage pratique d’âges multiples axé sur le jeu et caractérisé par le coenseignement. Pour convertir les salles de classes fermées existantes en aires polyvalentes d’apprentissage où les enfants peuvent circuler aisément et déterminer une partie de leur propre apprentissage, l’école a abattu le mur entre deux classes et ajouté une porte d’accès à une troisième salle. Il y a donc trois pièces communicantes : la salle principale, la salle de la montagne et la salle du papillon, chacune conçue pour répondre à des besoins éducatifs différents. L’article présente un nouveau mode d’organisation pour un programme d’apprentissage en bas âge permettant l’enseignement collaboratif, un espace d’apprentissage plus imaginatif et fonctionnel et des liens sociaux plus naturels.
Photo: Jenn Bardarson Photography
First published in Education Canada, September 2016
Great things are happening in B.C. public education. The CEA and Reader’s Digest Canada are pleased to recognize the following three school districts with awards for promoting lasting, system-wide change for K-12 students:
Fine Arts eCademy
Developing students’ passion for learning in and out of school
North Island Distance Education School (Navigate)
Comox Valley School District 71, Comox, B.C.
“Exploring learners’ interests, passions and strengths can bring a sense of meaning and purpose to schooling.”
Continuing the Journey with the Elders
Strengthening indigenous students’ connection to their school, culture and community
School District 5 Southeast Kootenay, Cranbrook, B.C.
“A stellar example of ‘Reconciliation in action’ that should be emulated in other school communities across Canada.”
Maker Educators Collaborative: Innovation in the Learning Commons
Discovering how schools can work together to forge new ways of teaching and learning
West Vancouver School District, West Vancouver, B.C.
“A blueprint for other school districts on how to break the ‘innovation’ silos that tend to exist in classrooms and schools.”
Profiles of the winning initiatives will be featured in the November issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.
Please visit www.cea-ace.ca/RDAwards for more information about these groundbreaking programs.
The CEA is pleased to announce that the H’a H’a Tumxulaux Outdoor Education Program has been selected among 47 applicants from across Canada to participate in the 2016 Indigenous ‘Innovation that Sticks’ Case Study Research Program. As part of this initiative, the CEA will conduct field study research to highlight how innovative educators have succeeded in engaging at-risk youth through culturally-relevant, land-based pedagogy.
H’a H’a Tumxuluax means “Sacred Land” in the language of the Sinixt people. This program’s educational model incorporates Aboriginal Worldviews and perspectives of teaching and learning, designed to ensure that students acquire the skills necessary to form positive and healthy relationships with themselves, with their community and with Mother Earth. The program emerged as a timely response to dwindling student engagement and a strong will to offer learners of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent a culturally-relevant and culturally-sustaining educational experience.
“Our selection panel of leaders in Indigenous education have lauded H’a H’a’s deep investment in propelling Aboriginal traditional knowledge to the forefront as a powerful way to captivate students and improve learning outcomes,” says CEA President and CEO Ron Canuel. “Clearly, this is a whole community approach and is a shining example for Elders, Knowledge Keepers and educators from across the country who seek to engage Indigenous learners in their own schools and communities.”
This program also successfully engages and collaborates with parents, staff and the wider community to ensure that cultural and ceremonial practices are incorporated and honoured. As a result, students have returned from land-based outings with an increased sense of confidence, trust and openness to learning that is grounded in activities that focus on leadership, communication and community involvement.
“Returning to a traditional outdoor educational setting for our students is what matters to us,” says Nathan Robinson, Principal of the Kootenay-Columbia Learning Centre. “Students are tuning in because they’re out of the classroom and they’re learning first-hand about traditional ceremonies, languages and histories. Self-identity and pride in our youth blossoms because they feel loved, respected and valued.”
The Kootenay-Columbia Learning Centre, which delivers the H’a H’a program, will receive a $10,000 contribution courtesy of initiative sponsor State Farm Canada to grow its activities and extend its impact. Program representatives will share their best practices with a CEA researcher, who will produce a case study report about the conditions and processes that allowed H’a H’a to succeed, including the steps that could be taken to spread this innovation to other classrooms and schools across Canada.
For more details about this program, please visit:
www.cea-ace.ca/innovationthatsticks
CEA knows there are Indigenous and provincial schools where tremendous innovation is happening by taking risks and implementing culturally relevant, community-supported, innovative programs that connect deeply with Indigenous learners and their way of learning and coming to know. This case study research program will help CEA to understand and promote how one successful program for Indigenous learners can support other educators in getting their own ‘innovations to stick’.
The Kootenay Columbia Learning Centre hosts multiple alternative education programs across two campuses in Trail and Castlegar, B.C. This alternative school was chosen as the first outreach site for the “Take a Hike” Program, which incorporates academics, adventure-based learning, therapy and community involvement.
For more information:
Max Cooke CEA Director of Communications (bilingual)
|
Nathan Robinson Principal of Alternative Education |
Supported by:
This initiative is generously funded by State Farm Canada, which share CEA’s commitment to supporting leaders who are transforming Canada’s education system.
The Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB) was selected to participate in CEA’s Innovation that Sticks case study research program and received a $10,000 contribution courtesy of State Farm Canada to support their ongoing innovation. OCSB representatives shared lessons learned along their journey to success for a case study report, which also contains key observations and recommendations for other education leaders trying to grow their own innovations from classrooms to entire schools and school districts.
Case Study Report Executive Summary and Videos: cea-ace.ca/OCSBcasestudy
Full Case Study Report: cea-ace.ca/OCSBreport
The front entrance of Ottawa’s St. Cecilia Elementary School, with its brightly coloured façade and curvilinear canopy, is designed to evoke excitement and anticipation. Soaring above the canopy, a glass tower symbolizes our love of learning and our motivation to bring “the Light of the World” into our school and community.
It is immediately apparent that this school design is based on new approaches to learning and innovation. The school is only three years old, having welcomed its first cohort of students in September 2013. According to Principal Andrea Green, “The design and concept of the school has architecture at the service of teaching and pedagogy. It lends itself to collaboration and the global competencies that are necessary for success in our ever-changing world.“
In 2010, the Ottawa Catholic School Board released its white paper, Towards 2020: Connecting with our students – A blueprint for change. The white paper included the following observation:
Today’s students are different from the students that our system was created to educate. The new digital learners are immersed in technology and they expect to use digital tools as part of their educational experience. Brain-based research provides evidence that today’s generation of students are “wired” differently than previous generations. Instructional strategies are evolving to reflect the needs of 21stcentury learners.
The Board was creating a digital ecosystem to reflect the changing global environment; it also happened to be planning to open a new elementary school. Board educators had a vision for a facility designed to enhance the acquisition of global competencies.
Before we could invite bids from architects, we needed to clarify our own vision and “wish list.” Board staff started the process: The design had to facilitate teaching and learning through collaboration and instructional differentiation. The design challenge was to create a model that would allow all spaces to be “places of learning.” (Today this concept has evolved into creating “agile” learning spaces.) Utilizing the talents and creativity of our own staff created opportunities for leadership and invited the risk taking necessary for innovation.
A Family of Schools Superintendent with responsibilities for Special Education and Student Services was assigned as the chair of the Elementary School Design Committee. The Superintendent of Planning and Facilities and the Superintendent of Learning Technologies were a resource to the committee.
In addition to the three superintendents, the committee included several elementary principals, and representation from Special Education, Learning Technology, Planning and Facilities, and Elementary Student Success, as well as teaching consultants representing Early Learning Services, Literacy and Numeracy.
The first email sent to the committee members stated, “Congratulations – you have won the lottery! And the prize is membership on the Elementary School Design Committee – to look at school design from a perspective of 21st century teaching and learning, leveraged by technology and student engagement.” Input was also solicited from student and parent focus groups and interviews with the principals from the last two elementary schools that had been opened in the previous five years.
The mandate for the committee was to:
The committee used the following as boundaries or challenges for new school design:
All recommendations from the committee went to the senior executive team, where the ideas were tested for compatibility with student engagement and learning outcome enhancement. The Associate Director of Education and the Director of Education were both very involved to ensure that pedagogy would drive the design of physical space.
Bryden Martel Architects Inc. (Ottawa) was awarded the contract for architectural services for the St. Cecilia facility, to be located in a growing suburb of Ottawa. The construction budget for the building was set at $8.4 million dollars, consistent with previous projects. The school was designed to accommodate 507 JK-6 pupils, with a footprint of approximately 50,000 sq. feet. The opening date was set for September 3, 2013.
The final design was supported and approved by the School Board of Trustees and by the Ministry of Education, who provided the funding for the new school.
Three years after the launch, a visitor to St. Cecilia will see students and staff engaged in inquiry learning, both inside and outside of the classroom.
