The pandemic changed a lot about our lives. For better or worse, we spent more time with our families, we picked up new hobbies and caught up on television and movies. We also spent a lot more time talking about an often overlooked or unspoken subject: our mental health. Let’s carry that forward – it’s a positive change.
Mental health encompasses a range of experiences from mental illness to mental wellness. Mental illness is an abnormal and typically continual negative state driven by issues in the brain. Wellness, on the other hand, is the condition in which you have resiliency skills, an ability to manage how you feel, and experiences of both positive and negative feelings on a regular basis.
I have been surrounded by educators for much of my life. My mother is a teacher. I hold a Master’s in Education and my principal’s certificates, and I started my career in the public education system. I led a national education charity and had the privilege of working with educators and education leaders daily. The environment is familiar to me – however, I acknowledge much has changed.
Our work at Mental Health Research Canada is to understand how Canadians are experiencing the vast range of mental health. We have completed multiple studies on mental health indicators and we have dug into our national data to explore various population and employee groups, such as educators.
What do we know from our research? Before the pandemic, K–12 educators’ self-reported day-to-day mental health indicators looked average compared to other sectors, including the level of diagnosis of some of the most common mental illnesses – anxiety and depression. Self-rated levels of anxiety were slightly below average and depression indicators were well below average. This is not particularly surprising, since despite the challenges the job may present, it seems reasonable to assume most people who select teaching as a profession would be aware of the nature of the work and only choose this profession if they feel they are suited to it and able to overcome these challenges on a regular basis. Also, teachers came into the pandemic with an additional layer of mental health protection – they are, on the whole, engaged in and proud of their work.
However, the pandemic was very difficult for K–12 educators. This profession showed the second-highest increase in levels of average anxiety – after nurses – with scores peaking in August each year and as new variants emerged. At some points, one in three teachers were self-reporting high levels of anxiety. Given all that we went through, this is likely not surprising to anyone. Our data showed it was especially hard for educators with dual roles as a caregiver or parent; they were supporting their family members while also managing new roles as virtual teachers. In places where teachers went back to in-person school, they also had increased concerns about catching and spreading COVID-19 to family members.
This situation often manifested as burnout. In the depths of the pandemic, 38 percent of educators self-reported burnout. This was slightly above the average of 35 percent for employed Canadians. We had expected higher burnout rates, but as this typically correlates with longer-term anxiety or depression indicators, it is possible that the protective factors and relative strengths going into the pandemic helped keep this lower than the incredibly high burnout rates seen among nurses and mental-health care workers.
In the post-pandemic recovery period, our most recent study on workplace mental health indicators showed some interesting new data. During the pandemic and in the recovery phase, health-care workers reported some of the highest rates of burnout. While we now see some improvement on levels of burnout among the health-care sector, we have not seen the same in the education sector. The two sectors are now experiencing the same levels of burnout. We were curious about what was happening in these high-burnout sectors, so we began conducting interviews with educators. These respondents were recruited from our large data collection and had self-reported some degree of mental distress during the pandemic or more recently.
As one would expect, we received a number of explanations, but they broadly fit into a few categories. During the pandemic, stress was driven by:
Once school returned to in-person learning, stress was driven by:
Improving these indicators is a collective responsibility. Parents and students have a role to play in understanding that teachers are usually doing the best they can with the resources they have. Leadership in schools, school boards, and unions can implement stronger policies to support mental health. Governments can better fund the system to address the academic and social gaps that arose for students during the pandemic, without losing sight of the need for additional mental health supports for staff. As well, educators have a responsibility to increase their understanding of mental health, including when and how to get help.
The basic tenets of workplace mental health generally are the following four pillars:
We have the great fortune to collect a huge national sample of data from employed Canadians as part of the Guarding Minds evaluation. This evaluation monitors 13 multi-faceted factors that create and support psychologically safe workplaces. The factors are Balance, Civility and Respect, Clear Leadership and Expectations, Engagement, Growth and Development, Involvement and Influence, Organizational Culture, Protection of Physical Safety, Psychological and Social Support, Psychological Competencies and Demands, Psychological Protection, Recognition and Reward, and Workload Management. In self-reporting, educators score below average on all these factors, with the exception of Engagement and Psychological Protection. There are many areas that deserve attention.
On the positive, educators score well (average) on Engagement because they often contribute extra time voluntarily and feel like they belong to a community. They score well in Psychological Protection because they are part of and invested in that community, and they have comparatively low rates of workplace discrimination, bullying, and harassment.
However, there are enormous challenges that educators are facing. Educators scored significantly below the average (10 percent below) in Balance, Clear Leadership and Expectations, Involvement and Influence, Organizational Culture, Protection of Physical Safety, Psychological and Social Support, and Recognition and Reward.
Reviewing and summarizing the biggest gaps between the average employed Canadian and educators reveals:
The inherent challenge, of course, is that change and cultural shifts are difficult to achieve in big institutional systems. Many of these struggles seem baked into the structure of public education in Canada – governments, school boards, and collective bargaining.
But we can make progress.
Strive for individual balance. This can be the archenemy of high engagement. Teachers care deeply about students and don’t want to let them down. This often results in conflicting priorities with personal time. I would encourage educators to define their personal boundaries of time, as difficult as that is, to support better life balance and strive for discipline to adhere to the boundaries they set for themselves. This is not easy to do. But educators have to take responsibility for setting their own personal limits. There is a necessary tension between commitment and life balance.
While recognition and achievement can be challenging in a structured pay environment, multiple studies have shown that many people are highly motivated beyond financial incentives. School environments can be set up to celebrate achievements. We do it well with students. Can students share impact stories of how a teacher affected their life? Can we better celebrate progress in working with students who were struggling? Can unions celebrate and promote great teaching and the significant contribution of educators to society? Can system leaders recognize school-wide improvements on key broad initiatives? This is the responsibility of the principal of each school, and superintendents overseeing families of schools. Sometimes, it is as simple as saying thank you and appreciating someone you know is working very hard, doing their best, and bringing their best self to work every day.
Really, the above examples apply to most workplaces. If we can come to work, do our best, support and appreciate each other, set our work-life balance priorities without apology or guilt, stamp out stigma and show empathy for one another without judgment, our work environments would all be better places.
Read more about the work of Mental Health Research Canada, including reports and data on the mental health of Canadians, on our website at www.mhrc.ca.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2023
Image caption: Cover detail from the 2010 ACDE Accord on Indigenous Education, which is now being renewed.
On behalf of the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE)
AS A COLONIAL NATION, Canada is founded on the theft of Indigenous lands through settler invasion, which must be understood as a structure rather than an historical event. What this means is that colonialism is not a thing of the past; it continues to shape economic, political, and social structures through its intent to displace and disempower Indigenous peoples. Tuck and Yang (2012) argue that at its core, colonialism and its need to ensure “settler futurity” is about control over the land. Education has been an instrument of colonialism, therefore complicit in the dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands, languages, and livelihoods. As part of the “civilizing” and assimilating agendas of Canadian society, schooling was designed to harm Indigenous people, particularly through the erasure of Indigenous ways of knowing and by disrupting family and community systems. The imperative for Canadians to understand and recognize this foundational context of colonialism has been part of educational directives for some time. This includes the 1996 Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which called for inclusion of Aboriginal perspective, traditions, and worldviews in the school curriculum and programs to address stereotypes and anti-Indigenous racism as educational priorities for improving educational outcomes for Indigenous learners and setting directions for Indigenous-settler relations in this country.
In 2010, under the leadership of Indigenous scholars Jo-ann Archibald and Lorna Williams, and Education Deans Cecilia Reynolds and John Lundy, the Association of Canadian Deans of Education (ACDE) launched the Accord on Indigenous Education. This marked the end of a three-year process of pan-Canadian consultation, engagement, and feedback at a time of limited understanding of the realities of settler colonialism in the consciousness of most Canadians. The Accord aimed to address this through a series of objectives meant to inform and transform both teacher education and K–12 classrooms. The Accord states that “the processes of colonization have either outlawed or suppressed Indigenous knowledge systems, especially language and culture, and have contributed significantly to the low levels of educational attainment and high rates of social issues such as suicide, incarceration, unemployment, and family or community separation” among Indigenous peoples in Canada (p. 2).
The key principles of the Accord include supporting a more socially just society for Indigenous peoples; respectful, collaborative, and consultative processes with Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge holders; promoting partnerships among educational and Indigenous communities; and valuing the diversity of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing and learning. These principles guide the Accord and its overarching vision that “Indigenous identities, cultures, languages, values, ways of knowing, and knowledge systems will flourish in all Canadian learning settings” (p.4). To achieve this vision, the Accord lays out a series of goals, including respectful and welcoming learning environments, curriculum inclusive of Indigenous knowledge systems, culturally responsive pedagogies and assessment practices, mechanisms for promoting and valuing Indigeneity in education, affirmation and revitalization of Indigenous languages, Indigenous education leadership, and culturally respectful Indigenous leadership.
Many deans of education have looked to the Accord to advance changes in teacher education, including the creation of mandatory Indigenous education classes in some programs and the intentional weaving of Indigenous knowledges, content, and perspectives into education courses in other BEd programs. The Accord has been used to advocate for revisions to provincial curricula across the country, especially when the curriculum was silent or only superficially inclusive of the historical and contemporary voices and experiences of Indigenous peoples. The influence of the Accord can also be traced to the creation of First Nations education frameworks in several provinces, the creation of teacher competencies or professional standards, efforts by school divisions to improve the experiences of Indigenous learners in classrooms and school communities, and the implementation of policies at local and provincial levels that aim to improve the experiences of Indigenous learners. In Alberta, the Teacher Quality Standards outline a requirement for teachers to have foundational knowledge of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, and in British Columbia, the First People’s Principles of Learning build on the aims of the Accord by centring Indigenous knowledge in education. In addition to policies, principles, and standards for education, the Accord has been cited numerous times by academics whose work challenges settler colonialism, influencing the growing body of research and scholarship in Indigenous and anti-colonial education.
In the years since the Accord was launched, many more efforts to recognize the truth of Canada’s history and improve Indigenous-settler relations have unfolded. One of the most significant is the work of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the resulting 94 Calls to Actions. Reconciliation as a framework for education has inspired Faculties of Education to create reconciliation advisories, hire Indigenous faculty, develop strategic plans, revise and enhance Indigenous offerings in curriculum, and provide professional development for staff and faculty to deepen their understanding of colonialism and Indigenous perspectives and knowledges. As it takes hold in educational spaces, we can all appreciate the way reconciliation facilitates decolonization, equity, and more recently, Indigenization. However, reconciliation has also been subject to critique, especially in light of the growing anti-Indigenous racism, illegal incursion on Indigenous lands, denial of Indigenous rights, and the heightened inequities within Indigenous communities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic (Styres & Kempf, 2022).
Further orienting Faculties of Education to Indigenous education priorities has been the emergence of the Idle No More movement, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Girls and Women (MMIGW), and the Federal Government of Canada’s commitment to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). For example, in B.C., UNDRIP became legislation through the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act and an Action Plan that specifies Indigenous peoples’ rights to self-determination as a core element of Indigenous-settler relations, including Indigenous people’s right to education in their languages and cultures. Given these emerging policy directives and social and political movements, the time was right to renew the Accord on Indigenous Education. This was precisely the request made to ACDE by the executive members of the Canadian Association for Studies in Indigenous Education in 2019.
The process of renewal that is underway draws inspiration from Cree Elder and scholar-educator, Dr. Verna Kirkness’s (2013) leadership approach that asks us to consider the following questions: Where have we been, where are going, how do we get there, and how do we know when we are there? Pan-consultation and feedback sessions are being held by deans of education from across Canada over the coming year, who will “listen and lift” the voices and perspectives from early learning, K–12, teacher education, and communities. The process of consultation and the work of the deans emphasize responsibilities and actions that help learners understand their entanglements in settler-colonialism, draw from the diverse and rich Indigenous knowledge traditions in their lives, and advance Indigenous rights and priorities through anti-racist, decolonial, and sovereign approaches. A revised Accord on Indigenous Education will seek to align its goals with the rights acknowledged in UNDRIP, the TRC Calls to Action, and the MMIGW Calls for Justice. Given all that has unfolded since the Accord was first launched, there is an imperative to move from a language rooted in the politics of respect to the politics of rights, creating new opportunities for educators to deepen and expand their understanding and their practice in ways that actively confront the colonial relations of Canada, moving us into an Indigenous-settler future in ethically relational ways (Donald, 2009).
Association of Canadian Deans of Education. (2010). Accord on Indigenous education. https://csse-scee.ca/acde/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2017/08/Accord-on-Indigenous-Education.pdf
Donald, D. (2009). Forts, curriculum, and Indigenous métissage: Imagining decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian relations in educational contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 1–24.
Kirkness, V. (2013). Creating space: My life and work in Indigenous education. University of Manitoba Press.
Styres, S. D, & Kempf, A. (2022). Troubling Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian education: Critical perspectives. University of Alberta Press.
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: Summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education& Society, 1(1), 1–40.
UN General Assembly, United Nations declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples: Resolution adopted by the General Assembly, 2 October 2007, A/RES/61/295. https://www.refworld.org/docid/471355a82.html
Caption for banner image at top:
Cover detail from the 2010 ACDE Accord on Indigenous Education, which is now being renewed.
First published in Education Canada, September 2023
Dr. Gabor Maté (2022) argues that within the medical world, treating individual health symptoms, without considering wider systems within which individuals exist, ignores multiple factors that contribute to sickness:
“What if we saw illness as an imbalance in the entire organization, not just as a manifestation of molecules, cells or organs invaded or denatured by pathology. What if we applied the findings of western research and medical science in a systems framework, seeking all the connections that contribute to illness and health?”
Historically, addressing individual symptoms has been the dominant approach in western medicine. The same focus on individuals rather than systems has also pervaded approaches to workplace wellbeing in Canadian schools. A plethora of incentives, from gym membership to yoga classes, suggests that K–12 staff wellbeing can be addressed by encouraging individuals to access such programs to counter stresses in work and life.
This article rejects a dominant focus on individual remedies and argues for systemic approaches to address workplace wellbeing. While individual responsibility has its place, a primary focus on it is misplaced. Teachers, principals, or school bus drivers should bear some responsibility for their own wellbeing, and for positively contributing to their professional workplace, but should not bear responsibility for fixing school systems that may be making them sick.
So how to create systemic approaches to wellbeing?
To its credit, the British Columbia government, through its Ministry of Education’s Mental Health in Schools Strategy (2020) has encouraged a focus on workplace wellbeing:
“Research confirms stress experienced by school administrators can negatively impact school staff. Teacher stress has been directly linked to increased student stress levels, spilling over from the teacher to the student and impacting social adjustment and student performance.”
Funds from the Ministry of Education to address mental health can be utilized for a focus on adults in K-12 school systems.
Addressing two issues would greatly improve the role of provincial governments (including B.C.) in supporting systemic workplace wellbeing:
Teacher and other unions tend to be reactive organizations. But addressing workplace wellbeing requires stakeholders to collaboratively consider data and act together to find solutions. When working with districts as EdCan Advisors,3 we have utilized the Guarding Minds at Work survey,4 conducted interviews with a range of staff, and accessed demographic, sick leave, and other data. These combined data sources, as well as reports we generate, can be used in management-union collaborations to jointly develop action plans.
A new form of proactive, collaborative social entrepreneurship might be considered, where ideas to improve wellbeing emerge from all stakeholders, and where consensus should be developed on proposed solutions. Both union and management can build trust by co-creating solutions and by working together to support wellbeing.
Being a compassionate leader is a fine idea, but being a collaborative one is better. Hierarchical school systems are reflected in job titles like Superintendent, CEO, and Executive Team. Many progressive leaders within these roles utilize collaborative approaches and encourage innovation within their organizations. But others do not, and autocratic leadership, especially in school principals, has been found in our work to have negative impacts on teacher and support staff wellbeing, while more collaborative and less autocratic principals have improved wellbeing in their schools.
Leaders can support systemic approaches by:
Everyone who works as an employee in a K–12 Canadian school district is part of a system. Yet how often does one hear “the system” discussed as though those working in it are not part of it? If I work in a system, I need to take some responsibility to make it better. But if my workload is excessive, my stress is high, and some of my professional connections and relationships are problematic, giving me one more job is not going to help.