Learning Commons: The old library was turned on its head in favour of an open Learning Commons that combines traditional reading material with various technologies. While the school is generally rectilinear in form, the Learning Commons echoes the curvilinear shape of the entrance canopy. The contours in the plan are repeated in the patterning of the multi-layered ceiling to excite and delight the eye. The organic form of this space provides many areas for differentiated work. There are spaces for individual and group work as well as noisy and quiet activities. Instead of the staid world of the silent library, space is now intended for interactive, collegial and collaborative activities – including communicating and interacting with the outside world through technology.
It is not uncommon to find student “Tech Connectors” working at a Genius Bar in the Learning Commons (Tech Connectors are members of a student club who explore learning technologies and help students and staff use them; a Genius Bar is a tech support area where students and staff help each other). Others work on video projects at the green screen station, and others work with robotics in Maker Spaces. And of course, you will also find students reading high-interest books and reading on devices, taking advantage of comfortable seating in a coffee-shop atmosphere – and these students are in grades K-6!
Caves and watering holes: An important contribution from student and staff input and from the literature review was the design of the school hallways. At St. Cecilia, every part of the building is intentionally designed as an opportunity for learning, not just the classroom space.
Hallways are differentiated by the use of colour and young students are adept at using colour for navigation as they move around the school. The hallways are designed with “caves and watering holes” – spaces built along the hallways where students can collaborate in small spaces or work independently. These spaces also include access to technology. Comfortable chairs, benches and tables allow for different types of learning activities.
Pods: At St. Cecilia, the classrooms are clustered in groups of three and open into a shared central pod area. These pods are extensions of the classrooms, where students from within a grade or across grades can work in collaborative groups. Supervision and observation of the pod is facilitated by large classroom windows overlooking the area. Each of the pod areas includes access to Chromebooks and iPads so that students can access technology whenever and wherever it is needed.
Principal Andrea Green explains, “Those students who work well in small groups or independently can work in the caves or in the pods. This benefits them and it also benefits the smaller number of students in the classroom, who have more direct support and supervision from the teacher.”
Building as teaching structure: Promoting the concept that learning occurs everywhere, not just in a classroom, the school building itself becomes a teaching opportunity. Exposed building systems and elements are intended to create an interactive “museum-like” feature that connects to the curriculum. Engagement is enhanced by the placement of over 20 QR codes throughout the school, explaining how the infrastructure and mechanical systems work. Examples include: a glass wall to showcase the colour-coded mechanical system, a glass-covered cut-out of a wall that shows how the under-floor terrain is constructed to support the floor, a glass-covered floor space to showcase the building foundation and column supports. A time capsule was placed by the students into the flooring at the time of construction. In other areas, drainage pipes from washrooms are displayed, as is the seismic reinforcement (for earthquake resistance). For budding architects and history buffs, classic Greek pillars are used to frame an area in the Learning Commons.
Environmental focus: The Ottawa Catholic School Board has been the top-performing school board in energy conservation in Ontario for the last three years. This focus on green energy and conservation is visible throughout the district and at St. Cecilia, where a student-led Environmental Club actively pursues conservation initiatives. Conservation, recycling and composting is thriving at St. Cecilia. The school is now at Gold level under the EcoSchool categorization.
At the outdoor classroom beside the Learning Commons, parent and community volunteers help to maintain vegetable and herb gardens on school property, while students learn about the natural environment through various components of the science curriculum.
The perimeter of the building is used to enhance energy conservation through the use of planted areas where snow is allowed to build up and insulate the facility.
Staff use the building and the curriculum to develop student responsibility for the environment and the “Care of God’s Creation.”
Technology use at St. Cecilia is ubiquitous. The school has enterprise level WiFi and an interactive LCD projector in every class, along with iPads, Chromebooks, and other devices. Students also have the option to bring their own devices to school. As a connected community, the school and the teachers use social media channels including Twitter, class blogs, Google Sites and other platforms to share information with their community. Students share video projects produced in class and often use green screens located around the school. Students have their own radio show entitled “Bee Hive Live.”
The school is also used for a variety of community activities where children and adults benefit from the state-of-the art facilities.
To connect the life of the school with the community at large, a ten-foot LED monitor in the glass entrance tower displays all the good things that are happening at St. Cecilia, whether it’s a Pizza Day, celebration of Easter or the fundraising activities of students around social justice issues at home and abroad. Technology truly helps us communicate to the world our message of Peace and Love.
The Ontario Ministry of Education has funded two more new schools within our Board since opening St. Cecilia. St. Dominic opened in September 2015, and a third school, St. Benedict, will open in September 2016. The design of each new school benefits from the feedback of students and staff at predecessor schools. Under an Ontario Hydro initiative at St. Dominic, we were able to incorporate solar panels on the roof of the school. We sell the electricity they generate into the Ontario grid, thereby creating a revenue stream that goes back to classrooms across the district. Some of the other evolutionary changes include enhancements to the functionality of the Learning Commons, increased space for meeting rooms and administrative functions, and universal washrooms. To promote branding and community engagement, the facade and canopy are unique for each school.
St. Cecilia’s is not a “one of a kind” dream school with unlimited funding; rather we used pedagogy to lead and drive our vision and design. Our thinking, our planning and ultimately the innovation created, were all incorporated using the same budget and the same overall school size as any of our traditional schools.
In September, 2018, we will open another elementary school in the area of Kanata. Our new school Design Committee is once again active as we look at how we can incorporate the principals of deep learning in our next elementary school. We will continue to review the literature, visit other sites, and consult our own staff as we collaborate and innovate to design the best learning environment possible for our students and staff.
En Bref: Cet article décrit comment le personnel d’un conseil scolaire a, par la consultation et la recherche, concrétisé une vision de nouveaux espaces d’apprentissage. Le résultat impressionne – une école conçue pour inspirer la collaboration et l’innovation, en reprenant la même superficie et le même budget que les écoles précédentes.
Chaque partie du bâtiment de l’école élémentaire St. Cecilia a été intentionnellement conçue pour offrir l’occasion d’apprendre. Les corridors comportent des alcôves et des postes d’apprentissage dotés d’outils technologiques et de mobilier polyvalent. Des systèmes et éléments de construction exposés visent à créer un contexte interactif s’assimilant à un musée qui s’intègre au curriculum. Une salle de classe extérieure favorise l’apprentissage dans un environnement naturel.
Photos: courtesy the Ottawa Catholic School Board
First published in Education Canada, September 2016
When I walked onto the tarmac at our local public school yesterday morning I was immediately drawn into that beautiful sense of chaos that is The-First-Day-of-School. Close to 1100 children and the parents, grandparents and caregivers responsible for getting them there. Nearly 100 staff members making sure that everyone knew where they were going. Comings and goings, hellos and goodbyes, delights in the recognition of long-lost friends (lost for two months) and the quiet assurances offered by adults to those experiencing a little bit of first day jitters. All of this held close in the stifling early morning air.
But then something wonderful and mysterious happened. The morning bell rang and this beautiful mess was very quickly transformed into a sense of order as our children once again became students. The transition from summer vacation to another school year was happening before our eyes. And happen it did! Students were gathered together into their respective classes and led, line by line, into the school building, while the adults that brought them there left (some reluctantly) to continue on with their days.
It’s a scene that will be played out every day from now until the end of June and, although the intensity of that first day can never be replicated, there is something very important that occurs in those daily exchanges when we say goodbye to our children, and their teacher says good morning. When you think about it, there is a deep sense of trust that makes these daily moments of separation and connection liveable. As parents, we trust that the school staff is going to have the best interests of our children at heart and that they will be looked after, protected and nurtured in their growth. In the same way, our educators trust in the support of families to come alongside them as partners in their child’s learning and education.
As I stood in the schoolyard yesterday morning, it struck me that these daily moments of trust are really the starting point for our conversations about parent engagement. It’s in the space created by this relationship of trust that we can find new ways of working together, new ways of drawing the talents and energies of parents and others into the school and new ways for families and educators to look out into the community with a shared purpose and commitment.
The start of every school year invites us to look differently at so many things. As Chair of the School Council at my own kids’ school, I’m hoping to make parent engagement one of the dimensions that we choose to actively explore a little more deeply, with a little more imagination and creativity.
I know that there are many of you who have done a whole lot more thinking about this over the years, and I hope to hear some of your stories.
What does parent engagement mean to you? As a teacher, an administrator or a parent, what ideas are you imagining that might bring even more life and vitality to your school community? How does that daily exchange between parent/family and school inspire your thinking about engagement?
Let’s get curious about that space for parent engagement and how we might hold it open for exploration, conversation and innovative ideas.
There is a clear disconnect between the new approaches to teaching and learning that are considered “best practices” for 21st century learning, promoted in PD and supported by research, and the old classroom or school design that in many ways works against them.
In almost every country that values literacy for all its citizens, recognition has grown that students learn in different ways and at different paces, and as information and tools have become more accessible and equitable, we welcome and support a variety of media and strategies. Our professional development teaches us how to differentiate learning and teaching and why Universal Design is essential – that what is good for one learner may be good for others. Learning communities and PD focus on the need to allow students to experience learning themselves through inquiry and guided projects. We are bringing back the “Maker Movement” (I say “bringing back” because as a student myself I experienced a great deal of “making” in my Shop and Home Economics classes) because we understand that our future generations need to experience hands-on learning focused on the principles of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Our schools and districts are also recognizing that health and nutrition play a vital role in students’ ability to learn.
But are we connecting these practices with how we design the space for learning? More often than not, our school infrastructure and classroom design is similar to 20th-century schools. Rarely does the physical space and classroom make-up (e.g. how we group students) connect to the pedagogies encouraged during professional development sessions. It’s time we thought about how our physical space, schedules and classroom make-up support or constrain the type of learning taking place.
As an itinerant teacher and faculty member at Brock University, I have toured hundreds of classrooms and schools, and can, with confidence, make the following generalizations:
What if students could attend learning sessions based on their individual interests or needs, similar to the EdCamp model or MOOCs (massive open online courses) that allow choice and interest-based learning?
Shouldn’t the classroom and school design match our changing philosophies of education and the evolution of 21st-century learning and teaching practices? How do we, as a system, begin to rethink school and classroom design in a way that meets the learning needs of all students and that allows for more exploration, more freedom of learning, more opportunity for self-driven inquiry?
In this article, I want to share how, despite some systemic barriers, teachers and schools can make small changes to their classroom set-up and routine. I also want to use these examples to encourage system leaders to honour a variety of physical spaces within their schools and consider thinking outside the box when it comes to school schedules.
In my blog, I once asked, “What is the Ultimate Learning Space?”1 I shared some key learnings from my job as Faculty Advisor at Brock University, where I visited many classrooms. I saw many cases where the learning environment directly impacted the students’ level of engagement, their focus, their interest and how much or little they contributed. What I noticed most was that when spaces were designed with explicit thought about inquiry, creativity and opportunity for hands-on learning, the students seemed happy. Content. While most classrooms that I visited were quite traditional, the following examples were those that made me think differently about school design:
What I found frustrating was that these were all individual classroom examples rather than district-led initiatives. One shining exception was Talbot Trail School in the Greater Essex County District School Board. This theme-based school encouraged learning in every space of the school. The hallways had interactive maps, 3D cityscapes, and flexible learning spaces (including laptop carts and movable interactive whiteboards). Learning was encouraged in the stairwell (where models of aircraft hung) and landings (equipped with hanging globes). The library was more of a learning commons; its inviting open-concept design featured natural light, beanbag chairs, carpeted areas, laptop carts and interactive whiteboards, and a book display that was out of this world.
Throughout the 2014/15 School Year, my team had the opportunity to gather examples from a variety of schools and create a learning space – the Enrichment and Innovation Centre – that models these changing teaching and learning pedagogies. We used the school year to document and research the outcomes, successes and big learnings from this project.
While we were touring schools and districts searching for ideas for the Centre, the best examples that we found were Kindergarten classrooms. In almost every case, these classrooms were designed in a way that allowed students to explore. The rooms had hubs or centres that were based on context themes (that related to the interest of the students). The tools and activities allowed students to build and design. And since abilities vary so dramatically in this age group, the activities were always differentiated and open-ended, so that regardless of the developmental stage of the child, the student felt success and could use feedback and support to improve or go to the next “level.” The learning looked like play: at a given moment, some students were on the carpet with blocks, some used hammer and nails to build, some were painting, while others explored sand or solved math problems.
Our challenge was to design a space for students of all ages and abilities that followed the Kindergarten model. When our first visitor – a secondary school principal – commented, “I hope you don’t take offence to this, but your room resembles, sort of, a Kindergarten room,” our faces beamed with smiles.
For the Enrichment and Innovation Centre, we designed a room without rows, groups or even an explicit “front.” Instead, there are areas or hubs differentiated by topic, skill or interest:
The Enrichment and Innovation Centre can be used as a demonstration for educators seeking ways to enrich their own program through inquiry and project-based learning spaces. The Centre connects the ideologies that are being advocated (inquiry, design thinking, integrative thinking) to the learning environment itself. Admittedly, the opportunities, resources and tools available to us here are atypical of a regular classroom. However, a committed educator with a growth mindset can adapt and change a “standard” learning space to allow modern learners to fully engage in self-directed, choice-driven and personal endeavor activities. For example, when I taught a self-contained gifted class a few years ago, I put my entire photocopy budget toward laptop purchases.
Over the past year, we have had over 500 students, some parents, and many volunteers visit the Enrichment Centre. We invite you in, too.
Visiting educators often ask us two questions:
A: Students are not always working at the different hubs or centres without explicit guidance. Further, the theme for each centre/hub, whether it be Design/Engineering, Literacy or Arts, is usually facilitated with a Big Idea Question that provides a common ground to the work.
A: There is a lot of self and peer assessment. When students set, edit and evaluate their own learning goals they also become fluent at reflecting on their successes and failures. Students have become familiar with sharing their goals and their questions at the start of the day, using a shared online document, and they also record their results/conclusions at the end of the day.
1 http://pipedreams-education.ca/2011/04/30/618/
http://pipedreams-education.ca/2012/09/04/my-top-10-learning-spaces-a-universal-design-in-a-gifted-classroom/#.VfGAeJ3BzGc ; http://pipedreams-education.ca/2011/02/02/educon-conversation-learning-spaces-of-tomorrow/
In 1994, Alberta Education established Alberta Public Charter Schools as the first of their kind in Canada. The rationale for the establishment of charter schools was to enhance choice and innovation across the province. Alberta Education described the nature of the schools as:
“autonomous non-profit public schools designed to provide innovative or enhanced education programs that improve the acquisition of student skills, attitudes, and knowledge in some measurable way… [They] have characteristics that set them apart from other public schools in meeting the needs of a particular group of students through a specific program or teaching/learning approach while following Alberta Education’s Program of Studies.”[1]
Alberta Public Charter Schools operate under agreements or “charters” with the Minister of Education for the establishment, administration, and renewal of the charter school. The charter describes the unique educational service the school will provide, how the school will operate, and the intended student outcomes. Charter schools are given more autonomy in governance and program delivery than other public school jurisdictions in the province, so long as the school can demonstrate: (1) innovation in education and (2) improved student learning. Their governance also differs from public or separate school jurisdictions. Unlike most public school jurisdictions, each charter school has its own principal, board and superintendent. Initially, charter schools received a five-year agreement from the Minister of Education. More recently, charter schools have been permitted to apply for a 15-year charter agreement. To support each charter school, the Association of Alberta Public Charter Schools (TAAPCS) was established to promote public charter school education in Alberta, play an advocacy role, and promote continued innovation and choice within public education.[2]
In this article, we provide an overview of the nature of Alberta Public Charter Schools, and offer a sampling of findings from a comprehensive study of the TAAPCS system to address two “myths”:
Charter schools have proved a popular option in Alberta; for each of the nearly 8,000 students enrolled in 13 Alberta Public Charter School jurisdictions, another student’s name rests on a lengthening enrolment waitlist. Parents are attracted to charter schools for a variety of reasons:
Parents who wish to send their children to charter schools have also identified some challenges:
Controversial aspects of Alberta Public Charter Schools
Early debates about the implementation of Alberta Public Charter Schools were, and in some respects remain, politically contentious. Critics of charter schools framed it as a form of publically funded private education. This is not surprising, given that in the mid-1990s, strong market-driven educational reforms were prevalent in Alberta and internationally.[4]
More controversially, charter school teachers – unlike public school teachers – are associate rather than full members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA). This designation was of particular concern to the ATA regarding the full protection of teachers within schools and the potential weakening of their position across the province.
There was further scepticism regarding the inclusivity and equitability of students and families who chose charter schools. Critics felt that the educational mandate would target students perceived to be preferable, due either to their talents or to socio-economic factors. Concerns arose around admissions processes, and the parameters of the educational mandates that could potentially exclude certain children from being considered.
Some of these early debates have been resolved with greater understanding, although discussions still emerge regarding the schools’ legitimacy, innovation, and impact on the larger educational landscape.
Most Alberta charter schools are located in Calgary and Edmonton. Currently, thirteen charter schools serve different student populations and diverse needs in the Province of Alberta (see Figure 1).
The schools are not restricted to students perceived as “easy to teach,” as may be charged by critics. They incorporate a distinct range of students. However, unlike public schools, charter schools do not receive additional funding for students who may have an Individual Program Plan (IPP) identifying diverse cognitive, emotional, social or behavioural needs. This may limit the range of students accepted into charter schools beyond their educational mandate.