So, what to do? The answer is simple – reduce workload and stress. But how to do it is not. We as EdCan Advisors have found two useful starting points:
As these progress, longer-term systemic approaches can be the focus of dialogue and planning, perhaps to address issues of racism or discrimination, or shifting school and district culture into more positive spaces.
One way to address racism in schools is to hire greater numbers of Indigenous and racialized teachers and other staff. A Rideau Foundation effort to boost Indigenous teachers was reported by McKenna (2023), and stated that in Winnipeg, 16.9 percent of students identified as Indigenous but only 8.6 percent of teachers were Indigenous. This lower ratio of Indigenous staff compared to districts’ Indigenous student populations is repeated in many Canadian school districts.
Systemic approaches to combatting racism and discrimination require more Indigenous teachers and racialized staff in schools. This is a more complex issue than recruitment, as some Indigenous people have stated they are reluctant to participate in what they still consider a predominantly colonial system. Indigenous staff report hearing racist and discriminatory comments from students, staff, or parents, comments which impact their wellbeing. Indigenous support staff have told me of bullying and harassment at work linked, in their view, to being Indigenous, female, and of low status in school districts.
At the same time, many non-Indigenous teachers are making significant efforts toward respectful access to both Indigenous knowledge and people. Others are apprehensive about cultural appropriation or fear to offend.
Just as decolonization is a work-in-progress, so will addressing wellbeing with anti-racism efforts take time and careful dialogue before significant changes are seen. McKenna also offers some thoughts on the complexity of the issue, identifying historical, cultural and current contextual issues, including “ongoing trauma connected to education that stems from residential schools, as well as colonial curriculums and a general lack of cultural safety in public education.”
While a significant dialogue with Indigenous and racialized people is needed, steps can be made while the bigger picture is explored. In one B.C. school district, Indigenous staff have stated that they do not trust either management or union processes to deal with racism, discrimination, or harassment. They prefer more restorative processes to address racist attitudes and actions. Evidence from districts that have utilized restorative approaches suggests such processes improve wellbeing for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff.
A similar focus to that on Indigenous and racialized staff might be placed on LGBTQ2+ staff in schools, perhaps with a focus on wellbeing for LGBTQ2+ staff in rural areas, where U.K. research (Lee, 2019) has outlined high levels of depression and anxiety among LGBTQ2+ teachers.
The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health reports: “More than 75% of suicides involve men, but women attempt suicide 3 to 4 times more often than men” (CAMH, 2023).
The Canadian Women’s Foundation (Senior & Peoples, 2021) states:
“Women experience depression and anxiety twice as often as men. Women in heterosexual pairings have long taken the position of ‘designated worrier.’ They tend to bear the brunt of the anxiety about family health and wellbeing. Of course, the data shows how worry work comes at the expense of a mother’s own health and wellbeing.”
Women comprise around 75 percent of many school district workforces. Yet there is a surprising lack of focus on women’s wellbeing and mental health in many school systems. Systemic change in a workforce largely populated by women requires a focus on women. Work-life balance can be difficult for women who often still have the primary care responsibilities within families, and even more so for those in the “sandwich generation” who are supporting both children and aging parents.
Teacher demographics in many school districts currently show more younger teachers, as retirements surge. New patterns are emerging with this changing demographic. One I have heard recently in B.C. school districts is that many younger teachers arrive shortly before the morning bell and are gone shortly after schools close in the afternoon, a pattern differing from some more experienced and older teachers, who often chat and collaborate after students leave. Teachers with young families have many demands at home that may limit the “after-hours” time they can spend at school. But younger staff in K–12 schools may also be protecting their own work-life balance by putting limits and boundaries on their work.
How to address the wellbeing of women staff in schools?
Look at the data. Are women taking leaves, accessing EFAP or short/long term rehabilitation programs proportionately more than males, and if so, in which roles? But if supporting collaborative approaches with systemic support resonates with districts, it is also crucial to start conversations with women staff at every status level about their wellbeing.
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PROVINCIAL GOVERNMENTs should be more active in supporting systemic approaches to wellbeing. Adopting some or all of the six factors explored in this article to a school district’s context might create strong foundations. Initiating short-term action would build momentum and ease districts into addressing tougher issues over the longer term. Systemic action is possible with the right leadership, staffing, and funding, a focus on data, and effective collaboration, facilitation, and implementation to build workplace wellbeing.
It’s not easy and there’s no exact recipe, but systemic improvements can be made. Let’s do what we can and share what we learn.
B.C. Ministry of Education. (2020). Mental health in schools strategy. Government of British Columbia.
www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/erase/documents/mental-health-wellness/mhis-strategy.pdf
Capobianco, A. (2023, May 24). Halifax education workers’ strike continues. Globe and Mail.
www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-halifax-education-workers-strike-continues/
Lee, C. (2019). How do lesbian, gay and bisexual teachers experience UK rural school communities? Social Sciences, 8(9), 249.
www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/9/249#:~:text=Results%20showed%20that%20LGB%20teachers,%2Dworth%2C%20depression%20and%20anxiety
Maté, G., with Maté, D. (2022). The myth of normal: Trauma, illness and healing in a toxic culture. Knopf Canada.
McKenna, C. (2023, March 28). Finding the Knowledge Keepers: The Indigenous teacher shortage. The Walrus.
https://thewalrus.ca/finding-the-knowledge-keepers-the-indigenous-teacher-shortage/
Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. (2023). Mental illness and addiction: Facts and statistics.
www.camh.ca/en/driving-change/the-crisis-is-real/mental-health-statistics
Naylor, C. (2020). The Powell River Learning Group: Improving professional relationships.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nSs5ZGmqQkYWCxqio42JehlV473kqm_l/view
Senior, P., & Peoples, A. (2021, June 7). The abysmal state of mothers’ mental health. (2021, June 7). Canadian Women’s Foundation.
https://canadianwomen.org/blog/the-abysmal-state-of-mothers-mental-health
Wang, F. (2022, October). Psychological safety of school administrators: Invisible barriers to speaking out. University of British Columbia.
https://edst-educ.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2022/10/Psychological-Safety-of-School-Administrators-v7-Final.pdf
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2023
Although statistics vary across provinces, Canadian schools in general were closed for a total of 51 weeks during the pandemic – placing the nation in the highest bracket globally for school closures (UNESCO, n.d.). Unsurprisingly, provincial policymakers across Canada continue to be concerned about the negative short- and long-term impacts of the disruptions created by these closures on students’ learning and have been focusing their attention on improving achievement in traditional content areas such as reading, writing, mathematics, and science. The dominant political and popular media discourse is that students have fallen behind and need to “catch up” in these foundational subject areas. Certainly, international research suggests that this concern is well-founded, and that students’ learning has been significantly disrupted during the pandemic.
Learning loss within and outside of Canada
International research is beginning to document the learning losses students experienced due to school closures, shifts toward online and hybrid learning, and other impacts associated with successive waves of the pandemic. Although these studies are relatively sparse, a limited number of Western nations such as the Netherlands (Engzell et al., 2021), Germany (Depping et al., 2021), Belgium (Maldonato & De Witte, 2021), and the U.S. (Bailey et al., 2021) suggest learning essentially stalled during the pandemic. These studies also suggest that the pandemic may have exacerbated existing inequalities, with lower socio-economic status (SES) students falling even further behind their more affluent peers. Collectively, the emergent literature suggests that learning and the academic resilience of students globally have been particularly threatened during the pandemic (Volante & Klinger, 2022a).
Unfortunately, Canadian large-scale assessment research, which is used to draw reliable and comparative measures of student achievement and system-level judgments, has been particularly constrained during the pandemic. Indeed, the administration of international, national, and provincial assessments have all been adversely impacted, with numerous cancellations during the initial waves of the pandemic. Further, those assessment programs that did occur met with high levels of non-participation, impacting sampling designs. These challenges have made it difficult to make provincial comparisons of student achievement. Those studies that do exist are confined to select geographical contexts such as Toronto (Toronto District School Board, 2021), or offer predicted losses extrapolated from summer learning research (Aurini & Davies, 2021). Collectively, the available research in Canada has been unable to quantify, with any level of certainty, the pandemic’s impact on students’ achievement.
Nevertheless, Canadian education systems, including higher education settings, are reporting important gaps in student learning, suggesting that learning losses have occurred for students in K–12 and beyond. International organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2020) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (2022) have also reported that lower SES students and their families have been unable to secure the necessary resources needed to succeed in online and hybrid learning environments amidst the turmoil created by the pandemic. These challenges are also well documented in popular media stories across Canada and reflected in the policy interventions adopted by various provincial governments to try to support our most vulnerable student groups. Nonetheless, the relative success of these efforts and interventions has not been measured.
Policy trends across Canada
One of our recent studies provided a pan-Canadian analysis of educational policy developments from January 2020 to December 2021 that were specifically related to academic resilience in the wake of the initial waves of the pandemic. Not surprisingly, our findings suggested greater attention was devoted to academic issues – namely learning outcomes in cognitive domains – with relatively fewer policies and resources to support mental health and general physical wellness (Volante et al., 2022c). Our analysis also suggested that there was also a general lack of policy differentiation in terms of how specific resources and supports were to be directed within provincial educational jurisdictions to help support at-risk students. Without such differentiation, we have argued that the resources developed will not be fully realized, and will undoubtedly fail to stem the growing disparities between low- and high-SES student populations that have been amplified by the pandemic.
Collectively, our policy research also underscores the importance of reconsidering how provincial education systems operate to achieve positive outcomes for students and how these outcomes might be “measured” and evaluated. Although a great deal of work is already underway by provincial testing bodies, large-scale assessment measures currently do not offer a multifaceted picture of student development. Conversely, international achievement measures such as those administered by the OECD and/or the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), provide background questionnaires that attempt to capture student-, school-, and system-level factors that may be related to student outcomes. As an example, these international measures increasingly include factors and outcomes that could be classified as non-cognitive skills, drawing attention to the importance of non-cognitive and mental/physical wellness outcomes.
Challenging the dominant discourse
One would be hard-pressed to find any educational stakeholder group that does not recognize the importance of student achievement in traditional subject areas such as reading, writing, mathematics, and science. Nevertheless, the pandemic has highlighted how achievement in traditional cognitive domains offers a necessary, but incomplete picture of the pressing challenges that face Canadian youth. As Volante, Klinger, and Barrett (2021) noted in a previous Education Canada article, Canadian children reported disturbing trends in relation to mental health and general wellness. Similarly, the promotion of non-cognitive skills such as growth mindset represents an increasingly important cadre of key attributes that contribute to resilient students, schools, and education systems in general (Volante & Klinger, 2022b).
Thus, provincial policymakers are faced with an important dilemma. Namely, to develop a comprehensive vision of student learning and wellbeing that emphasizes cognitive (i.e. reading, writing, mathematics, science achievement), non-cognitive (i.e. learning habits, self-beliefs, growth mindset), and general wellness in the face of dominant historical and political ideologies that have focused almost exclusively on standards-based education reform. Indeed, standards-based reform and achievement of the “three R’s” (reading, writing, arithmetic), has largely driven large-scale reform agendas in much of the Western world for more than half a century (Volante et al., 2022d). In spite of the concerns and evidence that have arisen with respect to the impact of the pandemic, every provincial jurisdiction in Canada continues to adhere to a standards-based reform model that emphasizes a hierarchy of subject areas and achievement outcomes. The importance of other critical factors and outcomes may be acknowledged, but receives little if any formal attention, and there is little effort to build on the information being collected by international assessments that now include such measures.
Rethinking large-scale reform
It is often written that adversity is a catalyst for growth and change. Certainly, the last several years have likely presented the most formidable adversity that many students, families, and teachers may face in their lifetimes. Rather than return to status quo approaches that emphasize a narrow set of achievement outcomes, this critical epoch in our collective history offers an opportunity to rethink our approaches to large-scale education reform to provide a more nuanced recognition of the skills and attributes required to face the challenges of the future. Certainly, any student, parent, or teacher will tell you that more than academic content was lost during the pandemic – capturing and addressing the multifaceted complexity of this “loss” requires a new conception of what quality education looks like in a post-COVID world. Failing to recognize the latter could undoubtedly result in students catching up in academic content, only to fall behind in the non-cognitive skills they require for further success. It is time for us to look for ways to link provincial, national, and international assessments and surveys in order to obtain the data needed to examine the complexity of learning that supports the whole child.
This research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
Aurini, J., & Davies, S. (2020). COVID-19 school closures and educational achievement gaps in Canada: Lessons from Ontario summer learning research. Canadian Review of Sociology, 58(2), 165–185. doi.org/10.1111/cars.12334
Bailey, D. H., Duncan, G. J., Murnane, R. J., & Yeung, N. A. (2021). Achievement gaps in the wake of COVID-19. Educational Researcher, 50(5), 266–275. doi.org/10.3102%2F0013189X211011237
Depping, D., Lücken, M. et al. (2021). KompetenzständeHamburger Schülerinnen vor und während der Corona-Pandemie [Alternative pupils’ competence measurement in Hamburg during the Corona pandemic]. DDS – Die Deutsche Schule, Beiheft, 17, 51–79. www.pedocs.de/volltexte/2021/21514/pdf/DDS_Beiheft_17_2021_Depping_et_al_Kompetenzstaende_Hamburger.pdf
Engzell, P., Frey, A., & Verhagen, M. D. (2021). Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(17), 1-7.www.pnas.org/content/pnas/118/17/e2022376118.full.pdf
Maldonato, J. E., & De Witte, C. (2021). The effect of school closures on standardised student test outcomes. British Educational Research Journal. doi.org/10.1002/berj.3754
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (2020). The impact of COVID-19 on student equity and inclusion: supporting vulnerable students during school closures and school re-openings. OECD Publishing. https://oecd.org/education/strength-through-diversity/OECD%20COVID-19%20Brief%20Vulnerable%20Students.pdf
UNESCO. (n.d.). Dashboards on the Global Monitoring of School Closures Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic. https://covid19.uis.unesco.org/global-monitoring-school-closures-covid19
Volante, L., & Klinger, D. A. (2022a). PISA, global reference societies, and policy borrowing: The promises and pitfalls of academic resilience. Policy Futures in Education. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14782103211069002
Volante, L., & Klinger, D. A. (2022b, January 27–28). Assessing non-cognitive skills to promote equity and academic resilience [Paper presentation]. Advancing Assessment and Evaluation Virtual Conference. https://aaec2022.netlify.app/_main.pdf
Volante, L., Klinger, D. A., & Barrett, J. (2021). Academic resilience in a post-COVID world: a multi-level approach to capacity building. Education Canada, 61(3), 32–34.
Volante, L., Lara, C., Klinger, D. A., & Siegel, M. (2022c). Academic resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic: a triarchic analysis of education policy developments across Canada. Canadian Journal of Education, 45(4), 1112–1140.
Volante, L., Schnepf, S., & Klinger, D. A. (Eds.) (2022d). Cross-national achievement surveys for monitoring educational outcomes: Policies, practices, and political reforms within the European Union. Publications Office of the European Union. https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2760/406165
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, April 2023
It is now increasingly clear that the school closures that began in the spring of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic have had and continue to have a significant impact on school environments and everyone within them. UNESCO (2022) estimates that more than 1.5 billion young people have been affected by the COVID-19-related education crisis. This crisis has apparently further weakened education systems that were already vulnerable, due in part to such factors as staff shortages, the unsatisfactory quality of teaching and learning, or inequalities related to gender, ethnic origin, language, socio-economic status or disabilities (UNICEF, 2015). Although the effects of this crisis are beginning to be understood, more research and field data are needed to better understand them and to better guide reconstruction efforts (Donnelly and Patrinos, 2022).
Our study
The overall goal of our study, conducted by the UNESCO Chair in Curriculum Development (UCCD) in partnership with the Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec (MEQ), was to improve our understanding of the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on school environments in Quebec. Specifically, the project aimed to describe the impact of COVID-19 on: 1) school organization and facilities; 2) students; and 3) teachers. In this article, we will focus on teachers’ perceptions of the negative effects that COVID-19 has had on their students.