Numerous studies have been conducted at the micro-level within particular charter schools,[5] but little research has been conducted at the macro-level considering the entire TAAPCS association. In a recent study,[6] we examined Alberta Public Charter Schools on a macro-level. We focused particularly on their ability to adapt and change education, by asking stakeholders to indicate the most influential issues consuming their interests and to identify the people and organizations important in solving their most pressing challenges. We also considered TAAPCS’ internal and external impacts to the broader educational jurisdictions. The resulting snapshot of the Alberta Public Charter School system illustrated a complex mix of the most pressing issues and networks of relationships found within, across and beyond Alberta Public Charter Schools. In this article, we unpack two dominating misunderstandings or “myths” and offer evidence from our research to reconsider the nature of Canada’s only public charter school system.
Freedom and autonomy: Alberta Public Charter Schools have the freedom to: 1) provide a specific education focus, and 2) govern through their own administrative and teaching processes. However, when we looked at the entire charter school system network of self-identified influential superintendents, teachers, board leaders, community members and government leaders, we identified several severe constraints on freedom and autonomy of leadership across this school system. We found that system leader networks invest 37 percent of their energy in administration and 29 percent in facilities issues, while spending only 16 percent on planning, 16 percent on equity and 2 percent on instruction issues. While individual schools have freedom to “do what they want” with regards to diverse program emphases and innovation, nearly half (44 percent) of their efforts are disproportionately focused on administration and facility issues, because external student access and space pressures (waitlists) have become primary leadership issues (see Figure 2).
Government agents in charge of facilities form the few critical links between leaders among the schools, limiting the power of the overall leadership network to invest their considerable resources in other issues. As one leader said:
“We don’t have facilities; you can’t grow without facilities. We don’t really create a choice for families in Alberta to go to charter schools because there is no available space there to come into.”[7]
Alberta Public Charter School leaders face limited facility availability (space), so they invest a vast proportion of their time in infrastructure issues. Provincial government education regulations require each school to negotiate for additional space with nearby public boards before they can: 1) acquire old public system spaces or 2) build new spaces. TAAPCS leaders must also negotiate with provincial government infrastructure agents for building capital in an intensely competitive provincial population growth picture. As a system, TAAPCS demonstrates a relatively low level of freedom to organize its interests in the face of change.
Doing the things they want to do: Research by Goldstein, Hazy, and Lichenstein revealed that certain patterns of relations among school community members (teachers, leaders, parents, students, and government) increase the potential for one part of the system to positively impact all other parts so that a system can “do” what it wants. A lot of good relationships form flexible networks on the basis of shared common values, social supports and trust. When those features trump technical, power and even knowledge-based relationships, a school system becomes more adaptable.[8] By contrast, hierarchical, vertical power-based relationships shown in classic “org charts” are the most brittle forms of organization. Figure 3 demonstrates a majority of bureaucratic and technical relationships among charter school system leaders.
In our study, we analyzed all relational networks and discovered a diffuse, fragmented pattern of leader connections between charter schools and tighter, closed clusters of relations within each school. These clusters indicate a system leader network with dominantly hierarchical, bureaucratic relation types. These types of systems generally lack flexibility or “freedom to do what they want.”
For the Alberta Public Charter School system to “do what it wants,” it needs to connect more among schools, across schools and beyond charter schools, similar to the enduring, deep relationships currently developed between some charter schools and community and business members. Students, nearby school systems (boards), government agents outside the charter administrative group, national and international organizations, professional teacher associations (the ATA) and leader associations (College of Alberta School Superintendents) are generally missing from the current networks.
Currently, Alberta Public Charter School enrollment stands at less than one percent of the total school-aged population in Alberta. The public charter school concept has neither “taken off” as a disruptive innovation in Canada, nor has it threatened public schools more broadly.
Defining competition: Zimmer and Budin[9] defined competition in education as a dynamic in a closed market system where tensions exist among education providers because resources (students) can migrate among school institutions. Given that any school outside a catchment-based, policy-mandated attendance rule is potentially “in competition” with others, Myth #2 could be true on a surface level. To a certain extent, all public schools are in competition with each other.
Competing with the public system: For the Alberta Public Charter School system to make a competitive impact on the larger public education systems, the organization would require a long-term plan and concerted action to attract students from outside its system.[10] Our research revealed that TAAPCS leaders lack a collective connection to the world outside the TAAPCS, and we found no evidence that they are actively competing with other school systems. This could be because TAAPCS leaders are turning over quite quickly – while they are very experienced as a group, over 75 percent of them have practiced in the charter system for less than six years (See Figure 4). Long-term marketing/competition plans would be difficult to actualize across the system with high turnover. Furthermore, we found that less than 20 percent of the leadership network efforts were concentrated on system-level change or impacts. Further, 76 percent of the leaders identified the target of their “impact work” to be impacts within charter schools, and not impacts external to the charter schools.
Although Alberta Public Charter Schools are successful as a collection of diverse and innovative schools, they are not as free or agile as many think when pursuing what they want to do as a collective of schools.[11] These schools have evolved over two decades into something of a set of “secret gardens” with an inward focus. Schools have strong internal impact within the boundaries of their schools, but show less external impact across the province. Further, charter school stakeholders describe a difficulty in sharing their educational practices with other school jurisdictions, given some animosity, tension and misperceptions of TAAPCS. They remain fairly disconnected from other education systems or professional educational bodies.
With limited connectivity between and beyond each charter school, no overall strategic plan for marketing, high leader turnover rates, and leader-targeted change programs impacting only other charter schools, the Alberta Public Charter School system is not a major competitor with the public system. TAAPCS does, however, offer important experience, governance, community engagement, structural and pedagogical innovation examples that could improve provincial education system adaptability.
The impact of Alberta Public Charter Schools on the education system as a competitive force is far less than many believe. That said, with the development of more open policy environments and collaboration across education systems in Alberta, this alternative system may offer promise for increasing the capacity of all education organizations in a changing Alberta.
En Bref : L’environnement éducatif albertain change. Le seul système d’écoles publiques à charte du Canada compte maintenant près de 8 000 élèves inscrits et beaucoup d’autres sur des listes d’attente. Cet article présente une vue d’ensemble de la nature des écoles publiques à charte de l’Alberta et certains des constats d’une étude exhaustive du système réalisée par l’Association of Alberta Public Charter School (TAAPCS) pour dissiper deux « mythes » : 1) les écoles publiques à charte de l’Alberta sont plus libres de faire ce qu’elles veulent; 2) les écoles publiques à charte de l’Alberta concurrencent inéquitablement le système public. En raison des cadres de politiques, des malentendus concernant les écoles à charte et des liens limités entre la TAAPCS et le reste du réseau public, ses innovations demeurent une sorte de « jardin secret » enclavé, tourné vers l’intérieur. Ces écoles ont un fort impact interne dans leurs établissements mêmes, mais un faible impact externe dans la province.
Collage: Dave Donald
First published in Education Canada, June 2016
1 Alberta Education, Charter School Handbook (Edmonton: Alberta Education, 2011), pg. 1. https://archive.education.alberta.ca/media/434258/charter-schools-handbook-september-2015.pdf
2 For a full explanation of the role of the Association of Alberta Public Charter Schools, see www.taapcs.ca
3 Lynn Bosetti and Dianne Gereluk, Understanding School Choice in Canada (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2016).
4 Lynn Bosetti, “The Dark Promise of Charter Schools,” Policy Options 29, no. 6 (2014): 63-67.
5 For a complete list of the internal research projects that have been conducted in Alberta’s Public Charter Schools, please see: www.taapcs.ca
6 Dianne Gereluk, Eugene Kowch, and Merlin Thompson, The Impact, Capacity and Adaptability of the Alberta Public Charter School System (University of Calgary, 2014).
7 Arnold, cited in Gereluk, Kowch, and Thompson, 2014, p. 155.
8 J. Goldstein, J. Hazy and B. Lichtenstein, Complexity and the Nexus of Leadership: Leveraging nonlinear science to create ecologies of innovation (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010).
9 R. Zimmer and R. Budin, “Is Charter School Competition in California Improving the Performance of Traditional Public Schools?” Public Administration Review 69 (2009): 831-845.
10 T. M. Davis, “Charter School Competition, Organization and Achievement in Traditional Public Schools,” Education Policy Analysis Archives 21, no. 88 (2013). http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1279
11 M. Uhl-bein, R. Marion, and B. McElvey, “Complexity Leadership Theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era,” The Leadership Quarterly 18, no. 4 (2007): 298-318.
The physical design of a school communicates messages about the purpose and nature of education. In the past, schools were designed to support the delivery of rote, standardized instruction. Today, however, the goal is for students to become critical thinkers, problem solvers, and meaning makers. Effective school designs reflect this change in educational philosophies and goals. For example, they include flexible, learner-centred spaces that encourage active, cooperative, and community-based approaches to teaching and learning.
Research on school design increasingly shows that students’ learning environments can have both positive and negative effects on their social behaviours, engagement, well-being, and academic achievement. The following specific school design elements are correlated with positive student behaviours and attitudes, as well as enhanced achievement:
Effective school designs create safe, innovative learning environments that motivate students, support teaching and learning, and provide a centre for community activities. Experts agree that the most effective and innovative school designs emerge from a careful consideration of both educational goals and local needs. They also concur that effective school design is participatory and inclusive, involving a collaboration among architects, engineers, school administrators, teachers, learners, and the larger community.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION RESOURCES
Architectural Design Guidelines for Schools. (2012). http://www.infrastructure.alberta.ca/Content/docType486/Production/ArchitecturalGuidelines.pdf
Bransford, J.D., Brown, A.L., & Cocking, R.R. (1999). The design of learning environments. In J.D. Bransford, A.L. Brown, & R.R. Cocking (Eds.), How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school. National Academy of Sciences. http://cet.usc.edu/
Oblinger, D.G. (Ed.). (2006). Learning spaces. EDUCAUSE. http://www.educause.edu/research-and-publications/books/learning-spaces
The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (2010). Creating excellent primary schools: A guide for clients. http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110118095356/http:/www.cabe.org.uk/files/creating-excellent-primary-schools.pdf
REFERENCES
Brkovic, M., Pons Valladares, O., & Parnell, R. (2015). Where sustainable school meets the “third teacher”: Primary school case study from Barcelona, Spain. ArchNet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research, 9(2), 77-97.
Harrison, A., & Hutton, L. (2014). Design for the changing educational landscape: Space, place and the future of learning. London: Routledge.
Moore, G.T., & Lackney, J.A. (1993). School design: Crisis, educational performance, and design applications. Children’s Environments, 10(2), 99-112.
Tanner, C.K. (2009). Effects of school design on student outcomes. Journal of Educational Administration, 47(3), 381-399.
Taylor, A. (2009). Linking architecture and education: Sustainable design of learning environments. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Upitis, R. (2004). School architecture and complexity. Complicity: An International Journal of Complexity and Education, 1(1), 19-38.
Van Note Chism, N., & Bickford, D.J. (Eds.) (2002). The importance of physical space in creating supportive learning environments. New Directions for Teaching and Learning No. 92. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Woolner, P. (2010). The design of learning spaces. London: Continuum.
Woolner, P., Hall, E., Higgins, S., McCaughey, C., & Wall, K. (2007). A sound foundation? What we know about the impact of environments on learning and the implications for building schools of the future. Oxford Review of Education, 33(1), 47-70.
This video is part of a series. You can view the full case study here: http://cea-ace.ca/OCSBcasestudy
OCSB Tech Integration from CEA / ACE on Vimeo.
This video is part of a series. You can view the full case study here: http://cea-ace.ca/OCSBcasestudy
OCSB Professional Development from CEA / ACE on Vimeo.
This video is part of a series. You can view the full case study here: http://cea-ace.ca/OCSBcasestudy
OCSB Innovation at the Top from CEA / ACE on Vimeo.
This video is part of a series. You can view the full case study here: http://cea-ace.ca/OCSBcasestudy
OCSB Risk Taking from CEA / ACE on Vimeo.
A CEA Selection Jury chose the Ottawa Catholic School Board (OCSB) out of 35 School District applicants from across Canada to participate in the 2015 ‘Innovation that Sticks’ Case Study Program. From September to December 2015 – through an Appreciative Inquiry interview process – the CEA researched how the OCSB has transformed its classrooms into 21st century environments that meet the needs of all learners.
The OCSB currently serves approximately 40,000 students in 83 schools across the City of Ottawa; a staff of more than 2,400 teachers and administrators, and 1,500 support staff, guide quality Catholic education.
With the conversion of libraries to Learning Commons, increasing broadband, universal Wi-Fi availability and equitable Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) policies, the OCSB has created a digital learning ecosystem focusing on collaboration, creativity and critical thinking among all of its 83 schools.
The CEA Selection Jury of Canadian innovation leaders was most impressed with how the OCSB leads with a focus on learning and teacher support first, followed by the technology. This School Board has been implementing their innovative strategy over a number of years, incorporated all partners – including teacher unions and support staff – and built a budget in support of this collective vision, with ongoing parent and student voice that continue to inform these changes.
The OCSB’s comprehensive Blueprint for Change — Towards 2020, Connecting with our Students provides a laptop to every teacher and principal. This 1:1 technology investment is complemented by a major professional learning focus that represents an important cultural shift across the Board to enable teachers to shift their practice to differentiated instruction, which has resulted in increased student achievement. Restrictive policies were removed to allow teachers to model digital citizenship by actively participating in social media. Every student in the Board receives yearly instruction on digital citizenship, integrated into the curriculum.
The OCSB’s leadership is very proud of how their staff has embraced technology to support student learning. They use social media and a variety of apps to share effective practice professionally and are connecting learning to students’ real lives, ensuring relevance to their interests and needs.
The OCSB received a $10,000 contribution courtesy of initiative sponsors State Farm Canada to grow its promising programs and practice. Board representatives shared “lessons learned” with CEA researchers about the conditions and processes that led to the beginning of this expandable innovation throughout their classrooms and schools.
This case study report provides concrete guidance and information resources to support other School District leaders faced with the challenge of determining how they can get their own ‘innovations to stick’ and achieve their goals.
This blog post is part of our series on leadership and governance and part 2 of this post.
To paraphrase Geoffrey Moore[1], the greatest point of peril in technology adoption lies in transitioning from early adopters—dominated by a few visionary users—to mainstream users who are predominantly pragmatic: in between the two lies the chasm. In my first blog entry, When You Bring Tech to the Teacher, But You Can’t Make ‘Em Click , I offered the following six evidence-based ideas to increase technology adoption in school districts.
Now I’d like to share the strategies that could underpin the implementation of these ideas and foster technology adoption in your school district.
5. Personalize the learning
Technology adoption has costs – in dollars, human resources hours, cognitive load, stress, etc. Even some of the most promising educational technologies end up gathering dust in those places where good technology goes to die in your district. To be fiscally, as well as educationally responsible, our technology planning must include monetary, infrastructure and organizational factors. Yet in our planning processes, consideration of the factors influencing adoption by individuals is perhaps the most important and most overlooked factor. The Straub citation from my previous post bears repeating: “understanding and facilitating the process of acceptance may be more important than the adoption itself”.[8] I hope my contributions to this blog improve your success when fostering technology adoption. Let me know.
[1] Moore, G. (1991). Crossing the Chasm. New York: PerfectBound (Harper Collins).
[2] Bergeron, B. (2002). Achieving clinician buy-in to technology. Medscape. Retrieved from
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/446224
[3] Carrington, A. (2015). Padagogy wheel v 4.0. Retrieved from
[4] Puentedura, R. (2006). Part 1: A model for technology and transformation. Transformation, technology, and education. Retrieved from http://hippasus.com/resources/tte/
[5] Holliday, J., Audrey, S., Campbell, R., & Moore, L. (2015). Identifying well-connected opinion leaders for informal health promotion: The example of the ASSIST smoking prevention program. Health Communication.
[6] Starkey, F., Audrey, S., Holliday, J., Moore, L., & Campbell, R. (2009). Identifying influential young people to undertake effective peer-led health promotion: The example of A Stop Smoking in Schools Trial (ASSIST). Health Education Research, 24(6), 997-988.
[7] Evidence-Based Intervention Work Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (2005). Theories of change and adoption of innovations: The evolving evidence-based intervention and practice movement in school psychology. Psychology in the Schools, 42(5), 483.
[8] Straub, E. (2009). Understanding technology adoption: Theory and future directions for informal learning. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 645.
This blog post is part of our series on leadership and governance.
Much is made of the amounts of money sunk into technology in education – sometimes with few extensive innovations in teaching and learning. Alfie Kohn recently discussed the issue in his blog post, “The Overselling of Ed Tech”[1]. Technology in education can be a physical object, software, or both, but ultimately, what technology leaders desire is an uptake (adoption and diffusion) of technology that improves teaching and learning – and/or the various other processes (clerical, administrative, HR, etc.) that support education. When evaluating the success of technology in education, it cannot be measured solely by the extent to which it transforms personal or institutional pedagogies or practices.
As Puentedura illustrated in his SAMR (Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, & Redefinition) technology adoption model, technology uptake spans a continuum from enhancing existing educational practices to transforming them.[2] In some cases, even a lack of adoption and diffusion may be acceptable when technology doesn’t suit the individual or the context.[3] Like students, educators (and by extension their organizations) can be at different developmental stages in regard to pedagogies, methodologies and technologies. Expecting technology to rapidly transform pedagogy, practices and the institution belies the cognitive load inherent in learning new concepts and/or in new methods through unfamiliar technologies as well as the conservative nature of the institution. Educators experience cognitive load like other learners – and perhaps schools do too.