Where does our data come from?
Conducted in two phases with elementary and secondary teachers from three school service centres (SSCs), our mixed-method study sought to measure changes in the effects of COVID-19 on various dimensions. Nearly 500 teachers responded to an online survey in the fall of 2020, and nearly 350 did so in the spring of 2021. Among these respondents, there were also volunteers who took part in semi-structured interviews in the spring of 2021 to further explore some of the issues addressed in the questionnaires.
The questionnaires asked teachers to rate the situation at their school, first for the beginning of the school year (for fall data collection) and then for the second half of the school year (for spring data collection). At both times, teachers quantitatively assessed, among other things, the extent to which COVID-19 had negatively impacted their students, specifically their learning, autonomy, collaboration, problem-solving skills, attentiveness, and organizational capability.
The quantitative results thus obtained were supported by qualitative data. For the fall of 2020, this support came from the responses to an open-ended question in the online survey, where teachers were asked to name the three most significant areas in which COVID-19 had negatively affected their students. For the spring of 2021, the qualitative data consisted of the points raised by teachers participating in the interviews.
Key negative effects of COVID-19 on students according to teachers
In general, we noted that elementary school teachers perceived greater effects on subject-specific competencies (French, mathematics, science, etc.), while secondary school teachers perceived greater negative effects on academic competencies (skills related to the role of student: attention, organization, problem-solving, etc.). When asked in an open-ended question to name the aspects most impacted by COVID-19, respondents mentioned most often the social aspect for the elementary school level, followed by attentiveness and reading, whereas for the secondary school level, motivation, participation, attentiveness, and the social aspect were mentioned most frequently.
Elementary schools
In the fall, the three learning areas most affected by COVID-19 in elementary schools were student achievement in grammar, writing, physical education, and health (Figure 1). Based on teachers’ perceptions, it would appear that the gap between the strongest students and those students who had some prior difficulties widened between school closures and the resumption in the fall of 2020. In connection with the effects on students’ grammar and writing levels, teachers pointed out, in response to the open question of the questionnaire, that these difficulties were particularly significant for a number of allophone students who had potentially missed opportunities to develop their French skills during the lockdown. As for the problems experienced by very young children in physical education and health, some difficulties related to fine motor skills were observed.
In the spring, the top three learning areas most affected by COVID-19 according to elementary teachers were students’ attentiveness, problem-solving ability, and grammar levels (Figure 2). With respect to students’ attentiveness, teachers mentioned that students seemed to have difficulties with their role as students, including the ability to pay attention both in the classroom and remotely, and the ability to solve academic and socioemotional problems. Concerning grammar difficulties, as in the responses to the fall questionnaire, elementary teachers mentioned in the spring interviews that difficulties in French were particularly significant for allophone students.
Secondary schools
In the fall, secondary school teachers reported negative effects primarily on their students’ attentiveness, organization, and problem-solving ability (Figure 3). It is interesting to note that the effects on learning in the subject area taught by the respondents were relatively small (it was only the seventh most named learning area). In terms of attentiveness and organization, the responses to the open-ended question in the questionnaire indicated that these difficulties were experienced primarily in distance learning, since intervening was more difficult online than in the classroom, but they also occurred at school. There were more distractions online, and this made keeping students’ attention a challenge for teachers. In the classroom, the irregular school organization (schedules, classroom bubbles, travel, school materials, digital learning platforms and tools, etc.) that resulted from compliance with the health measures in force proved difficult to follow for a number of students. In terms of problem-solving, teachers noted that this was a major difficulty for students in mathematics.
In the spring, the top two negative effects of COVID-19 on students perceived by teachers still concerned their attentiveness and organization skills, followed by their autonomy and their level in the discipline being taught (Figure 4). Like their elementary school colleagues, secondary school teachers noted in the interviews that they had observed a greater effect of COVID-19 on students who were already struggling pre-pandemic, as well as large differences in adjustment between the strongest and struggling students upon returning to school. Secondary school teachers mentioned in the interviews that many students had little support at home, and that hybrid1 instruction would most likely further widen the gap between strong students, who would succeed in any case, and students more at risk of failure, for whom the risk would increase. It was also noted that student achievement in the subject being taught rose to the rank of fourth highest key negative effect of COVID-19. We can assume that students and teachers alike eventually felt the impact of the various delays that occurred both during the school closure and throughout the school year when the subject content had to be scaled back “to the essentials.”2
Before concluding, we need to mention that, like any study, this one has its limitations. First, as with the vast majority of studies on the effects of COVID-19 in both the educational and other fields, it is impossible to establish a pre-pandemic picture of the study population. It is therefore difficult to determine what is specifically the impact of COVID-19 and what is the result of prior situations or influences. Second, although our sample included several hundred students and teachers, it represented only a small proportion of the study population. Furthermore, the questionnaire respondents and interview volunteers may have been those teachers who had the most to say about the situation or who had experienced more difficulty than others in this particular school year.
Rebuilding schools and keeping the focus on students
Although the negative effects of COVID-19 on students as perceived by teachers are relatively significant, it was noted in both the questionnaires and the interviews that 100 percent of participating teachers emphasized the high resilience of students during the 2020-2021 school year. Many also mentioned that the student support measures (Conseil supérieur de l’éducation, 2021) had been very helpful. In addition, and interestingly, the students felt that the impact of COVID-19 on their learning was rather weak, whereas, as we have shown, the teachers had the perception that these effects were quite significant. This raises the question: did students underestimate the effects of COVID-19 or did teachers overestimate them? The reality probably lies somewhere in between. Regarding the teachers’ perceptions, it should be noted that the usual stresses associated with the teaching profession (Eblie Trudel et al., 2021), in addition to those associated with the pandemic, the health measures, and disruptions in school organization during the 2020-2021 year may have influenced their representation of the effects of COVID-19 on their students.
Since we do not know the long-term effects of COVID-19 on students, it is important to continue research on Quebec schools in order to support and equip them as they rebuild. Moreover, it is essential that teachers and other school staff working with students be adequately trained to support and assist these students in the short, medium and long terms, for example, in the areas of bereavement, stress and trauma counselling, school-family collaboration, and counselling for students with various difficulties (Müller & Goldenberg, 2020).
This project was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and the Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec, under the Partnership Engage: COVID-19 Special Initiative program.
Acknowledgements
This article was written by Marion Deslandes Martineau, Patrick Charland, Yannick Skelling-Desmeules, Olivier Arvisais, and Marie-Hélène Bruyère. The authors would like to thank the partners of the Ministère de l’Éducation and the school service centres involved, as well as their colleagues, co-researchers and collaborators in the study: Jonathan Bluteau, Isabelle Plante, Isabelle Gauvin, Stéphane Cyr, Tegwen Gadais, Éric Dion, Joanna Trees Merckx, and Jay S. Kaufman.
Conseil supérieur de l’éducation. (2021). Returning to normal? Overcoming vulnerabilities in an education system responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Le Conseil. www.cse.gouv.qc.ca/en/rebe20-21-covid
Donnelly, R., and Patrinos, H. A. (2022). Learning loss during Covid-19: An early systematic review. PROSPECTS, 51(4), 601609. doi.org/10.1007/s11125-021-09582-6
Eblie Trudel, L., Sokal, L., and Babb, J. (2021). Teachers’ voices: Pandemic lessons for the future of education. Journal of Teaching and Learning, 15(1), 4–19. doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v15i1.6486
Müller, L.-M., and Goldenberg, G. (2020, July 5). Education in times of crisis: The potential implications of school closures for teachers and students. Chartered College of Teaching. https://my.chartered.college/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/CCTReport070520_FINAL.pdf?fbclid=IwAR0t62tROapzSQv28ofnIVc3AhE44UuFTP19dg6_V0-o7y8NqAFkEawAWZ8
UNESCO. (2022). Education: from school closure to recovery. UNESCO. www.unesco.org/en/covid-19/education-response
UNICEF. (2015, January 19). The investment case for education and equity. UNICEF, Education Section.
https://unicef.org/reports/investment-case-education-and-equity
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, April 2023
1 Hybrid teaching consists of teaching that is sometimes done remotely and sometimes in the classroom. For much of the 2020-2021 school year, this was the schedule that was imposed on students in the upper secondary level (i.e., students aged 14-17).
2 Lists of essential knowledge to focus on in each discipline have been made available by the Ministère de l’Éducation, to the detriment of other concepts normally included in the curriculum.
COVID-19 and the measures put in place to limit its spread have affected the quantity and quality of teaching and services offered by schools. These measures include the complete closure of Canadian schools as of mid-March 2020, emergency distance learning and support, the creation of classroom bubbles, and the temporary closure of classes to control outbreaks. According to the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation du Québec (2021), school disruptions could lead to an impoverishment of the knowledge and skills acquired by children, particularly among the most vulnerable. From an economic perspective, learning delays among elementary and secondary school children in Canada could result in losses amounting to nearly $2,500 billion in GDP over 80 years (Hanushek & Woessmann, 2020).
A growing body of data regarding the effects of academic disruptions on learning became available during the years 2021-2023. A pre-recorded systematic review on the topic indicates that outcomes vary according to the social and school context in which the disruptions occurred, and how they were managed. According to this meta-analysis of 42 studies in 15 countries, a substantial overall learning deficit (Cohen’s d = -0.14, 95% confidence interval -0.17 to -0.10) emerged early in the pandemic and persisted over time. Learning deficits are particularly significant among children from underprivileged socioeconomic backgrounds. These deficits are also higher in mathematics than in reading, and in middle-income countries than in high-income countries.
Although the effects of COVID-19 on learning are of concern to the Canadian government, there appears to be little national data available. In Quebec, the Observatory for Children’s Health and Education (OPES), in collaboration with the Ministère de l’Éducation, collected data to measure the reading skills of Quebec children completing Grade 4 of elementary school in 2021. Between March 2020 and May 2022, these children experienced 15 months of school disruptions caused by the health measures that were implemented to counter the spread of COVID-19.
The goal was to compare the learning level of children in 2021 to that of Grade 4 children in 2019 (who had not been exposed to the pandemic). We tested the possibility that learning gaps between cohorts can vary by child gender, reading-risk status and socioeconomic background, and by the number of days classes were closed.
Methodology
In April 2021, all French-language and public school service centres (n=60) in the province were invited to participate in a study to understand the impact of school closures on reading performance in Grade 4. School participation was voluntary.
The analyses included 10,317 students in 2021 and 13,669 students in 2019 from the same schools, for a total of 23,986 students.
Learning was measured using the compulsory French test (language of instruction). This was the same test that was administered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, i.e., the June 2019 test.
The Grade 4 reading assessment featured two tasks: the literary text task and the ordinary text task. Only one of the two tests was administered in this study: the ordinary text test. This is a 2.5-hour test in which students read an ordinary 1,000-word text and respond to 12 questions with short answers. The tests were corrected centrally, with each copy being corrected twice by employees of the Direction de la sanction des études (DSE) of the Ministère de l’Éducation du Québec.
The child’s gender and the school’s Socio-Economic Environment Index11 (IMSE) were used as independent variables.The number of class closure days during the 2020-2021 school year (fewer than 15 days closed or more than 15 days) was used in the analyses.
Calculation of learning gaps
To estimate learning gaps between 2019 and 2021, we used a linear model that included school fixed effects. The model is as follows:
Yiet=ɑ +β Cohortt2021 + γBoyi + θe + εiet
where Yiet is the score of student i in school e in year t. The term Cohortt2021 is an indicator variable equal to one in 2021 and zero in 2019. School fixed effects are collected by θe. The student’s gender is controlled via Boyi and εiet is the error term. Standard deviations were calculated to account for the strongest correlation in outcomes among children in the same school (cluster analysis). Thus, the coefficient β captures the effects of school disruptions under certain assumptions. The possibility of interactions between IMSE, performance and gender was investigated.
Our results
There was an average 8.4 percentage point decline in reading between June 2019 and June 2021. The size of this gap varied according to the children’s test performance: it was high for the bottom decile of performance (20 pp); medium for the middle deciles (10 pp at the 4th decile); and zero for the top 2 deciles of performance. Boys had slightly more pronounced losses than girls.
School staff and promotion of equal opportunities
We compared reading skills as measured through a ministry test (n=10,880, 9-10-year-old students) with children in the same schools (n=13,669) that had administered the same test in 2019. Results indicated an 8.4% difference in student reading scores between 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2021 (after 15 months of exposure to the pandemic). Thus, while the average score was 77.7% in 2019, it was 69.3% in 2021. The size of this standard deviation varied depending on how well the children performed on the test. It was high for the bottom decile of performance (20 pp2); medium for the middle deciles (10 pp at the 4th decile); and zero for the top two performance deciles. These results suggest that children who were already strong in reading, i.e., those with scores in the top 20%, had not experienced learning losses 15 months after the onset of the pandemic. On the other hand, children who were weak in reading, i.e., those with scores in the bottom 20%, did experience significant learning losses (15-20 pp). The performance gaps were larger (by 1.3 pp) for boys.
The results suggest that students with academic difficulties are particularly in need of the specialized and structured environment offered by the school to support them in their learning. They highlight the crucial role of teachers and school professionals as advocates for equal opportunity. Moreover, studies of classroom management practices in a context of uncertainty (such as during a pandemic) suggest that less attention is paid to vulnerable groups during times when everyone is experiencing a low sense of safety. As the years 2020-2021 have placed unusual demands on school staff, it is possible to anticipate that the return to greater normality in 2022 will provide the support needed for everyone’s success.
The results of Betthauser et al. (2023) indicate greater losses for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Although our results show that children from disadvantaged schools had lower scores than others in both 2019 and 2021, we did not detect that learning losses were greater for children from disadvantaged schools, but rather for children who had lower reading levels. Note that since the disadvantage index is correlated with performance, it is plausible that the differential results by performance obscured the difference in the disadvantage index.
It is also possible that we did not find an impact from deprivation due to the fact that the index to which we had access was measured at the school level and not at the child/family level. The composition of schools is in fact very heterogeneous in terms of family disadvantage. Thus, even in disadvantaged neighbourhoods, the variable may not capture individual differences in the level of deprivation, whereas the performance variable does. This explanation also applies to the income threshold, which is a school-level variable.
Special considerations and recommended follow-ups
This study has important methodological strengths, including the standardized nature of the test, the large sample size (n=23,986), the diversity and representativeness of the socioeconomic status of participating schools, and the comparison of children in the same schools in 2019 and 2021. The within-school comparison type controls for a large number of confounding variables, including school management, school staff and the children who attend the schools.
The results captured the full direct and indirect effects of pandemic disruption on the acquisition of reading skills, not just the effects of academic disruption. It should be noted that the context in which the tests were taken may have influenced the results: the test in 2021 was not compulsory and was not entered on report cards. Although teachers were instructed to prepare their students for the test by following standard practices, children’s motivation and stress levels may have been different in 2021 than in 2019. The lower level of stress may have had a positive effect on the performance of some children. For others, the fact that grades were not reported on the report card may have decreased motivation.
The results underscore the importance of conducting a long-term review of the learning trajectories of Canadian students following the 2019-2021 academic disruptions. Researchers have shown that a 0.2 standard deviation increase in academic achievement is associated with higher earnings (2.6% over a life course) and better labour market participation (Chetty, Friedman, & Rockoff, 2014a, 2014b). It should be noted that this study shows greater effects for the most vulnerable students, suggesting increased social inequalities in academic performance. Monitoring of standardized test scores over the next several years is necessary to quantify changes in gaps, if any, and to identify strategies to narrow them.
We would like to thank our collaborators: Karine Trudeau, PhD, and William Sauvé.
Blainey, K. (2020). The impact of lockdown on children’s education: a nationwide analysis. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.risingstars-uk.com/media/Rising-Stars/Assessment/Whitepapers/RS_Assessment_white_paper_1.pdf
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014a). Measuring the impacts of teachers I: Evaluating bias in teacher value-added estimates. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2593-2632.
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., & Rockoff, J. E. (2014b). Measuring the impacts of teachers II: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. American Economic Review, 104(9), 2633-2679.
Engzell, P., Frey, A., & Verhagen, M. D. (2021). Learning loss due to school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(17), e2022376118.
Goldhaber, D., Imberman, S. A., et al. (2022). To what extent does in-person schooling contribute to the spread of Covid-19? Evidence from Michigan and Washington. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, 41(1), 318-349.
Haelermans, C., Jacobs, M., et al. (2021). A full year COVID-19 crisis with interrupted learning and two school closures: The effects on learning growth and inequality in primary education. doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/78fje
Hanushek, E. A., & Woessmann, L. (2020). The economic impacts of learning losses. OECD Work document on education, 225, OECD Edition, Paris.
Maldonado, J. E., & De Witte, K. (2022). The effect of school closures on standardized student test outcomes. British Educational Research Journal, 48(1), 49-94.
Milanovic, K. (2022). The residual impact of educational disruption on primary school attainment by spring 2022. 22 RS Assessment, School Dash. https://risingstars-uk.com/media/Rising-Stars/Assessment/Whitepapers/Spring22_RS_Assessment_white_paper.pdf
Quebec, É. (2021). GDUNO. https://prod.education.gouv.qc.ca/gdunojrecherche/rechercheOrganisme.do;jsessionid=3sZe_Q8EMu68DHnFStbDpDDcFQszamaRzuTZLx4hSeKmIfn7AGRh!1100596104!-1697553619?methode=recherche
Quebec, M. d. l. e. d. (2021). Indice de milieu socio-économique (IMSE). www.education.gouv.qc.ca/enseignants/aide-et-soutien/milieux-defavorises/agir-autrement/indice-de-milieu-socio-economique-imse
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, April 2023
1 The school’s Socio-Economic Environment Index (IMSE): This is an index made up of two variables, the mother’s undereducation and the parents’ inactivity, which emerge as the strongest explanatory family variables of a child’s non-achievement in school. A student’s IMSE is the IMSE of the population unit from which he or she comes, while the school’s IMSE is the average of all students’ IMSEs.
2 Percentage point
It is now THREE years since governments around the world announced the shutdown of schools to protect students and teachers from COVID-19. According to UNESCO (2020), more than 1.5 billion children from more than 190 countries were sent home in March 2020 to receive instruction remotely, if at all. Since then, educators, parents, and policymakers have been interested in knowing how much the disruptions COVID-19 brought to regular reading instruction impacted children’s reading performance. In this article, we expand on a previous report on children’s reading performance during the first six months of the pandemic (see Georgiou, 2021) to include information from 20 K–9 schools in Alberta from September 2019 until they returned to regular classroom instruction in September 2022.
Findings from the rest of the world
The results of most published studies in different parts of the world indicate that COVID-19 had a significant impact on children’s reading performance, particularly in early grades. For example, in a recent study covering five million Grade 3 to 8 students in the U.S., Kuhfeld et al. (2023) reported that the average fall 2021 reading scores on a standardized reading measure were .09 to .17 standard deviations lower relative to same-grade scores in the fall of 2019. Compared to the growth a typical (pre-pandemic) student makes in these grades, these test score drops represent roughly a third of a school year’s worth of growth. Similarly, working with a sample of Finnish children, Lerkkanen et al. (2022) reported that the growth in reading from Grade 1 to 4 was slower for their COVID-19 cohort than for their pre-COVID-19 cohort.
The same body of research has also revealed that the effect of COVID-19 has not been equal for different groups of students. For example, students from lower socio-economic (SES) backgrounds (or students attending high-poverty schools) seem to have been influenced more than students from higher SES backgrounds. There is also some evidence that students with reading disabilities were more impacted than students without reading disabilities. Finally, Kuhfeld et al. (2022) found that in the U.S., the effect of COVID-19 was greater for Hispanic, American Indian and Alaskan Native, and Black students than for Asian American or White students.1
Findings from Canada
Evidence on how COVID-19 has impacted Canadian students is still scarce and we know of only two studies reporting on how Canadian students were affected, one conducted in Alberta and one conducted in Quebec.
The Alberta study: Georgiou (2021) compared the performance of approximately 4,000 English-speaking students from Grades 2 to 9 in September 2020 (right after the schools re-opened) to the performance of same-grade students in the three years prior to the school closures. Georgiou found that only the performance of younger children (Grades 2 and 3) was lower compared to previous years. Interestingly, the performance of older children (Grades 4 to 9) either remained the same or improved during the pandemic. On the basis of these findings, the Ministry of Education in Alberta (Alberta Education) asked schools to test all their Grade 1 to 3 students in reading and provided substantial funding to support schools in providing reading interventions to the most affected children in early grades.
The Quebec study: Côté and Haeck (personal communication, June 3, 2022) compared the performance of Grade 4 French-speaking students in Quebec using the results from the reading ministerial exam in June 2019 (prior to the pandemic) and June 2021 (a year into the pandemic). They found a substantial decrease in the average performance of students between the two measurement points (77.3 percent in 2019 vs. 69 percent in 2021).
Back on track?
We have been studying reading development and difficulties in Alberta for the past 20 years. Because of this, we had measures in place in multiple schools to also examine the impact of COVID-19. For the purpose of this article, we examined:
To better understand the impact of COVID-19, it is important to break down the time into three separate periods. The first time period covers September 2019 to September 2020. This time period captures the time when schools closed indefinitely after the COVID-19 outbreak and only remote instruction was available to children. The second period (September 2020 to September 2021) is the academic year when schools re-opened, but children had to quarantine for 10 to 14 days if they had COVID-19 and whole classes shifted between face-to-face and online teaching depending on the number of positive cases in each class. Finally, the third time period (from September 2021 to September 2022) is when most teaching took place face-to-face and there were relatively fewer learning disruptions.
These findings suggest that the students in these 20 schools might be back on track in reading following three years of COVID-19 pandemic.
Four keys to recovery
There are four key factors we believe that have helped the students in this sample to get back on track. We summarize them below.
Use of evidence-based practices in the participating schools
Obviously, we wouldn’t have any data to present here unless these schools were collecting data from their students on a yearly basis using norm-referenced assessments. In addition, teachers in these schools have been participating in ongoing professional development seminars with us focusing on best practices in teaching reading, and have been sharing their experiences from field-testing different strategies as part of their communities of practice (see Georgiou et al., 2020, for more information). Principals have also been meeting regularly to discuss the results of their assessments and to identify areas in which their teachers would benefit from further professional development. It is important to note here that the evidence-based practices were in place in the sample schools well before COVID-19. This means that when Alberta Education called teachers in the province to focus their instruction on foundational skills in learning to read (e.g. phonological awareness, phonics, reading fluency), the teachers in these schools did not have to change what they were already successfully doing. This likely had a positive impact on their students’ reading performance and contributed to a quicker recovery.
Early screening and intervention
Alberta Education mandated screening of all Grade 1 to 3 children using reliable and valid assessments of foundational reading skills. Traditionally, most school divisions in Alberta have been using various benchmark assessments to identify struggling readers, despite research showing that they are neither reliable nor accurate (Burns et al., 2015; Parker et al., 2015). Alberta Education did not approve these assessments for accessing additional funding. In addition, Alberta Education shared a reading intervention program with all schools in the province that included 80 lessons on phonological awareness and phonics, and asked schools to report on children’s growth over time. To our knowledge, this is the first time a province mandated early literacy screening and provided free intervention materials to all schools; both policies should continue in the future.
Funding
Alberta Education provided $45 million additional funding to schools to address any learning losses. To our knowledge, this is the largest amount spent in the country and assuming the money was used for the intended purpose (i.e. intervention), it may explain why students in our sample schools caught up quickly. Alberta Education also funded research projects on early intervention and the results of these projects provided valuable information on how to address learning losses. In one of these projects, we provided intervention to 365 Grade 2 and 3 struggling readers, and after 4.5 months of intervention, 80 percent of them had improved about 1.5 years in their reading. Some of these children were in the schools included in the study reported above. Funding of evidence-based reading interventions in conjunction with frequent monitoring of students’ progress using reliable and accurate measures should continue in the future.
Discussions around evidence-based practices
The discussions taking place around the country on what should be done to address learning losses drew teachers’ attention to evidence-based practices in reading. For example, among the recommendations given to teachers through different media was one that reading researchers have long asked for: Provide systematic and explicit phonics instruction in early grades. This recommendation is now also included in the new Alberta English Language Arts curriculum for the early primary years.
The positive results on recovery come from schools that use evidence-based early literacy instructional practices and have provided their teachers with professional development on these practices that they may not have received in their teacher education programs. At this time, we don’t yet have reliable information on COVID-19 recovery from schools that are behind in transitioning to evidence-based early literacy programs. Finally, the promising results we see in our schools in Alberta reflect positively on the policy implemented by Alberta Education. By mandating early screening and funding additional interventions, and by making reliable assessments and effective intervention programs available to schools, Alberta Education essentially acted on the recommendations provided by the Ontario Human Rights Commission’s Right to Read report.
Burns, M. K., Pulles, S. M., et al. (2015). Accuracy of student performance while reading leveled books rated at their instructional level by a reading inventory. Journal of School Psychology, 53, 437–445.
Georgiou, G. (2021). Has COVID-19 impacted children’s reading scores? The Reading League Journal, 2, 34–39.
Georgiou, G., Kushnir, G., & Parrila, R. (2020). Moving the needle on literacy: Lessons learned from a school where literacy rates have improved over time. Alberta Journal of Educational Research, 66, 347–359. doi.org/10.11575/ajer.v66i3.56988
Kuhfeld, M., Lewis, K., & Peltier, T. (2023). Reading achievement declines during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from 5 million U.S. students in Grades 3–8. Reading and Writing. doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10345-8
Lerkkanen, M.-K., Pakarinen, E., et al. (2022). Reading and math skills development among Finnish primary school children before and after COVID-19 school closure. Reading and Writing. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11145-022-10358-3
Parker, D. C., Zaslofsky, A. F., et al. (2015). A brief report of the diagnostic accuracy of oral reading fluency and reading inventory levels for reading failure risk among second- and third-grade students. Reading & Writing Quarterly, 31, 56-67.
UNESCO. (2020). COVID-19 impact on education. https://en.unesco.org/COVID19/educationresponse
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, April 2023
1 These are the descriptors used in the study.
“Ongoing staffing challenges, lack of daily staff supports for post-pandemic recovery, daily bus cancellations, lack of system navigation and social work for all families, and a focus on ‘catching up’ when massive structural issues continue to be major challenges. The idea that we are ‘back to normal’ seems to reign, yet every day is a challenge for staff and families. This places incredible pressure on administrators and staff who consistently attend work, further burning out essential staff. With labour challenges at the forefront and possible strikes, it remains unseen how much more the system can bear.” – Elementary school principal, Northern Ont.
The start of the 2022-23 school year was the closest to normal that students, families, and educators have experienced since September 2019 – but how are schools, educators, and students really doing? Three years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the newest findings from People for Education’s Annual Ontario School Survey (AOSS) provide valuable insights. This article will focus primarily on the data collected from the 2022-23 AOSS,1 which received responses from 1,044 principals across all 72 publicly funded school boards in the province.
When the pandemic first shut down schools in March 2020, the list of challenges that emerged seemed endless. There now exists a substantial body of research documenting how the relentless pivoting between no school, virtual school, hybrid school, and eventually in-person school triggered a domino effect of issues that included families troubleshooting technology, juggling remote learning and work, and navigating perpetually evolving health and safety protocols (People for Education, 2021a). None of us had ever gone through a global pandemic before, so it was natural to be focused on the logistics of COVID-19: monitoring positive case counts, screening tools, social distancing, and never leaving the house without a mask – or at all. In the meantime, people’s mental health and wellbeing were progressively being impacted by feelings of anxiety, isolation, or depression, to name just a few (Vaillancourt et al., 2021).
The first AOSS conducted after the arrival of COVID-19 immediately shone a light on the toll that the pandemic had taken, specifically on the wellbeing of school principals. More than half of the 1,173 principals who responded during the 2020-21 school year disagreed or strongly disagreed that their levels of stress felt manageable (People for Education, 2021b). This same finding occurred in the following 2021-22 school year, along with principals’ concerns about the mental health and wellbeing of students and staff (People for Education, 2022). At this point in time, principals’ perceptions about the availability of school resources to support staff and student mental health and wellbeing were mixed:
However, in October 2022, when asked to indicate the level of support needed from boards and the Ministry of Education for recovery from COVID-19, the vast majority of schools (91%) reported that they require some or more support for mental health and wellbeing, with almost half (46%) reporting that they need a lot of support.
At the beginning of the pandemic, most of the focus in schools was on COVID-19 safety and the logistics of remote learning; three years into the pandemic, mental health and wellbeing supports have emerged as a top priority. Numerous principals shared insights about the specific challenges they are witnessing in the current school year.
“Children are excited to be back at school and there is an energy in the building. That said, many students have never experienced school pre-COVID and as such, are needing support in basic expectations regarding how to behave at school. We are noticing significant self-regulation challenges in primary; anxiety and fears of coming to school in junior; and a lot of sexualized /swearing/inappropriate language in our intermediates. And all grades struggling with conflict resolution skills.” – Elementary school principal, GTA
“Student needs have increased significantly due to COVID-19: self-regulation, literacy, numeracy, mental wellness. Due to the impact of COVID-19 many students are experiencing many more challenges. These challenges are being met as best we can with the resources we have. Human resources are the most important type of resource.” – Elementary school principal, GTA
Although mental health and wellbeing was identified as the area where schools feel that support is most needed, staffing was also consistently underscored as a critical issue. This finding is not surprising, given that:
“Supporting increased children’s mental health needs with no increases in resources stresses the staff and leads to increased absenteeism. The lack of replacement staff (especially for Educational Assistants (EAs) and designated Early Childhood Educators (DECEs)) causes this problem to snowball.” – Elementary school principal, southwestern Ont.
The lack of sufficient staff has been regularly highlighted over the past three years (People for Education 2021a; 2022). Early in 2022, a wave of the highly transmissible Omicron variant prompted an investigation into staff absences across numerous school boards and found that the number of daily unfilled teaching jobs was, on average, steadily increasing (Teotonio & Rushowy, 2022). School boards used various strategies to cover staffing shortages, such as removing the caps on the number of days worked by retired teachers, permitting student teachers to work, assigning teachers classes to cover during their planning time, and principals stepping back into classrooms.
These survival tactics, however, did not come without a cost to the mental health and wellbeing of school staff and students alike. When asked if there were any challenges so far in the current 2022-23 school year, one elementary school principal in northern Ontario wrote:
“People are burning out way more quickly post-COVID, partly due to staffing challenges; learning and mental health needs of students are exacerbated post-COVID; the staff shortage impact on daily triage of student needs because of illness and no one to cover; having all expectations of a ‘normal everything open year’ without allowing educators to build back up before being expected to go all out for everything.”
The finding that 91% of Ontario schools need some or more support for mental health and wellbeing supports is inextricably tied to the finding that 82% of Ontario schools reported needing some or more support for school support staff. After all, one of the primary ways of addressing mental health and wellbeing is with more staff who specialize in this area. An elementary school principal in southwestern Ontario explained, “Full-time mental health care workers are required in schools to be present and available to support students and families on a DAILY basis, and to offer support for staff who are struggling to deal with the class dynamics erupting from mental health challenges.”
While 78% of schools expressed needing some or more support for teaching staff, only 19% noted needing a lot of support, which is markedly less than the 35% of schools who expressed needing a lot of support for school support staff (e.g. educational assistants, administrators, custodians, etc.) (See Figure 2). This finding is significant, given recent events related to job action and labour negotiations for education workers in the province (McKenzie-Sutter, 2022). While teaching shortages do exist, there is currently a higher demand for education support workers. One elementary school principal in southwestern Ontario described the situation: “Staffing shortages are leading to a crisis in education. Addressing the shortages across all employee groups has to be a priority for the government.”
As we look ahead to the remainder of the 2022-23 school year, it is essential to consider what actions are necessary to address the needs of Ontario’s publicly funded schools. Here are some ideas suggested by principals:
Three years into the pandemic, COVID has taught us the importance of mental health and wellbeing, as well as the incredibly huge role that schools play in our lives. If public education is the foundation of our society and the key to solving many of society’s current problems, it is crucial to learn from the challenges of the past few years and get our priorities right as we plan for a happier, healthier, and more hopeful future. As one elementary school principal from southwestern Ontario put it:
“A recovery plan for a global pandemic, hmm… I think it is an opportunity to rethink some aspects of public education. Could be a great opportunity.”