The topic of individual behavioural change – which includes technology adoption as a subset – has been the focus of much research, most frequently related to public health initiatives. Most technology adoption literature focusses on the organization and factors external to individuals (e.g. funding, release time, policies, access). While important, these factors are often considered in isolation from more individualized aspects.
Below are six key intrapersonal and interpersonal aspects to consider when fostering technology adoption. They are taken from the literature of individual behavioural change across a variety of fields. (Some specific strategy ideas will be provided in a follow-up blog post, You Can’t Leap a Technology Chasm in Two Jumps.) The importance of these considerations will vary according to the individuals and their contexts.
Willingness to adopt new[4] technology can be affected by factors including: upbringing, experience, age, personal values, self-efficacy, confidence, reliance on routines, as well as interest in novelty & new stimuli.
ROI is a business term for “return on investment”. TPROI is my term relating to the balance between a) an individual’s investments of time, effort, etc. in learning/using a new technology; and b) if/how the technology improves the individual’s situation. TPROI encompasses more granular terms like perceived usefulness & perceived ease of use, as well as the practical reliability of a technology (e.g. limited glitches or time-outs).[5] The greater a TPROI, the more likely a person is to think about adopting a new technology and begin using it. Positive experiences can boost self-efficacy, and increased self-efficacy can increase the values individuals place on TPROI for subsequent technologies to adopt.
Some practices define or fortify a core identity – for individuals, professionals and organizations. The more a technology is perceived to substantially change a core identity practice the more adoption resistance there will be.[6]
Elements of choice, flexibility, & volunteerism can support technology adoption. Straub suggests even when “it is difficult if not impossible to make technology adoption a free choice…building in flexibility for teachers to have the perception of a choice may improve adoption facilitation”.[7]
Bergeron[8] found among clinicians, individuals “have very little in common with each other, in terms of their daily work routines, need for information and time pressure”, they each adapt differently to a new technology and “within each specialty, there are technology adoption patterns that become apparent as a function of individual differences”. Parks, Bansal, & Zilberman[9] tell us that a technology fits differently across disparate groups due to “differences in socio-cultural, economic, geographic, and environmental factors”. They go on to say that techniques like modelling and demonstrations can increase “adoption efficiency by providing a better match between individuals and the technology”—even when such strategies appear to decrease demands for a technology. An observed decline in interest after a demonstration could indicate reduced waste (e.g. not blanketing a school with technology that ends up unused) and get technology into the hands of people who will use it.
When adoption spreads from one individual to another, you have diffusion. While innovators & early adopters readily latch on to new technology, and can provide visible (e.g. public relations level) examples for a school or district, these groups don’t necessarily share their learning with the larger population. One study found that only about one in four innovators/early adopters shared their learning with the larger group.[10] Unlike innovators and early adopters, the ‘early majority” of the wider population “aren’t interested in the nuances of the underlying technology but in what it can do to solve their problem[s]”.[11] Educational practitioners may rely more on contextually based practices, personal experience and communication with colleagues than research papers when considering new technology.[12] Moore referred to the gap between innovators/early adopters and the early majority as a chasm and states it can be difficult to bridge.[13] Social influence relates to how others can influence individuals’ opinions, behaviours, and attitudes. In the case of a new technology, leveraging social influence is thought to be a significant strategy to bridge the chasm, though “the late majority and laggards may accept innovative [technology]… only though the pressures of conformity”.[14]
A major consideration seemingly absent from the technology adoption literature is the role (if any) played by educators’ considerations of their students: “The teacher is not only an adopter of the innovation but also must act as a change agent for his or her students”. Straub compares our current relationship with continually emerging technologies to that of Sisyphus and the rock he perpetually rolls uphill, concluding, “understanding and facilitating the process of acceptance may be more important than the adoption itself”.[15] I’m inclined to agree.
[1] Kohn, A. (2016). The overselling of ed-tech. Retrieved from http://www.alfiekohn.org/blogs/ed-tech/
[2] Puentedura, R. (2006). Part 1: A model for technology and transformation. Transformation, technology, and education. Retrieved from http://hippasus.com/resources/tte/
[3] Straub, E. (2009). Understanding technology adoption: Theory and future directions for informal learning. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 625-649.
[4] “new technology” refers to technology new to the user; it could be emerging technology new to society or education in general, or technology new to an individual’s practice.
[5] Davis, F. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceive ease of use, and user acceptance of technology. MIS Quarterly, 13, 319-340.
[6] Jaffe, D. (1998). Institutionalized resistance to asynchronous learning networks. Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks, 2(2), 21-32.
[7] Straub, E. (2009). Understanding technology adoption: Theory and future directions for informal learning. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 645.
[8] Bergeron, B. (2002). Achieving clinician buy-in to technology. Medscape. Retrieved from
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/446224
[9] Parks, M. Bansal, S., & Zilberman, D. (2015). Technology adoption under fit risk: What should development project donors and managers know? Procedia Engineering, 107, 3-10.
[10] Morrison, P., Roberts, J., & von Hipple, E. (2000). Determinants of user innovation and innovation sharing in a local market. Management Science, 46(12), 1513-1527.
[11] Bergeron, B. (2002). Achieving clinician buy-in to technology. Medscape. Retrieved from
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/446224
[12] Evidence-Based Intervention Work Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. (2005). Theories of change and adoption of innovations: The evolving evidence-based intervention and practice movement in school psychology. Psychology in the Schools, 42(5), 475-494.
[13] Moore, G. (1991). Crossing the Chasm. New York: PerfectBound (Harper Collins).
[14] Lin, M. & Hong, C. (2011). Opportunities for crossing the chasm between early adopters and the early majority through new uses of innovative products. The Review of Socionetwork Strategies, 5, 27-42.
[15] Straub, E. (2009). Understanding technology adoption: Theory and future directions for informal learning. Review of Educational Research, 79(2), 645.
Historically, the function of school leadership rested solely in the office of the school principal. This may have been by necessity rather than design, as this was where all the information and resources needed to lead the school resided. Student records, timetables, calendars, district forms, school improvement plans, even the ability to communicate with parents and community members was mediated by the principal’s office. Since many of the resources needed to affect the functioning of the school were only available to those with access to the principal’s office, it made sense that the responsibility for the implementation of school leadership remained there.
With the advent of web-based technologies, many of the key resources needed to support school leaders are now available online and can be accessed at any time, from any location and by any member of the school staff. Moreover, with the plethora of tech resources that are now available, individual educators can connect, collaborate and share with their colleagues throughout their school, district and beyond, which has increased the degree to which teachers can influence the practice and actions of classrooms other than their own. It is therefore important to examine the impact of technology on school leadership. Just as web-based technologies have served to disrupt and change the music and media industries, technology has already begun to disrupt the traditional notion of school leadership and will play a significant role in redefining it in the future. This disruption will cause the education community to reconsider not just how school leadership is enacted, but also the role teacher-leaders play in supporting the success of the school.
Tech-enabled teacher leaders capitalize on the collaborative and participatory nature of web-based technologies such as social media and video conferencing to engage in actions that intentionally influence the knowledge and practice of others. The Ontario Leadership Framework1 defines leadership “as the exercise of influence on organizational members and diverse stakeholders toward the identification and achievement of the organization’s vision and goals.” While this is a very broad definition of school leadership, the research of Ken Leithwood and colleagues acknowledged that there are but a few essential leadership functions that directly affect student learning and the success of a school. They are as follows:
Because these activities are vital to school success, it is paramount for school leaders to find ways to embed them into the life of the school. Encouraging teachers to play active leadership roles will help ensure these essential functions spread beyond the principal and are amply filled.
What follows is a look at how teachers are using technology to engage in leadership activities in each of these four areas.
While there is no denying that the principal fulfils the primary role of setting the directions of a school and conveying this vision to staff, students and stakeholders, teacher-leaders also play an important role. The principal and school improvement plan may state the goals for the school, but the fulfilment of these goals would not be possible without the contributions of the classroom teachers.
Classroom blogs are a tool used by tech-enabled teacher leaders to highlight what takes place in the classroom and to demonstrate how their actions are supporting the school vision. Over the course of the year, these blogs become an open and ongoing record of how their high expectations for the students translate into high quality work from their students. This sharing of student work examples demonstrates to all stakeholders what the school’s visions and goals mean in practice.
Including images and reminders like the one on the Room 308 in Action classroom blog2 (see Figure 1), provides a daily reminder to all stakeholders of what the school’s visions and goals mean with regard to student conduct and the importance of an inclusive and supportive classroom culture.
Toronto teacher Zélia Capitão-Tavares created this classroom blog (see Figure 2), to showcase student learning and provide a window for students and parents to observe what takes place in the classroom. She says that as a result, “students are able to share what they are doing at school with more confidence.” She also notes, “Parents and family members who do not have regular access to the student also appreciate the online window to peek into the learning world of the student, who is always presented as a positive contributing member in the class environment and within their own learning.” Thus, in addition to building productive relationships with families, the Room 308 blog provides a vivid example of what the school’s vision regarding student-centred learning means in practice.