McKenzie-Sutter, H. (2022, November 4). What you need to know about the Ontario education workers’ strike. Global News. https://globalnews.ca/news/9253376/ontario-cupe-education-worker-strike-explained
People for Education. (2021a). Challenges and innovations: 2021-20 annual report on Ontario schools.
https://peopleforeducation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/2020-21-AOSS-Final-Report-Published-110721.pdf
People for Education. (2021b). Ontario principals’ challenges and well-being: Annual Ontario School Survey 2021. https://peopleforeducation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/People-for-Educations-report-on-Ontario-Principals-Challenges-and-Wellbeing-AOSS2021.pdf
People for Education. (2022). A perfect storm of stress: Ontario’s publicly funded schools in year two of the COVID-19 pandemic. https://peopleforeducation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/People-for-Education_A-Perfect-Storm-of-Stress_May-2022.pdf
Teotonio, I. & Rushowy, K. (2022, February 7). ‘Really severe challenges’: Ontario school boards struggle with unprecedented staff absences. The Toronto Star. www.thestar.com/news/gta/2022/02/07/really-severe-challenges-ontario-school-boards-struggle-with-unprecedented-staff-absences.html
Vaillancourt, T., Szatmari, P., Georgiades, K., & Krygsman, A. (2021). The impact of COVID-19 on the mental health of Canadian children and youth. FACETS, 6(1), 1628–1648. doi.org/10.1139/FACETS-2021-0078
Illustration: iStock
First published in Education Canada, April 2023
1 The 2022–2023 AOSS is the 26th annual survey of elementary schools and 23rd annual survey of secondary schools in Ontario.
In recent years, because of globalization, the world has become increasingly small and interdependent. No longer confined by place of birth or residence, citizens have a collective responsibility to participate in a globalized society.
In 2015, the UN General Assembly recognized this responsibility by adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The resolution includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that seek to promote far-reaching social, health, environmental, and political change.
At the same time, several Canadian ministries of education have stressed the importance of integrating the UN SDGs and contemporary world issues into the curriculum as part of a field of study known as global citizenship education (GCE). As a discipline, GCE aims to provide students with the knowledge, skills, and values to address critical global challenges. These include the alarming spread of misinformation, a global health crisis, climate change, and a growing threat to the liberal international order. While some provinces have incorporated GCE into their curricula, most do not offer it as a stand-alone course.
More Canadian ministries of education should adopt a required half-year course at the secondary level on responsible global citizenship. They should seek to equip students with critical thinking skills, including media and information literacy (the ability to find and evaluate information), health literacy (the ability to make informed health decisions), ecological literacy (the ability to identify and take action on environmental issues), and democratic literacy (the ability to understand and participate in civic affairs). Various stakeholders have a vested interest, including school administrators, teachers, curriculum writers, policymakers, scholars, and professors.
The conceptual framework below (Figure 1) ties responsible global citizenship to critical thinking through four literacies:
As the framework reflects, critical thinking is a necessary skill to achieve responsible global citizenship. The UNESCO International Bureau of Education (IBE) (2013) defines critical thinking as a “process that involves asking appropriate questions, gathering and creatively sorting through relevant information, relating new information to existing knowledge, re-examining beliefs and assumptions, reasoning logically, and drawing reliable and trustworthy conclusions” (p. 15). Critical thinking skills help global citizens make responsible choices when consuming information about the media, health, environment, and democracy. These skills are necessary to evaluate the abundance of information (and misinformation) in the digital age. They also play a central role in making evidence-based health decisions, provide a foundation for exploring today’s complex and interdependent ecosystem, and encourage the kind of civic engagement and participation needed to preserve a functioning democracy.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians have spent more time on the internet and their smartphones. A recent survey found that 98 percent of Canadians aged 15 to 24 years old use the internet (Statistics Canada, 2021). The survey also noted that 71 percent also check their smartphone, at a minimum, every half hour (Statistics Canada, 2021).
While Canadian youth have unprecedented access to knowledge and information, they are at the same time exposed to more misinformation and disinformation than at any other time in history. This makes it even more critical that students receive media and information literacy training at an early age.
Several organizations, including UNESCO, have taken notice. A decade after publishing the first edition of its media and information literacy curriculum, UNESCO (2021) released Think Critically, Click Wisely: Media and information literate citizens. The more-than-400-page document provides a curriculum and competency framework, along with modules divided into separate units. It also includes useful pedagogical approaches and strategies for teachers.
Meanwhile, in Canada, other organizations (e.g. the Association for Media Literacy, the Canadian Association of Media Education Organizations, and MediaSmarts) have promoted media and information literacy instruction. And for more than three decades, Canadian provinces and territories have incorporated such content into their curriculum. However, as the only Western nation without a federal department of education, Canada has a media and information literacy curriculum that varies by province and territory.
This moment requires increased focus and attention to help Canadian students learn how to think critically when evaluating the media and its information sources and distinguishing between fact and fiction while using information tools. As such, ministries of education should consider adding the following topics in the proposed media and information literacy unit:
The COVID-19 pandemic is shining a light on the importance of health literacy. The Public Health Agency of Canada defines it as the “ability to access, understand, evaluate and communicate information as a way to promote, maintain and improve health in a variety of settings across the life-course” (Rootman & Gordon-El-Bihbety, 2008, p. 11). This form of literacy requires both knowledge and competence in health-related disciplines.
It should come as no surprise that Canadians lacking health literacy skills are less likely to retrieve reliable information or make informed choices. In fact, limited health literacy (or health illiteracy) can directly impact whether individuals comply with data-driven public health guidance. What’s more, the rapid dissemination of COVID-19 misinformation has placed them at an even greater health risk.
At an organizational level, public health agencies have struggled to manage the current “infodemic” (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2021). In a Public Policy Forum report, University of Toronto professors Eric Merkley and Peter Loewen (2021) provide five recommendations, including to:
Additionally, medical professionals should provide up-to-date, credible information to large audiences through a strong social media presence.
At the school and board level, teachers and administrators should promote more health literacy instruction. While the concept of health-promoting schools dates back nearly three decades, there is an even greater imperative for students today. In fact, the World Health Organization and UNESCO (2021) recently proposed a whole-school approach to encourage student health and well-being, ranging from school policies and resources to a greater focus on community partnerships and a positive social-emotional environment.
Adopting these standards will help to facilitate cooperation among ministries of education, schools, and civil society organizations. Accordingly, a health literacy unit should include:
Being a responsible global citizen also requires ecological literacy – defined as “a way of thinking about the world in terms of its interdependent natural and human systems, including a consideration of the consequences of human actions and interactions within the natural context” (Manitoba Education and Training, 2017, p. 15). On top of the combined infodemic-pandemic, an ecological crisis continues to deteriorate. Earlier this year, the federal government released a 768-page document (Health of Canadians in a Changing Climate: Advancing our knowledge for action) that examines the serious threat climate change poses to Canadians’ health (Berry & Schnitter, 2022). The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (2021) report, in particular, details the negative impact of greenhouse gas emissions, which is causing increasing temperatures and frequent natural disasters. Additionally, more than half of the world’s key biodiversity areas remain unprotected while pollution levels keep rising (UN, 2021).
A recent poll conducted by Ipsos (2021), in collaboration with the Canadian Youth Alliance for Climate Action (CYACA), examined the views of young Canadians 18 to 29 years old on climate change. The study found that Canadian youth consider climate change to be a top-five issue of concern after housing, COVID-19, health care, and unemployment. Upon reviewing each province’s secondary school science curriculum, sustainability researchers Seth Wynes and Kimberly Nicholas (2019) conclude that there is insufficient focus on scientific consensus, impacts, or solutions to climate change. Government leaders may be more likely to fulfill their climate action promises if Canada does more to develop responsible environmental citizens through climate change education.
Ecological literacy, however, is not limited to climate change education and will require students to acquire skills and competencies in other areas. In addition to climate change, this unit should include:
The COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the Canadian way of life has contributed to the discontent many feel. According to a Pew Research Center survey, while only 29 percent of Canadians at the beginning of the pandemic believed the country was more divided than before the outbreak, 61 percent held that view by the following year (Wike & Fetterolf, 2021).
Pandemic fatigue, however, should not serve as an excuse for undermining democratic institutions and norms. Indeed, in the latest edition of The Economist Intelligence Unit’s (2022) Democracy Index (global democracy rankings), Canada dropped seven spots (5th to 12th place). The report highlights a troubling trend – one in which Canadian citizens express an increasing level of support for non-democratic ideas and values.
Civically literate citizens are more likely to understand the inner workings of the democracy and participate through voting, peaceful assembly, or other forms of engagement (The Samara Centre for Democracy, 2019). The Samara Centre for Democracy (2019) report explains that civic literacy can be developed during the Canadian citizenship process, at home, in schools, and outside the classroom. Schools are a particularly important forum through which Canadian youth can learn about civic participation and engagement.
In a civics unit, students should have the opportunity to hear diverse perspectives, make informed opinions, and actively participate in the community. Democratic literacy content should include a discussion on:
As teachers prepare students for a post-pandemic world, a one-size-fits-all approach cannot address the needs of every student. Yet, there should be a common framework.
The responsible global citizenship framework can serve to guide ministries of education seeking to implement practical and relevant GCE-related courses and content. To develop responsible global citizens and critical thinkers requires the advancement of media and information, health, ecological, and democratic literacies. These four literacies are critical for Canada’s future success and relevance in a global society.
Illustration: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2022
Berry, P., & Schnitter, R. (Eds.). (2022). Health of Canadians in a changing climate: Advancing our knowledge for action. Health Canada. https://changingclimate.ca/site/assets/uploads/sites/5/2022/02/CCHA-REPORT-EN.pdf
The Economist Intelligence Unit. (2022). Democracy index 2021: The China challenge. www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2021
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2021). Climate change 2021: The physical science basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the sixth assessment report of the intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University. www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Ipsos. (2021). Young Canadians’ attitudes on climate change. www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2021-10/CYACA%20Report%2020211004_0.pdf
Manitoba Education and Training. (2017). Grade 12 Global Issues: Citizenship and Sustainability.
https://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/
Public Health Agency of Canada. (2021). A vision to transform Canada’s public health system. Government of Canada. www.canada.ca/content/dam/phac-aspc/documents/corporate/publications/chief-public-health-officer-reports-state-public-health-canada/state-public-health-canada-2021/cpho-report-eng.pdf
Rootman, I., & Gordon-El-Bihbety, D. (2008). A vision for a health literate Canada: Report of the expert panel on health literacy. Canadian Public Health Association. https://swselfmanagement.ca/uploads/ResourceDocuments/CPHA%20(2008)%20A%20Vision%20for%20a%20Health%20Literate%20Canada.pdf
The Samara Centre for Democracy. (2019). Investing in Canadians’ civic literacy: An answer to fake news and disinformation. www.samaracanada.com/docs/default-source/reports/investing-in-canadians-civic-literacy-by-the-samara-centre-for-democracy.pdf?sfvrsn=66f2072f_4
Statistics Canada. (2021). Canadian Internet use survey, 2020. www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/en/daily-quotidien/210622/dq210622b-eng.pdf?st=O5mYsIgz
United Nations. (2021). The sustainable development goals report 2021. https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2021/The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2021.pdf
UNESCO. (2021). Think critically, click wisely: Media and information literate citizens. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000377068
UNESCO-IBE. (2013). IBE glossary of curriculum terminology. www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/Publications/IBE_GlossaryCurriculumTerminology2013_eng.pdf
Wike, R., & Fetterolf, J. (2021). Global public opinion in an era of democratic anxiety. Pew Research Center. www.pewresearch.org/global/2021/12/07/global-public-opinion-in-an-era-of-democratic-anxiety
World Health Organization & UNESCO. (2021). Making every school a health-promoting school: Implementation guidance. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000377941
Wynes, S., & Nicholas, K. A. (2019). Climate science curricula in Canadian secondary schools focus on human warming, not scientific consensus, impacts or solutions. PLoS ONE, 14(7), e0218305. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218305
“Let us define ‘ethical intention’ as aiming at the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions.” –Paul Ricoeur (1990/1992, p.172)
What ethical responsibilities do educational organizations have to create the conditions that foster employee well-being? Is the strategy of self-care promotion sufficient or should educational organizations consider what other obligations exist in order to encourage the “good life?” If we are aiming at the good life as Ricoeur (1990/1992) suggests, and if our intention is to create well-being in the education workplace, then reminding people to take care of themselves and focusing on the health practices of individuals is not enough. People exist in relationships and work in complex systems, so addressing these things is also necessary in order to create and support well-being. If the relationships or systems are not well, then focusing on the individual “fixing” themselves becomes both ineffective and frustrating.
Making the “right” health decisions and doing self-care activities tend to be framed as a competence or character issue of an individual (Wang, Pollock, & Hauseman, 2018), but this idea falls apart when one considers that an employee only has control over one part of the situation. For example, employees can do all of the things they know are good for them – they can eat well, get the requisite hours of sleep each night, exercise, meditate, have great social support, and so on – but if they are in a toxic workplace environment or work with others who don’t care about them, then they will not be well. Many education leaders who are promoting and supporting self-care are trying to do the right thing for their employees, their employers, or both, but are, unintentionally, losing the substance for the shadow and doing more harm than good.
More and more ministries of education and school districts are recognizing the need to address staff well-being as an important step toward increasing student well-being. They are also acknowledging the importance of staff well-being in relation to students’ learning outcomes. In the province of B.C., the newly published Mental Health in Schools Strategy (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2020) recognizes the need for adult well-being for the very first time. “Not only does adult stress impact students directly, it can also lead to increased sick days taken by staff, increased disability claims and challenges with retention and recruitment, all of which cost the school system as a whole” (British Columbia Ministry of Education, 2020, p. 5).
The Mental Health in Schools Strategy document correctly points out that there is also a business case to be made for addressing staff well-being. Education leaders are looking at well-being as a way to save money through lower absenteeism, increased staff retention, and other human resources considerations. Having a safe and caring workplace creates value for the institution, as it increases productivity and makes financial sense from the human resources perspective – but employee well-being has value beyond just what it can provide in a linear and measurable cost/benefit analysis. Organizations have a moral responsibility for the well-being of their employees. There is also intrinsic value that exists in the relationships between people that we cannot reduce to numbers and statistical analysis; this benefit exists in the connection itself and is experienced in the most successful and creative teams (Waterhouse, 2019).
As individual employees, we exist within organizations that are in relationships within the larger system. The system is not a separate entity that exists outside of the individuals who are part of it. The organization itself is made up of, developed, and shaped by people in relationship. This explanation fits with the idea that “the moral life of organizations is reducible neither to individual morality, nor to institutional structures. Rather it is usually the interplay of individual moral agency on the one hand, and organizational structures on the other that determines outcomes” (Herzog, 2018, p. 2). This interplay doesn’t take away the responsibility that each person has for their own decisions and actions, nor does it waive organizations’ responsibilities to attend to their employees’ well-being. But instead, it acknowledges that those decisions and actions, whether they are individual or organizational, occur within and are impacted and shaped by the individual’s relationships and interactions with the organizational contexts. Organizations need to change the way they work, co-develop well-being strategies and practices with their employees, and wholeheartedly integrate them into their daily lives.
It is valuable to look at what an organization is doing to promote health and well-being and whether these strategies and practices are having the intended impact. The use of self-care as a well-being strategy puts the responsibility on the individual to take care of their own health, ignoring the systemic inequities that create an unequal playing field. It also ignores the responsibility of organizational leaders to create and support policies and practices that bring well-being into the culture and structure of their organizations. In the education workplace, the role of the employers in supporting well-being is often seen as simply providing information – via newsletters, blog posts, or “wellness days” – for employees to learn about self-care they can do on their own. Such a view is patronizing, as it places the burden on individuals and neglects organizations’ impact on and responsibility for their employees. Recently, an education colleague spoke about a staff wellness day at their school: “Our administrator was praising the day and publicly people were praising the day too, but privately no one saw the point.” The idea that work-related stress can be relieved with health promotion materials is problematic because it ignores the organizational, social, and systemic patterns that have contributed to the stress in the first place (Bressi & Vaden, 2017). As illustrated from the above example, it also runs the risk of appearing inauthentic or becoming a “Band-Aid” solution that could damage the very relationships that it aims to support.
The other workplace strategy around self-care practices is to encourage or reinforce better health practices. Some districts are promoting the use of apps that record fitness and other health goals. These apps are often part of the employee assistance program offerings and tend to reward individuals or teams for meeting their goals with virtual awards or gift cards. There are mixed opinions on the effectiveness of these types of behaviour modification programs, but it is generally agreed that how these programs are structured matters. A study by Gneezy et al. (2011) found that this is particularly true for initiatives designed for the public good, as incentive programs can have “adverse effects in social norms, image concerns or trust” (p. 206). The same study also found that using incentives to make lifestyle changes sometimes works in the short term but is usually not sustainable. These are often great tools, but alone they are just not enough.
So, if we want to increase staff well-being and experience all the benefits this provides, what do we do?
One of the more promising strategies in workplace well-being is the idea of moving to a joint responsibility model of health promotion (Joyce et al., 2016). A white paper put out by the Mental Health Commission of Canada and Morneau Shepell (2018), a human resources company, promotes this joint responsibility model that includes recommendations like creating a caring culture and supporting the employee-manager relationship. We would like to suggest a three-part model that includes looking after self, supporting and caring about each other, and considering the policies and practices in the system that either promote or get in the way of well-being.
Having a well-being plan that has all three components acknowledges the shared responsibility and makes this something people at all levels of the organization are working on together. For example, it is still the individual’s responsibility to take care of their own health, so information or programs that encourage self-care are great – but only if that is just one part of a more comprehensive well-being support plan. The plan should also include ways to support each other like team building, opportunities to contribute, plans to address conflict, and anything that supports connection, collaboration, and belonging on teams. The third part is looking at policies and practices through the lens of equity and well-being. Which of your practices/policies are supporting well-being and which are getting in the way of it? There are many examples and opportunities to look at established practices with a new well-being lens, such as: whose voices are included in decision making processes? Do our onboard practices create equity and belonging? How do people advance in our district? Do we provide opportunities for ideas and feedback to be heard and shared? Do we need an email policy to support boundaries around work time? The answers to these and so many more questions will vary, but they are definitely worth asking and reflecting on together.
The education system’s ethical responsibility is to work together on creating well-being in the K–12 workplace; it is then that Paul Ricoeur’s (1990/1992) ethical aim for “the ‘good life’ with and for others, in just institutions” (p. 172) can be truly be achieved.
Bressi, S., & Vaden, E. R. (2017). Reconsidering self-care. Clinical Social Work Journal, 45(1), 33–38.
British Columbia Ministry of Education. (2020). Mental health in schools strategy. Government of British Columbia.
Gneezy, U., Meier, S., & Rey-Biel, P. (2011). When and why incentives (don’t) work to modify behavior. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 25(4), 191–209.
Herzog, L. (2018). Reclaiming the system: Moral responsibility, divided labour, and the role of organizations in society. Oxford University Press. DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198830405.001.0001
Joyce, S., Modini, M., et al. (2016). Workplace interventions for common mental disorders: A systematic meta-review. Psychological Medicine, 46(4), 683–697. doi:10.1017/S0033291715002408
Mental Health Commission of Canada & Morneau Shepell (2018). Understanding mental health, mental illness, and their impacts in the workplace. Health Canada.
Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as another (Kathleen Blamey, Trans.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1990.)
Wang, F., Pollock, K., & Hauseman, D. C. (2018). Ontario principals’ and vice-principals’ well-being and coping strategies in the context of work intensification. In S. Cherkowski & K. Walker (Eds.), Perspectives on flourishing in schools (pp. 287–303). Lexington Books.
Waterhouse, A. (2019). Positive relationships in school: Supporting emotional health and well-being. Routledge.
On January 11, 2020, a 61-year-old man in the central Chinese city of Wuhan succumbed to a new virus that had sickened at least 41 people. “There is no evidence that the virus can be spread between humans,” the New York Times reported at the time (Quin & Hernandez, 2020). By April 2, the COVID-19 coronavirus had sickened more than one million people in 171 countries across six continents and had killed more than 51,000. In a recent report for the Royal Society of Canada, my colleague Michelle Hagerman and I noted that nearly two years later, the pandemic had not only claimed the lives of millions but also upended nearly every public, private, and non-governmental institution around the globe (Westheimer & Hagerman, 2021).
Crises have a way of making us ask big questions. They focus our attention on what matters most – to us, our loved ones, our fellow citizens, and the planet. For educators, prioritizing what is important became fundamental as teachers grappled with the new realities of online learning, spotty attendance, and the immense inequalities the pandemic revealed about the lives of students and their families. These new realities offer an opportunity to reshape our thinking about what matters in education. But opportunity is not the same as destiny. For lasting change to occur, we must focus our attention on using what we have learned.
Can you name any of the fourteen plant phyla? What’s the difference between sine and cosine? When did the Assyrian empire’s reign over Mesopotamia begin and end? What roles do chloroplasts, vacuole, or mitochondria play in the basic functioning of cells? If you don’t know the answers, you’re not alone. The truth is that few adults (whose professions do not require such specialized knowledge) know the answers to these questions. And even fewer face social, civic, or career setbacks as a result.
If I could ban any two words from education talk for the next year or so, I would choose these: learning loss. The past two years of interrupted schooling has meant that countless children missed lessons in math, history, geography, science, and literature. Every day we read about children falling behind, but the curriculum is bursting at the seams. Falling behind what? Behind whom? Estimates are that nearly 90 percent of the world’s 1.7 billion students have missed a significant amount of school these past two years. So we shouldn’t be surprised if testing experts tell us that, on balance, the COVID generation is not performing as well on standardized assessments of progress as previous cohorts of children at the same stage in their schooling. We probably didn’t need the tests to tell us that predictable fact. But what if that model of teaching and learning is outdated and there are more important things for teachers to think about than whether they’ve “covered” the curriculum?
For certain basic skills such as numeracy and literacy, the language of learning loss is an understandable way of expressing concern over an achievement gap between high- and low- achieving students. But for more than three decades, the school curriculum has become increasingly consumed with all the things students should know before they graduate. That has resulted in an unprecedented global obsession with micro-managing teachers’ work to ensure the right information is taught, and with standardized testing to find out if they’re succeeding. Yet those who seek to demonstrate the importance of coverage in the curriculum mostly use standardized measures of knowledge attainment to prove their point. This tautological approach should be easily dismissed, pandemic or no pandemic, when making the case that we need to move our priorities away from a mile-wide-inch-deep approach to teaching and learning.
Research in teaching and child development tells us that learning how to think analytically is much more important than cramming in material that students won’t remember weeks or years later. We live in an age of instantly accessible information in an infinite number of domains. Living well in the 21st century does not require more information, but rather the knowledge and skills needed to sift, understand, and assess the quality of information. Teaching content matters, but covering every possible historical event and scientific or mathematical concept does not.
I would be thrilled if my child had the opportunity to read and discuss with her teacher and classmates the brilliant allegorical novel, The Alchemist. After all, many students learn valuable ways of thinking about the world from reading it. But I’d be OK if they had to miss that one and read only Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner or Yann Martel’s Life of Pi instead. What matters is finding topics of interest to both teachers and students, having the time to explore those topics in depth, and facilitating connections between subject matter and the outside world. A deep-dive into topics of interest is worth more than a stress-filled endurance swim in the shallows.
This is not a new idea. “Less is more” has been a common aphorism in curriculum development for more than 30 years. The harms wrought by trying to meet curricular standards bursting at the seams were well documented before the pandemic (see for example Kempf, 2016), but during the past two years, as teachers and school boards across the country were forced to recognize the impossibility of covering the entire prescribed curriculum, the very idea of breadth versus depth came under increased scrutiny. It has become clearer than ever that endlessly expanding content goals reduce teachers’ control over the curriculum, undermine their professional judgment, and limit student engagement.
The COVID-19 pandemic functioned like an X-ray, revealing already existing fault lines in our nation and the world: poverty and economic inequality, hunger and homelessness, racial and ethnic bias, unequal access to high-speed internet and computers, and inadequate resources for those most in need. None of these are new challenges, but they are newly spotlighted for all of us to see – “pinned” in the vernacular of the now-ubiquitous video conferencing platforms. Online learning meant that educators were transported into students’ homes, making inequality difficult to ignore.
What bothers me about a focus on learning loss and “falling behind” is that it will increase these already existing gaps. Calls for economically disadvantaged students to keep up with their wealthier peers will not diminish the achievement gap between children from poorer and wealthier households. The problem is not that some kids will learn more than others as much as it is the consequences we tie to arbitrary benchmarks of learning in the first place. Since students are likely to be evaluated in the future using assessments of how much of the curriculum was covered, and since those evaluations continue to be used to sort students in ways that will affect their futures, we are, at least in part, creating the very problem we hope to eliminate by emphasizing the achievement gap. The more we value the acquisition of information over the development of intellectual, emotional, and relational capacities, the more we contribute to rather than ameliorate inequality.
I do not want to minimize the added supports some children need to make up for lost schooling in basic skills. A child entering Grade 3 after having missed much of the previous two years may not be able to read. Some children will have missed the opportunity to learn or solidify basic mathematical literacy. These are significant liabilities, not really comparable to missing stories about some explorers in Canadian history. It is a significant handicap to be lacking these “basic skills,” and for most children, it would be difficult to acquire these skills on their own. To be sure, we should support additional funding for more teachers, smaller classes, and additional programming so that these gaps can be addressed.
But there is much more to schooling than basic skills alone, and we must be careful not to create arbitrary barriers to those students who, beyond common-sense basic skills, have not acquired the same level of curriculum coverage as their more well-resourced peers.
Schools have been stuck in the wrong paradigm for success, one in which individualized knowledge and skills are the end-goal instead of a means to develop students’ best selves within the community of their teachers and peers, and, by extension, improve society for all of us.
If we agree to move beyond an outdated paradigm of education centred around curriculum coverage, what kind of vision for post-pandemic education can take its place? Two decades ago, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire wrote that education either functions to inculcate conformity in the younger generation or it becomes “the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world” (2000, p. 34). To Freire, the sense of pedagogical meaning-making that derives from curriculum is inseparable from the goal of improving society. In other words, improving society requires not only teaching basic skills and knowledge, but also engaging young and old alike in a process of collective meaning-making and community-building.
For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in the ways people treat one another, learn from one another, and live together in local, national, and global communities – in short, how people see themselves as members of a community. Education has always seemed important to me, not because of the debates about passing fads and strategies (phonics versus whole language, new math versus old math, small classes versus big classes), but rather because choices about how we teach our children are choices about the kind of society we believe in and the kind of people we hope will emerge from our schoolhouse doors. Will they be concerned only with their own individual success and ambitions without regard to the welfare of others? Will they form healthy and happy relationships with others? Will they value democratic values such as self-governance and social justice? Will they learn how to develop convictions and the courage to stand up for those convictions if and when it becomes necessary to do so? Will they be able to engage in work and community activities they find meaningful? These values are manifestations of a sense of both personal and civic identity and form the basis of community life.
You can see, then, that I think about schools not only or even primarily as vehicles for the transmission of knowledge, but also as places where children learn about the society in which they are growing up: how they might engage productively, how they can fight for change when change is warranted, and how to know when it is warranted. Schools have always taught lessons in areas such as citizenship, moral values, good behaviour, and “character.” Schools teach children to follow rules, to wait their turn, and (ideally) to cooperate with others. Schools (again, ideally) also teach children how to acquire and process information and how to articulate their ideas to others – all necessary skills for democratic community life. Some schools also help students consider whether being a “good” citizen or member of the community ever requires questioning rules, or what might be the proper balance between rule following and thinking about the origins and purpose of rules.
Schools teach these lessons regardless of whether or not they aim to do so explicitly. How classrooms are set up, who gets to talk when, how adults conduct themselves, how decisions are made, how lessons are enacted – all these inevitably serve as lessons in how to live together. Whether teachers explicitly “teach” these subjects or not, students learn about community organization, the distribution of power and resources, rights, responsibilities, and of course, justice and injustice. These same lessons are mirrored in students’ online interactions. Curricular choices and the relative importance we put on covering all the content standards contain both overt and hidden lessons as well.
When policy-makers focus obsessively on learning metrics, teachers are forced to reduce their teaching to endless lists of facts and skills, unmoored from their social meaning. But when we consider what a successful education might look like more broadly and we think about the impact our curricular choices have on the people we hope students will become, we create new ways of seeing the complex work of teaching and we form new expectations for the purposes of a public education.
Schools should teach subject matter content. There, I said it. I do not want to entertain strawman arguments about progressive educators who don’t care whether children learn to read and write, add and subtract numbers, or learn facts about things. As far as I know, there is not a group anyone can join called “Parents and Educators Against Children Learning How to Read.”
What I am suggesting is that schools should teach content without becoming overly concerned with teaching all content. The need for such a shift in thinking is not new but was made newly possible by the disruption brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eliminating the need for each and every student to cover the exact same material at the same time would free teachers to help their students create meaning, develop a sense of purpose, belonging, well-being, and the chance to learn more deeply about things that excite their curiosity. A paradigm for education that embraces these kinds of goals encourages teachers and students to develop content knowledge and skills by drawing on the local passions, interests, and resources of the school and community. As high school history teacher Michael Berkowitz likes to say: content matters more than coverage.
Most importantly, a successful education should be one that allows each child to become the best version of themselves, and to envision a future for their communities and the planet that isn’t yet realized – but that they can help bring about.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, March 2022
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Continuum.
Kempf, A. (2016). The pedagogy of standardized testing: The radical impacts of educational standardization in the US and Canada. Palgrave.
Qin, A. & Hernández, J. C. (2020, January 10). China reports first death from new virus. The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/world/asia/china-virus-wuhan-death.html. Para 4
Westheimer, J., & Hagerman, M. (2021). After COVID: Lessons from a pandemic for K-12 education. In T. Vaillancourt (Ed.), Children and schools during COVID-19 and beyond: Engagement and connection through opportunity. Royal Society of Canada. https://education.uottawa.ca/en/news/royal-society-canada-policy-briefing-children-and-schools-during-covid-19-and-beyond
Shanna (eight) has always been a sensitive child. She feels nervous about many things, and these feelings have only increased during the pandemic. It is becoming increasingly difficult for her caregiver to get her to school in the mornings.
Yasmin (11) has struggled with her adjustment to Canada and gets frustrated that school is so difficult when she was a strong student in her home country. Her worries about her family that are still back at home can feel overwhelming, and often distract her from her classes.
Jesse (14) is finding it really difficult to navigate their queer identity in different spaces, including different levels of acceptance at the home of each of their parents. They are feeling increasingly isolated and have thoughts of harming themselves.
What do these seemingly diverse students have in common? They have different strengths and different challenges, but are all struggling with the everyday expectations placed on them, including at school. Further, they could all benefit from opportunities to improve their mental health. For many students, mental health can be promoted through creating welcoming environments and teaching skills such as self-regulation, communication, and healthy relationships. For others, additional opportunities to learn coping strategies might be required. Still others may need more specialized services. As a major piece of children’s ecosystems, schools must be intentional in how they support positive mental health. We need to look beyond academic rankings for schools and recognize that successful schools support mental health, both for compassionate reasons and because strong mental health underlies future success.
Canada is often identified as a great place to live on international lists and rankings. However, our performance on children’s mental health is not a source of national pride. Even prior to the pandemic, the last UN report card ranked us 31st out of 38 rich countries on children’s mental health and happiness. We also have one of the highest rates of adolescent suicide. We would not accept such a ranking for our math scores; to score this low in mental health is cause for a significant call to action.
The COVID-19 pandemic has affected every aspect of our lives and routines. Not surprisingly, children and youth are paying the price with decreased well-being. Data collected by SickKids looking at impacts during the second wave found that more than half of 750 kids aged 8–12 reported significant symptoms of depression; 70 percent of adolescents reported significant depression. Furthermore, the pandemic has exposed and amplified the inequities that were there all along. Equity-seeking groups have been harder hit by pandemic impacts, and this includes worse mental health for youth who belong to marginalized groups. The jury is still out on long-term impacts of disruptions related to the pandemic, but there is no question many of the negative impacts will linger.