In our rapidly changing world, it is of vital importance that school leadership supports the ongoing professional growth of educators. Teacher-librarian Alanna King, from Orangeville, Ontario, has been using Google Hangouts as a means to build relationships and stimulate growth in the professional capacities of her fellow educators. Each week she hosts an online book club, where educators can gather to deepen their knowledge and understanding of pertinent issues related to education. Hosting the session online enables educators to build professional relationships with a diverse group and to benefit from this professional development (PD) opportunity regardless of their location.
Another way to stimulate professional growth is to lead discussions about the relative merits of current and alternative practices. While a school principal may formally engage in this leadership activity during a staff meeting or PD day, these types of sessions may be too infrequent to support the ongoing professional growth many teachers desire. In an attempt to fill this leadership gap, many tech-enabled teachers have turned to Twitter as a source of weekly professional development sessions that provide them with an opportunity to discuss promising practices.
The weekly Canadian Ed Chat3 ( Figure 3) provides educators from across the country with an opportunity to connect and discuss relevant educational issues. The tech-enabled teachers who organize and moderate these sessions post a calendar of discussion topics in advance of the weekly gathering to ensure that participants are prepared to contribute to the conversation. Each session begins with the initiating question that was posted on the calendar. Once the session begins, teachers are asked to post their responses to the initial question and to subsequent questions that are raised. What then takes place is a dynamic conversation that examines the relative merits of current and alternative practices while also building a professional learning community where teachers can reach out to seek advice and assistance for specific classroom challenges.
Because these tech-based activities are organized by teachers for teachers, they are, perhaps, more likely than district-initiated PD sessions to address the issues most on teachers’ minds.
Building productive relationships with families and communities relies on having the opportunity for people to interact with each other. In the past, this was solely dependent on face-to-face contact. In today’s busy world, it can be very difficult to find time to interact directly with all of the people with whom we have relationships. Fortunately, in the Web 2.0 world, educational leaders no longer have to rely exclusively on in-person interactions to build relationships. While it is best for the initial interaction to be in person, technology makes it significantly easier to maintain the ongoing contact that is necessary for a positive relationship to develop. Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google+ and Google Hangouts are all tools used by tech-enabled teacher-leaders to enhance their relationships with students, parents, community members and colleagues.
Ongoing communication is essential for schools to be able to build productive relationships with families. For the past six years, Hamilton, Ont., elementary teacher Aviva Dunsiger has been using Twitter to create a direct line of communication between parents and the classroom (see Figure 4). Each day Aviva’s classroom Twitter feed is filled with pictures of student work, classroom activities and posts created by students.
These types of Tweets provide parents and school community members with a window into the life of her classroom. Using Twitter in this manner also contributes to the development of trusting relationships among teachers, students, and parents, which can have a significant impact on school climate and student learning.4
Developing the organization to support desired practices also involves finding ways to connect the school to its wider environment. Kathy Cassidy’s Grade 1 classroom blog5 (Figure 5) invites the world into their classroom. This Moose Jaw, Sask., teacher successfully achieves this goal by showcasing student participation in a global read-along, posting pictures of their contribution to the community food bank, and including a link to the blog of the B.C. classroom they frequently collaborate and learn with.
While the principal may be the formal instructional leader, it is important to acknowledge that there are many leaders within the school who provide instructional support. A day in the life of a principal is one filled with administrative imperatives, agenda juggling and organizational emergencies. Unfortunately, this can make it quite difficult to find the time to provide the support that educators require to improve the instructional program. Once again, tech-enabled teacher leaders have stepped in to address this leadership function in a manner that suits the busy schedules of classroom teachers. Using technology to facilitate the distribution of instructional leadership helps to ensure that this essential leadership function occurs frequently and throughout the building.
Blogging can be considered an asynchronous leadership opportunity to provide instructional support while also stimulating professional growth. Teacher leaders often begin blogging to support their own professional reflection, but in making these reflections public, they create an open forum for their colleagues to learn from their experience and gain insight into effective instructional practices.
Saskatchewan secondary teacher Shelley Wright’s blog[6] (Figure 6) is a testament to professional reflection and life-long learning. The topics she blogs about reflect her commitment to using technology to create student-centred, inquiry-focused learning environments. This serves to provide instructional support for other teachers while also modelling her school’s values and practices. The comments posted to her blog, expressing appreciation for her insight and instructional support, reveal the impact Wright has had on other educators. For example, one teacher wrote:
I can’t tell you how much this article inspires me and how perfectly it articulates what I am trying to do with a new HS Social Justice course I’m teaching. I would love to take you up on your offer to help others create an inquiry classroom…
Shelley is not alone. When one considers that there are thousands of tech-enabled teachers who are actively blogging to support professional growth and reflection, it can be quite difficult to keep up with what is happening. Luckily, teacher-leaders like Doug Peterson (from Essex, Ontario) have come forward to provide assistance in monitoring these tech-enabled leaders. Peterson’s blog includes a weekly review and synopsis7 of interesting and highly relevant blog posts from educators in Ontario (Figure 7). With over 16,000 subscribers to his blog feed, Peterson is clearly a leader in the Canadian educational blogosphere. These numbers demonstrate the potential of technology to influence the practice and professional growth of a significantly greater number of educators than is possible through more traditional PD methods.
These examples are merely the tip of the “technology iceberg.” It should now be apparent that even without a formal leadership title, tech-enabled teachers are redistributing educational leadership and the role teachers play in supporting the success of their schools and their profession.
En bref: Tout comme la technologie transforme actuellement les pratiques en classe, son utilisation a commencé à bouleverser les notions conventionnelles de leadership en éducation, ce qui amènera le milieu de l’éducation à réévaluer tant la manière dont le leadership scolaire se manifeste que le rôle joué par les enseignants qui sont des leaders. Grâce à la pléthore de ressources technologiques maintenant disponibles, des éducateurs individuels peuvent se connecter, collaborer et partager avec d’autres éducateurs dans leur école, leur conseil scolaire et ailleurs. L’auteure de cet article examine comment des enseignants technologiquement outillés du pays emploient différentes ressources technologiques pour redistribuer le leadership en éducation et rehausser le rôle que jouent les enseignants pour favoriser le succès de leurs écoles et de leur profession.
Original photo: courtesy Ms. Cassidy’s Classroom Blog
First published in Education Canada, March 2016
1 Institute for Education Leadership, The Ontario Leadership Framework (Toronto: Queen’s Printer for Ontario, 2012). http://immix.ca/
2 Room 308 in Action: http://308inaction2015.blogspot.ca/2015/10/poetry-ss-use-line-2-create-stunning.html
3 www.cdnedchat.ca/home
4 K. A. Leithwood, The Ontario Leadership Framework 2012: Research foundations (The Institute for Education Leadership, 2012).http://immix.ca/
5 Ms. Cassidy’s Classroom Blog: http://mscassidysclass.edublogs.org
6 Wright’s Room: https://shelleywright.wordpress.com
7 Doug – Off the Record: https://dougpete.wordpress.com
In our modern education system we have come to pride ourselves on an ability to build into our environments sophisticated processes and protocols designed to mitigate risk of all types. We see it in the types of activities that are permitted in schools and those that are not. We see it in the way that teaching has developed into a system that values best practices over teacher intuition and ingenuity, pre-identified learning outcomes over serendipitous delight, and a prediliction for data sets and indicators over the look of joy and surprise (or the lack of joy and surprise) in the eyes of our students.
In a sense we have developed a sense that, for education to work, we need to take the guesswork out of the project and take risk out of the equation.
It is against this backdrop of safety and risk management or, better, the complete avoidance of risk, that Gert Biesta introduces the compelling thesis of his recently re-released Beautiful Risk of Education. For Biesta, the core dynamic of the education enterprise is, to be blunt, always (and necessarily) risky:
The risk is not that teachers might fail because they are not sufficently qualified. The risk is not that education might fail because it is not sufficiently based on scientfici evidence. The risk is not that studetsn ight fail because they are not working hard enough or lacking motivation…The risk is there because education is not an interaction between robots but an encoutner between human beings. The risk is there because students are not to be seen as objects to be molded and disciplined, but as subjects of action and responsiblity. —Gert Biesta, The Beautiful Risk of Education
Biesta insists—and this is something that will resonate with those with any degree of proximity classroom life—that the central energy of education exists in that relationship between teacher and student. But it is not a relationship based on a simple “input-output” logic but, instead, on a dialogue between two living, breathing entities. Success in education is not about making the learning process more efficient, more predictable, more reliable—more risk-free. This would be to take the human element out of the equation. In fact, in Biesta’s mind, “there is a real chance that we take out education altogether”.
Instead, the real dynamic of education is grounded in an approach to relationship that would, in my opinion, be considered strange, in not foreign, in today’s risk-free classroom. It requires an attitude of patience, resilience and vulnerability that is not only “not demanded” in today’s education climate, but is actually discouraged.
But Biesta challenges us to think of this as the type of risk that we must take if we are serious about education. It’s risky business because, in many ways, it forces us to empty ourselves of the things that we are used to bringing to the table: tools for management and control, practical knowledge, exquisite approaches to planning, well-established sets of success criteria and a keen eye for efficiency and results.
In doing so we come to the stark, sobering realization that we have nothing but ourselves to offer.
And for many of us, the real risk will be that we may not think that’s enough. But, isn’t that what makes it so beautiful?
Dr. Stuart Shanker is best known as Canada’s leading expert on the science of self-regulation. Dr. Shanker is a Distinguished Research Professor of Psychology and Philosophy at York University and CEO of The MEHRIT Centre, an educational network that focuses on translating current knowledge about self-regulation into practice. He is the author of Calm, Alert, and Learning: Classroom strategies for self-regulation and Self-Reg: How to help your child (and you) break the stress cycle and successfully engage with life. His 2010 Education Canada article, “Self-Regulation: Calm, alert and learning,” remains one of the most widely read articles on the CEA website.
John Hoffman met with Dr. Shanker during a week-long Self-Regulation Symposium at Trent University last year to discuss how his understanding of self-regulation has evolved and to explore his vision for self-regulation-based practice in schools.
At that time I was still training under Stanley Greenspan, and his whole approach was about a child’s emotional functioning. So I saw emotional regulation – which essentially means learning how to regulate your strong negative emotions and enhance your strong positive emotions – as the key to self-regulation. When I talked about things like hyperarousal, I saw that mainly in emotional terms. Now I see the root of self-regulation more in physiological terms.
I had been familiar for quite some time with Steve Porges’ Polyvagal Theory, which provides a lot of insight into what we call the biological (or physiological) domain of self-regulation. As I developed a deeper understanding of Steve’s ideas, I began to see that there were deeper physiological mechanisms involved in emotional regulation. Now I have a much stronger conviction that we really have to understand what is happening in the biological domain of self-regulation, because that drives what is happening in the other domains: emotional, cognitive, social and prosocial.
I also came to see how all five domains in the Self-Reg model can get bound up in a stress cycle, resulting in a sort of “multiplier effect.” So invariably when we do Self-Reg we have to look at several domains, and not just work on the most glaring issue.
We don’t believe there is one single right way to do Self-Reg. We want to see Self-Reg evolve in ways that we can’t possibly predict or try to control.
The way you define self-regulation has changed. Before it was about managing one’s state of arousal – the ability to stay calmly focused and alert in learning situations. Now you define self-regulation as the ability to manage stress: to be able to deal with a stressor and then recover. Why the emphasis on stress?
I used to talk to people about hyper- and hypoarousal, which I still think is very important. But I found that model wasn’t very effective because teachers and parents weren’t familiar with the terms. So instead of having a truly experiential understanding, it seemed like they were often just memorizing the terms. They knew the definition of self-regulation was to recognize when you are hyper- or hypoaroused and get back to calm – but in some ways these were just words. But when I talked about self-regulation in terms of the energy it takes to deal with stress, I could see that it had a more intuitive meaning for people. So now I’m trying to help people understand the effect stress has on our functioning in all of these five domains. The key idea is that dealing with stress burns energy and therefore reduces the amount of energy children have available to help them concentrate, take in information, handle social interaction, control their behaviour and emotions, experience empathy, and, ultimately, to learn.
It is important for teachers to approach their job with the conviction that if a child is having trouble learning, then there is some stress going on, and that is changeable. So a key part of a teacher’s job becomes tuning into what is stressing the child – not only major or “toxic” stress, but also everyday stressors and hidden sensory, social and cognitive stressors – and reducing the stress so the child can get into “learning brain.”
I’ve done a lot of thinking about what the hidden stressors might be for children in the different domains. Here’s an example. For children, pattern recognition is a hugely important factor in reducing the stress of engaging with their world. Some children have trouble seeing different kinds of patterns, often because of a deficit in one of the sensory modalities. This is particularly important in the cognitive domain, because the roots of cognition are the ability to take in and process information from the senses and to recognize patterns. When the child doesn’t see the patterns, he doesn’t know what to expect. School becomes very stressful for a child who has problems in these areas. The learning brain shuts down to avoid the stress. Poor pattern recognition is often at the root of inattention. So if we can help children improve their pattern recognition, we can do amazing things for their higher cognitive skills.
Our experience is that teachers who have developed a certain level of understanding about biological self-regulation are often fairly quick to learn ways to adjust the classroom environment to reduce subtle stressors. This includes strategies like noise reduction (carpets on the floor, tennis balls on the feet of chairs etc.), reducing visual clutter (less artwork, posters and student work on classroom walls, use of curtains to hide items stored on shelves) and creating micro-environments – alternative spaces for children such as standing desks or tents designated as a quiet place where students can go to withdraw. This often makes a noticeable difference fairly quickly.
Teachers are also finding ways to build activities that support self-regulation into classroom routines. One of the most important ones is physical activity, which increases the heart rate, decreases tension in the body and supports optimal brain function.
Another thing we hear a lot from teachers is that when they learn to make the shift from seeing children’s behaviour as willful non-compliance to looking for the stressors behind the child’s behaviour, it’s like having a weight lifted from their shoulders. There are various reasons why this might be the case, but I suspect a reduction in the teachers’ stress is part of it. If you can improve children’s behaviour by lowering their stress levels, that reduces the energy you have burn battling to get kids to comply.
The biggest thing is the way interest is building. When we come into a district we might start out working with 25 or 30 teachers. Then we’ll go back the next year to work with the same group and go deeper. But we often have to change the venue because so many more people want to attend. That happens to us everywhere. For me this is the most important aspect. We did nothing to solicit work or advertise it, until we launched the MEHRIT Centre (TMC) website last year. Before that it was entirely word of mouth.
I have really agonized about this. The obvious model was to develop a program and then persuade provincial ministries to adopt it. And we had profound interest from ministries across the country. But I began to feel that this was the wrong model.
First of all, a program is too compartmentalized. It’s just an add-on to what you’re already doing. What we’re trying to accomplish is more of a paradigm revolution. We want to fundamentally change the way people think about children’s development, behaviour and learning, to spark a new set of questions about the impact of stress on children.
The other thing I don’t like about the program model is that in a program model you tell people exactly what to do and how to do it. We’re looking for something broader and more interdisciplinary than that. We have developed a method for understanding and enhancing self-regulation that we call “Self-Reg,” but we don’t believe there is one single right way to do Self-Reg. We want to see Self-Reg evolve in ways that we can’t possibly predict or try to control. So teachers are going to have a huge influence on how Self-Reg practice unfolds, but so will parents and elders and so on. And I’m seeing it happening. Now that we have more people involved contributing ideas and experiences, one of the things that excites me is that I’m starting to lose track of how much of this is me and how much is what I’m absorbing from other people.
The MEHRIT Centre should not play the role of oracle. We want to be more a sort of voice or medium, where we try to synthesize and share what we’re learning from a number of sources.
I haven’t, but I know it’s out there. It comes from people who think what kids need is discipline and what schools need is zero tolerance policies. My answer to them is, “How’s that working for you?”
The MEHRIT Centre (TMC) website (www.self-reg.ca) has lots information and learning resources about self-regulation and the Shanker Self-Reg Method, including:
TMC’s annual Self-Reg Summer Symposium is held at Trent University, Peterborough, Ont., where TMC is based.
Dr. Shanker’s new book (June 2016), Self-Reg: How to help your child (and you) break the stress cycle and successfully engage with life, reflects his current thinking on self-regulation.
En bref: Stuart Shanker est le plus grand expert canadien en science d’autorégulation et le chef de la direction de The MEHRIT Centre, un réseau éducatif mettant l’accent sur la conversion en pratiques des connaissances actuelles en matière d’autorégulation. John Hoffman s’est entretenu l’an dernier avec le professeur Shanker lors d’un symposium d’une semaine sur l’autorégulation à l’Université Trent, discutant de l’évolution de sa compréhension de l’autorégulation et explorant sa vision des pratiques fondées sur l’autorégulation à l’école.
L’interview du professeur Shanker aborde sa nouvelle compréhension du fondement biologique de l’autorégulation, le travail réalisé pour découvrir les « stresseurs cachés » susceptibles d’affecter la capacité d’apprentissage d’un enfant, ainsi que sa vision d’un grand changement interdisciplinaire du paradigme de notre conception du développement, du comportement et de l’apprentissage des enfants.
Photo: courtesy Stuart Shanker
First published in Education Canada, March 2016