Before we talk about the central role schools can play in promoting student well-being, I want to clarify what is meant by mental health. All too often, mental health is considered synonymous with mental illness, as if it only exists when there is a problem. Of course, we all have mental health the same way we all have physical health. Thinking about mental health in a deficit-based manner is analogous to saying we only have physical health when we are sick. The Public Health Agency of Canada defines positive mental health as, “the capacity of each and all of us to feel, think, act in ways that enhance our ability to enjoy life and deal with the challenges we face.” Within that definition, we can see there is significant overlap with the role of schools. We need to expand our ideas around what makes a school successful and recognize that one indicator of a successful school or school system is that proper mental-health supports are in place and education is seen as truly being about the development of the whole person.
There are many pragmatic reasons to think about an expanded notion of school mental health. Many skills that underlie positive mental health can be taught, often within a social-emotional learning framework. Promoting facets of mental health, such as self-regulation and optimism, improve learning outcomes. Most children and youth attend school, thus minimizing access barriers. Educators see children daily and are familiar with a wide range of what might be considered normal and healthy in a particular age group; as such, they are well positioned to notice changes.
Obviously, teachers are not social workers, nor should they be expected to take on that role. The answer lies in a tiered school mental-health approach, with role clarity at each tier. This tiered approach is often conceptualized as a triangle, and although different names are given to the tiers in different models, the notion of three tiers that represent universal, selected, and targeted intervention is widely understood in any comprehensive public health approach.
TIER 1 is where universal prevention or promotion happens. It can include everyday practices that create welcoming spaces for all students. At Tier 1, educators can introduce social-emotional learning concepts in short activities and reinforce them during teachable moments. There are also excellent programs that are effective in promoting well-being and align well with curricular expectations.
Over the past five years, my team has partnered with the London District Catholic School Board to implement and evaluate a program called MindUP. In our research with students with 580 students in 42 kindergarten classrooms, we found that students in MindUP classrooms experienced significant benefits. Problematic behaviours were reduced (Crooks, Bax et al., 2020). Their prosocial behaviours and executive functioning showed gains, suggesting that new and mental-health promoting skills were being developed. This project shows how mental health promotion can lead to much wider benefits than simply less depressed children. Improvements in executive functioning could be expected to translate to improved academic performance – a contention we were in the process of investigating when COVID hit and ended our research!
Furthermore, educators reported decreased burnout and an increased sense of personal efficacy (Kim et al., 2021). They talked about creating calmer classrooms that in turn led to a greater sense of personal well-being. By implementing a program that was aligned with curriculum and board priorities, this initiative reduced educator stress rather than leading to work intensification.
“I’ve become a lot more mindful as a teacher. You always recognize those kids who have difficulty, but there’s a whole different perspective now… as to how we look at children and how we deal with them.” – MindUP educator
TIER 2 is where students who may be considered vulnerable can be offered additional support. The source of this vulnerability may not be the individual child at all; effective programming at this level for identified equity-seeking groups might help buffer against experiences of discrimination or past trauma. Tier 2 work is often implemented by mental-health professionals, but educators still have an important role in identifying students who would benefit and supporting their involvement. We have developed or evaluated several programs through our intervention research over the past 15 years.
For example, our Uniting Our Nations mentoring program for Indigenous students promotes healthy relationship skills and coping, within a cultural framework. In the elementary school version, students meet weekly in groups with an adult mentor. The secondary school version uses student mentors and mentees who are also guided by an adult mentor. Our longitudinal evaluation found that students who were involved for two years had increased positive mental health, were more culturally connected, and achieved better credit accumulation than their peers (Crooks et al., 2017). This is an important study because it counters the prevailing notion that focusing on social and emotional well-being and cultural connectedness somehow competes with academic achievement. In this study, the opposite was true. By focusing on social and emotional well-being with an identity-affirming approach, students were able to shine with their academics.
Mentors are showing other kids that you can succeed and still be First Nations. That’s the key; it’s showing kids they don’t have to lose who they are in order to be successful. We are not asking you to assimilate or give up everything to succeed. We know that you can keep connected to your culture and succeed. – Indigenous educator
Supporting Transition Resilience of Newcomer Groups (STRONG) is a small-group resiliency-enhancing intervention for newcomer students who are struggling with some aspect of their adjustment. STRONG brings together groups of six to ten students with a clinician (and often a co-facilitator, who may be an educator) to teach youth resilience skills such as relaxation, coping, problem-solving skills, and goal setting. In addition to the individual skill development, youth benefit from the relationships they develop with other participants, and a decreased sense of being alone. Preliminary evidence suggests that STRONG increases coping strategies, connectedness, and resilience (Crooks, Kubyshin, et al., 2020).
HRP for 2SLGBTQA+ Youth is a group-based intervention for secondary school students who identify as gender, romantic, and sexual minority youth (and their allies). It was designed to be facilitated by educators in schools in the context of gender sexuality alliances (GSAs). The program includes key relationship skills and coping strategies appropriate for all youth, but has an expanded focus on being identity affirming and addressing stressors that are more specific to 2SLGBTQIA+ youth. Our focus groups with youth and educators suggest that students enjoy the program and benefit from the skills they learn, as well as the connections they make to others (Lapointe & Crooks, 2018).
Clearly, having effective programs for equity-seeking groups does not reduce the need to fight racism, colonialism, and homophobia on a larger societal level, but these strengths-based programs can help students develop important skills and strategies while also developing a sense of community.
TIER 3 refers to the domain where students’ mental health needs are of sufficient severity and complexity to require specialized services. Within a comprehensive school mental health model, the vision is for schools to hand over the care of students to qualified mental health professionals in the community at this point, while staying involved as part of the circle of supports for the student. In reality, there is a significant shortage of mental health resources in the community and schools are often left trying to support students with Tier 3 needs. Some boards are even exploring taking on this work more intentionally, in the face of the shortage of referral options.
The three tiers of a comprehensive school mental health approach are not isolated, and students may need different levels of support at different times. Also, referring to this integrated and comprehensive approach as school mental health does not let those beyond the school setting off the hook – we all have a role to play in promoting well-being for children and youth.
So, what do we need to advance the vision of comprehensive school mental health in every school in Canada? We need to move beyond piecemeal initiatives and create a comprehensive and coordinated strategy. Organizations such as the pan-Canadian Joint Consortium for School Health (www.jcsh-cces.ca) can facilitate the sharing of effective practices across jurisdictions. This work cannot be achieved on the backs of individual educator and administrator champions. We need all the implicated government ministries to commit to this work and provide the appropriate resources.
What would a co-ordinated, comprehensive approach include?
Finally, we need to remember that schools are embedded in and reflect larger societal values and dynamics. As Canada continues to navigate reconciliation and attend to systemic racism, we need to think critically about how school mental health initiatives can be aligned with these movements and not reinforce negative systemic influences.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, March 2022
For two-page summaries of the research mentioned in this article, see “Research Snapshots” at: www.csmh.uwo.ca/research
Crooks, C. V, Bax, K., et al. (2020). Impact of MindUP among young children: Improvements in behavioral problems, adaptive skills, and executive functioning. Mindfulness, 11(10), 2433–2444. doi.org/10.1007/s12671-020-01460-0.
Crooks, C. V., Exner-Cortens, D., et al. (2017). Two years of relationship-focused mentoring for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit adolescents: Promoting positive mental health. The Journal of Primary Prevention, 38. doi.org/10.1007/s10935-016-0457-0.
Crooks, C. V., Kubishyn, N., et al. (2020). The STRONG Resiliency program for newcomer youth: A mixed-methods exploration of youth experiences and impacts. International Journal of School Social Work, 5(2). doi.org/10.4148/2161-4148.1059.
Kim, S., Crooks, C. V., Bax, K., & Shokoohi, M. (2021). Impact of trauma-informed training and mindfulness-based social–emotional learning program on teacher attitudes and burnout: A mixed-methods study. School Mental Health, 13(1), 55-68.
Lapointe, A., & Crooks, C. (2018). GSA members’ experiences with a structured program to promote well-being. Journal of LGBT Youth, 15(4), 300–318. doi.org/10.1080/19361653.2018.1479672.
Have we lost the purpose of education during the pandemic? Or did the pandemic exacerbate a lost purpose for education? These are the questions I have asked myself since schooling for almost six million children and youth was disrupted in Canada due to COVID-19.
There were many poignant moments of this sense of loss. One stark moment was last June when my children’s elementary school report cards were delivered. Although it was challenging, my children were able to engage in the mandated five hours of daily online instruction for more than half the school year in Ontario. This was possible because we had technology and stable Wi-Fi, a house with quiet spaces, at least one parent with flexible employment, and so much more. What grades were schools giving to the one in five children or one in two First Nations children living in poverty (Canada Without Poverty, 2021), who were struggling to access school supplies and services from books and computers to food security programs? How were the 10 to 20 percent of students with special education needs graded when they did not have access to differentiated online instruction or social and therapeutic services (Vaillancourt et al., 2021)? The report cards were a grade of our privilege.
Faced with an unprecedented lifetime crisis in education, school officials rarely chose to depart from typical assessment measures and other standard policies. The irony is that the pandemic ushered in urgent public conversations about the need for a “new normal” based on collective well-being. From forced physical distancing and social disconnection with family and friends to relying on strangers to get the vaccine and flatten the curve, we learned about the fundamental importance of relationships for us to be well. Yet our humanity or the need for relationships for human flourishing – a purpose for education – seemed lost in the crisis. Perhaps more accurate is that the relational foundations of education have been further lost.
Gert Biesta describes a lost purpose as a decades-long process of “learnification.” Learnification refers to a language of learning that has “shifted attention away from the importance of relationships in educational processes” (Biesta, 2016, p. 15) and toward individual sense-making of an abstract something (Biesta, 2009, pp. 36–9). Learning asks “for a student to get it, comprehend it, be ‘conscious’ of it; even if [they] didn’t want to get it, didn’t enjoy it, or does not intend to use it” (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 46). Steeped in neoliberal policies, learning has become an individual’s responsibility to respond to market-driven demands of employability.
Who is harmed when the fundamentality of relationships is undermined in education? The answer is all of us. One illustrative example is reconciliation education. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (2015) made it ever more apparent that current curricula exclude Indigenous knowledges. Cree educator Dwayne Donald reminds us that “the tipis and costumes approach has been applied to classrooms for years leaving teachers and students with the unfortunate impression that Indians have not done much since the buffalo were killed off and the West was settled” (2009, p. 5). While there have been curricular advancements, too often schools do not address settler responsibility for colonial unjust relations. This is evident from the long tradition of naming schools after residential school architects and underscored by the recent reprimand of an Indigenous student who refused to stand for O Canada (Coubrough, 2021). Schools perpetuate what Donald refers to as the mythology of the fort – a deeply embedded colonial frontier logic that characterizes Indigenous and non-Indigenous lives as walled, separate realities (i.e. “civilization” on the inside and authentic “Indians” outside) (2009, pp. 1–3). What would it mean for reconciliation if we rejected “denial of historic, social and curricular relationality” (Donald, 2009, p. 5)? What would it mean for education if relationality, fundamental to Indigenous worldviews, was a driving purpose?
Who is harmed when the fundamentality of relationships is undermined in education? The answer is all of us.
If relationships had been the purpose for education pre-pandemic, school officials’ responses to the crisis might well have been different. Governments across the country closed schools while often keeping bars, restaurants, and gyms open – prioritizing the economy over in-person learning. The rationale was that learning would seamlessly continue thanks to technology for remote instruction and private resource partnerships. A recent report from the Royal Society of Canada on pandemic education outlines the inequities of digital learning access and outcomes. Experts cited higher rates of disengagement, absenteeism, and thus “learning loss” for the most vulnerable students. Less often acknowledged is that “learning loss” – far different than measures of numeracy and literacy – is, simply put, a loss of relationships. Students reported worsening mental health, including higher rates of depression and anxiety, and a withdrawal from virtual classes, in large part because of the loss of social interactions with peers, teachers, and other education staff (Vaillancourt et al., 2021).
Education stands in contrast to learnification. Biesta contends that education is the creation of spaces where students may practise together their “grown-up-ness.” He defines grown-up-ness as an educational value by which students may respond to the challenges of human living – democracy, ecology, and care – without positioning themselves in the centre of the world (Biesta, 2015, pp. 8–10). Education is about a concern for humanity and not “survival of the fittest.” The school classroom then, rather than a controlled space for individual achievement, must be envisioned as being comprised of human beings seeking to understand what it means to be in relation with another. Likewise, political problems in education, like violence in schools, rather than being reduced to problems with individual learners, must be taken on as a collective responsibility that requires interconnected social systems of care and justice (Campbell, 2019).
What does it mean then to have a relational approach to education?
1) It means acknowledging that relationships are a fact, but the kinds of relationships we foster in education are a choice.
As humans we are constituted in and through relationships with others (Llewellyn & Llewellyn, 2015). We have a range of social relationships – some healthy and some unhealthy – but connections are essential determinants of our identities and well-being. We cannot choose the fact of relationships, but we can choose to be attentive to relationships for human flourishing. One resource for evidence-based methods of developing healthy relationships is the Promoting Relationships and Eliminating Violence Network (PREVNet). This network offers a range of resources, on a range of topics from healthy dating relationships to bullying, that support youth development. For more information, visit www.prevnet.ca.
2) It means that the relationships at stake within schools and broader communities must determine what we do in education.
Who is education for? What is it for? A relational approach asks who before what. The absence of asking who enables the continued privilege of normative identities (Llewellyn & Parker, 2018). The identities of those most marginalized are excluded when education is about individualized learner objectives and ignores the power relations within communities. A relational approach is not one-size-fits-all training. Instead, it requires attention to the context of relationships and the facilitation of dialogue to understand and act upon the diverse histories, experiences, and perspectives of students. An example of such an approach is Relationships First, which encourages relational education policies in Newfoundland and Labrador. For more information, visit www.relationshipsfirstnl.com.
3) It means that social systems, including but not limited to education, must work relationally toward a better future.
A relational approach requires a move from siloed and fragmented systems and services to integrated efforts that address complex challenges for humanity. It requires school officials to recognize the interdependence of education with other systems, from health and finance to justice and labour. The health of relationships cannot be borne by individual teachers or individual schools that rely solely on social and emotional learning objectives. Instead, collective action is needed to prioritize just relations for the future of policy, curriculum, assessment, pedagogy, and school culture (Butterfield, 2019). An exemplar of this work is Nova Scotia’s Restorative Approaches in Schools Project, which is a crime-prevention partnership between the departments of justice and education and with communities. For more information, visit https://novascotia.ca/just/prevention/restorative_approaches_in_schools.asp.
4) It means that the past stands in relationship with a collective reimagining of our future.
A relational approach requires that those involved in the educational project look back, not to simply blame, but to determine how we can move forward together. It calls for us to be guided by Sankofa – a symbol that was taught to me by the African Nova Scotian community in my current research. Sankofa is a West African term that means it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot in order to go forward. The term is represented by the image of a bird that flies forward while looking backward with an egg – symbolizing rebirth – in its mouth. To learn more about Sankofa in action you can read about the Restorative Inquiry for the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children, inclusive of a Canadian History curriculum Digital Oral Histories for Reconciliation (DOHR) at www.restorativeinquiry.ca or www.dohr.ca.
While many of these resources speak to the principles of a relational approach, the question remains: What does that look like for post-pandemic teaching? The answer is: It depends. This is an unsatisfactory answer for some people who may be seeking easier solutions. It depends does not mean, however, that it depends on nothing. It depends on being steadfastly attentive to human flourishing and the relationships at stake in each educational context. To illustrate in more concrete terms, it means healing harms and not punishing non-compliance in schools. It means moving away from standardized testing and empowering teachers to work with families for authentic assessment. It means rejecting hybrid/fractured teaching, which is technology for technology’s sake, and embracing technology for human needs. It means not cramming content into the classroom but seeking to introduce knowledge that is responsive to urgent problems in communities. It means ending attacks on teachers and instead offering greater care for those who do the most care work. Overall, drawing from black feminist theorist bell hooks (1984), it means bringing what lies at the margins into the centre and struggling together for a brighter future.
The good news is that students are leading the way. Just listen to the news and you will see that students are not only thinking and acting relationally, but demanding their schools follow. Hundreds of students at Waterdown District High School in Waterdown, Ont., walked out early in October, after their principal reinforced dress codes for female students only days after the launch of a sexual assault investigation at the school. Sophie Vivian, who helped to organize the walkout, told the media, “It’s harmful for so many victims and even girls in general” (Pope, 2021). And, last fall, hundreds of students at Bishop McNally High School in Calgary protested outside the Calgary Police Headquarters over anti-Black racism in schools, including racial slurs by white teachers. Winnie Osunde, a Black student at Bishop McNally, publicly called for schools to teach more about Black history and Black Lives Matter movements (Ferguson, 2020). These and other similar news stories during the pandemic demonstrate that students are demanding an education that prioritizes relationships of belonging, equity, and justice. Students are modelling for all of us what it means to practise grown-up-ness – to respond to the challenges of humanity and seek human flourishing for each other. My hope for a post-pandemic Canada is that we will choose to restore or make new a relational purpose for education.
Photo credit: Adobe Stock
This is part of the first edition of Education Canada, powered by voicEd radio, a cross-platform professional learning experience.
This article draws upon earlier publications by Dr. Llewellyn.
Llewellyn, K. R., & Llewellyn, J. (2015). A restorative approach to learning: Relational theory as feminist pedagogy in universities. In T. P. Light, J. Nicholas, & R. Bondy (Eds.), Feminist pedagogy in higher education: Critical theory and practice (pp. 11−31). Wilfrid Laurier Press.
Llewellyn, K. R., & Parker, C. (2018). Asking the ‘who’: A restorative purpose for education based on relational pedagogy and conflict dialogue. The International Journal of Restorative Justice, 30(1), 399−412.
Llewellyn, K. R., & Llewellyn, J. (2020, June 15). A restorative approach is key for a new normal after COVID-19. Policy Options.
Biesta, G. (2009). Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1), 33−46.
Biesta, G. (2015). What is education for? On good education, teacher judgement, and educational professionalism. European Journal of Education, 50(1), 75−87.
Biesta, G. (2016). The beautiful risk of education. Routledge.
Butterfield, K. (2019). Restorative approach to education. Equity Knowledge Network. https://rsekn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Restorative_Approach_to_Education.pdf
Campbell, C. (2019, February). Learnification and the attack on education. Epoché Magazine, 20. https://epochemagazine.org/20/learnification-and-the-attack-on-education
Canada Without Poverty. (2021). Just the facts. https://cwp-csp.ca/poverty/just-the-facts/
Coubrough, J. (2021, September 22). First Nations student reprimanded after not standing for O Canada. CBC News. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-student-reprimanded-o-canada-wfpcbc-cbc-1.6179258
Ferguson, E. (2020, October 8). Hundreds of high school students join walkout in support of anti-racism. Calgary Herald. https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/hundreds-of-high-school-students-join-walkout-in-support-of-anti-racism
Donald, D. (2009). Forts, curriculum, and Indigenous Metissage: imagining decolonization of Aboriginal-Canadian relations in educational contexts. First Nations Perspectives, 2(1), 1−24.
Ellsworth, E. (1997). Teaching positions: Difference, pedagogy, and the power of address. Teachers College Press.
hooks, bell. (1984). Feminist theory: from margin to center. South End Press.
Pope., A. (2021, October 8). Waterdown students protest dress code reminder amid sexual assault investigation. CHCH News. www.chch.com/waterdown-students-protest-dress-code-reminder-amid-sexual-assault-investigation
Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. (2015). Honouring the truth, reconciling for the future: summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.800288/publication.html
Vaillancourt, T. et al. (2021). Children and schools during COVID-19 and beyond: Engagement and connection through opportunity. Royal Society of Canada. https://rsc-src.ca/sites/default/files/C%26S%20PB_EN_0.pdf
The close coupling of content standards with standardized testing brought about by Margaret Thatcher’s U.K. government in the late 1980s ushered in a new form of school accountability that has become the dominant education reform model used by industrialized governments around the world (Volante, 2012). Student performance on large-scale assessment measures are intended to hold school administrators and teachers accountable while also providing the “data” to spur system and school-level improvements. Indeed, every single Canadian province and territory administers and reports achievement in relation to these external provincial measures and also participates in varying degrees in prominent international tests such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) Programme in International Student Assessment (PISA).
The OECD, and PISA in particular, has increasingly exerted a pronounced influence in the governance of education systems both nationally and internationally and forced policymakers to grapple with consistent and recurring challenges, such as achievement gaps between different segments of their national and provincial student populations (Volante et al., 2018). One key achievement gap that is often reported is the difference between high and low socio-economic status (SES) groups. The OECD provides national profiles – which can also be disaggregated at the provincial level – to indicate the differences in student achievement that exist between the most and least socioeconomically disadvantaged students. Countries that possess a higher relative share of low SES students who achieve well are said to have a more academically resilient population.
As previously suggested, academic resilience is the notion that there are some students who achieve favourable achievement outcomes despite coming from lower SES backgrounds. Yet, to the average person, the word “resilient” means something quite different. Indeed, the Oxford dictionary defines resilience as “the ability of people or things to recover quickly after something unpleasant, such as shock, injury, etc.” Clearly, the general notion of resilience is much broader than what is typically captured and often widely reported when discussing students and education systems. At the same time, the unprecedented and generational challenges presented by COVID-19 have provided an important impetus to reconsider how we support students in contemporary schools. It is highly likely that the pandemic has created even greater inequities with respect to students’ access to learning resources and supports due to socio-economic factors. Further, the impact of these inequities will impact more than just academic outcomes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the growing necessity of broader notions of academic resilience that recognize important mental health as well as physical well-being concerns in children and adolescent populations – elements of resilience that are typically not captured by large-scale assessment measures. Rarely does a day go by without public recognition of the daily struggles students, particularly those from poorer households, are facing given the upheaval caused by school closures, social isolation, and familial economic losses – to name but a few factors. Certainly, federal resources such as the recently released Guide to Student Mental Health During COVID-19 (Health Canada, 2020) underscores some of the growing challenges students are facing during the pandemic.
Canadian children may be facing an impending epidemic of mental health and general wellness struggles when the virus eventually subsides. For example, a pan-Canadian survey of the impact of the COVID pandemic on physical activity found less than 5 percent of children 5–11 years old and 0.6 percent of youth 12–17 years old were meeting required guidelines (Moore et al., 2020). Similarly, a recent study by the Hospital for Sick Children in Ontario found a staggering 67–70 percent of children/adolescents experienced deterioration in at least one of six mental health domains during the COVID-19 pandemic: depression, anxiety, irritability, attention, hyperactivity, and obsessions/compulsions (Cost et al., 2021). What steps should be taken by policymakers, district leaders and educators, and teacher education institutions to help alleviate these challenges, both in the short and long term?
There are scant examples within Canada where policymakers report on the overall mental health and/or physical well-being of their student populations. Although international and provincial metrics of student proficiency in such content areas as reading, mathematics, and science abound, measures of health and wellness are typically not reported in a consistent manner or given the same status in policy communities.
Perhaps the Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children (HBSC) survey can serve as a model for provincial/territorial education systems. The HBSC is a cross-national survey conducted in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO) that is administered every four years and focuses on the health and well-being of young people (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2020). This survey is administered in Canada to 11-, 13-, and 15-year-olds, and includes much broader aspects of health than those reported by large-scale assessments such as PISA. Provincial governments could develop a similar annual survey to provide more timely comparative data to inform policy directions during and after the pandemic. Ultimately, we need to provide and recognize markers of mental health and physical well-being with the same reverence that has been traditionally ascribed to student achievement measures.
In addition to policy reform considerations, building capacity for more healthy schools will ultimately depend on effective leadership and teaching practices. On a national level, we see Physical and Health Education Canada’s 2021–2024 strategic plan outline the organization’s aim to emerge from COVID-19 with clearly defined intentions targeting pan-Canadian education efforts to improve the well-being of children and youth (Physical and Health Education Canada, 2021). The proposed efforts are wide-ranging and build on current (e.g. Schonert-Reichel & Williams, 2020) and former (e.g. Ontario Ministry of Education, 2017) provincial-territorial healthy schools policy and practice priorities targeting student well-being (i.e. development of national competencies, innovations, testing, sharing of best practices, and professional development). For their part, school districts across Canada will need to devote the necessary resources and provide appropriate professional development opportunities so that teachers are equipped to better identify and intervene in the worsening physical and mental health crisis that is facing Canadian education systems.
Now more than ever, congruent efforts to expand universal screening measures will need to be deployed to address these worrisome trends. Screening in elementary and secondary schools would primarily involve the completion of student questionnaires (American Psychological Association, 2020) – albeit with notable adaptations to account for the unique challenges encountered during distance learning and social isolation. Emerging from this pandemic era of education, measures considerate of academic, personal, physical, cultural, and social circumstances should be considered to promote greater understanding of the relationships between student success and student well-being. Such surveys in provincial and territorial education systems could complement the school climate surveys that many schools and districts already use, but with the necessary specificity to provide more granular data for specific student interventions. Just as governments around the world have echoed the importance of contact tracing to tackle the pandemic, district leaders and teachers will need timely data to help direct their resources and efforts to where they are needed most.
Lastly, any discussion on addressing mental health and physical well-being issues must include considerations for the education of future teachers. Pre-service education programs across Canada will need to continually evolve to ensure aspiring teachers are equipped with the latest pedagogical approaches in both face-to-face and distance learning environments. In addition to instructional time devoted to traditional subject-areas (i.e. language arts, mathematics, science, etc.) is a greater recognition of health and physical literacy, which are regarded as desired outcomes of health and physical education teaching, and important system and school health promotion goals to be achieved (Physical and Health Education Canada, 2021).
Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has illustrated with brute force that our traditional hierarchy of subjects, content knowledge, and associated skills are insufficient to “measure” the effectiveness of schools if we expect our students to thrive in a post-COVID world. Collectively, capacity building efforts geared at provincial policy reforms, districts and schools, and teacher education institutions represent a viable multi-level approach to strengthening the resilience of student populations. As one interesting example of a response to this growing need, New Zealand is developing a well-being curriculum that will be integrated across other curriculum streams.
Given the novelty of the current circumstances facing teachers and school-aged children across Canada, there will be a need to research and document the relative impact of different school structures and pedagogical approaches being utilized in online, blended, and socially distanced classroom learning environments. Understanding how these different structures and strategies interact and impact the most at-risk student populations will require an iterative process where recent research findings inform teaching and teaching informs subsequent research. This cyclical process is essential to establish a “best-practice” literature that policymakers and school leaders can draw upon to support their students in rapidly evolving school environments.
The effectiveness of these structures and approaches, and the impact of policies and programs utilized during the COVID-19 pandemic, must be rigorously researched and judged against a broader range of success criteria. Unfortunately, most of the current research in many international contexts appears to be focused on “learning loss” – which is essentially the examination of average drops in standardized test scores in different education systems during the pandemic (Kaffenberger, 2021). Yet virtually every school-based practitioner would acknowledge and echo the significant mental health and physical well-being “losses” that students are also experiencing. Certainly, it is possible for our education systems to attend to both the academic and mental health and physical wellness issues of Canadian youth to help build resilient schools.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2021
American Psychological Association (2020, September 22). Student mental health during and after COVID-19: How can schools identify youth who need support? www.apa.org/topics/covid-19/student-mental-health
Caldwell et al. (2020). Physical literacy, physical activity, and health indicators in school-aged children. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17. www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/15/5367
Cost et al. (2021). Mostly worse, occasionally better: Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on the mental health of Canadian children and adolescents. European Child Adolescent Psychiatry. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33638005/
Ministry of Education. (2017). What we heard: Well-being in our schools, strength in our society. Government of Ontario. www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/about/wb_what_we_heard_en.pdf
Health Canada (2020). Guide to Student Mental Health During COVID-19. Government of Canada. www.mentalhealthcommission.ca/sites/default/files/2020-09/covid_19_tip_sheet_student_mental_health_eng.pdf
Kaffenberger, M. (2021). Modelling the long-run learning impact of the Covid-19 learning shock: Actions to (more than) mitigate loss. International Journal of Development, 81. www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0738059320304855#
Moore et al. (2020). Impact of the COVID-19 virus outbreak on movement and play behaviours of Canadian children and youth: A national survey. International Journal of Behaviour Nutrition and Physical Activity, 17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12966-020-00987-8
Physical and Health Education Canada. (2021). 2021-2024 PHE Canada Strategic Plan: A clear path forward. https://phecanada.ca/about/strategic-plan
Public Health Agency of Canada. (2020, November). Health Behaviour in School-Aged Children. Government of Canada. www.canada.ca/en/public-health/services/health-promotion/childhood-adolescence/programs-initiatives/school-health/health-behaviour-school-aged-children.html
Schonert-Reichel, K., & Williams, J. (2020). Assessment of Schoolwide Well-Being & Social-Emotional Learning. Well-Being BC. www.wellbeingbc.ca/images/school-toolkit/Well-Being-BC—Assesment-Tool—FULL-Workbook.pdf
Volante, L. (2012). Educational reform, standards, and school leadership. In L. Volante (Ed.), School Leadership in the Context of Standards-Based Reform: International Perspectives (pp. 3–20). Springer.
Volante, L. (Ed.). (2018). The PISA Effect on Global Educational Governance. Routledge.
Spring of 2020, mid-COVID lockdown and Canadian youth were planted at their computers for remote learning. Stores were closed, sports on hold, families isolated in their homes, and friends unable to hang out. Most middle- and high-school students spent part of their days creating ways to be interpersonal. Students from a high school in Alberta found an ingenious way to interact: they circled their wagons. Imitating ancestors who moved West almost two centuries ago, the students drove to the empty high-school parking lot and backed up to form a circle with their trunks and hatches open. They sat individually in the back of their own vehicles. Facing one another, between three and five metres apart, they sat, talked, and played music; they were kids doing what kids do. They had a space to be. Administrators still working daily in the school gave a thumbs-up to their creative pupils. I asked one of the Grade 11 students to send me a short video. In it, I observed 12 cars backed into the wagon wheel: one kid per vehicle, all legs dangling from the back and each teen engaged. During the most terrifying global time in a century, there was hope and initiative displayed by the clever youth who figured out how to safely be together, and with the approval from the school leadership team who were glad to create a space for their students to be, and to be well. I was impressed by the good intent and action all around and pitched an idea to make a short film with them. I would interview each participant remotely and ask them to shoot some of their sessions. The youth were thrilled that I was inspired by their collaborative genius, and I began to organize the logistics.
The local police shut it down. With no explanations, one day they came to the parking lot and told the youth to cease and desist. Overruling the school administrators, law enforcement made sure that no wagons would circle.
Having a place “to be,” a public space, creates healthy and positive ways of being. An ad hoc social community emerges in public spaces, where senses are stimulated and the similarities and diversity of those involved are displayed (Mean & Tims, 2005). Wellness is associated with the benefits of public space, which is claimed equally by everyone. The space reinvents itself daily: inhabitants change, the ability to seek an area for body and mind is created and recreated. Public space is not only the product of a developer, city planner, school board, or museum, it is often an unofficial collaboration between those who determine the space is valuable.
Urban public space is often conceived in parks, yet many areas have ceased mapping out new parks. While some public urban spaces for warm weather have been introduced, with shared public gardening, exercise space, meditation paths, biking and roller blading trails, and skateboard ramps and tubes, little consideration or initiative has been established to create winter-friendly public spaces. Canadian youth are left out in the cold.
Public space is often unattainable for youth; indeed many towns and cities have no designated space for youth. The last pre-pandemic public space I saw was in a parking lot. Between 25 and 40 high-school kids were hanging out in small groups in front of a Cineplex at the south end of an enormous mall, an early spring day, they were enjoying the weather. As I parked, four police cars pulled up and ordered them to leave. Canadian malls are often a gathering spot for youth. Avoiding inclement weather, Canadian youth visit malls for restrooms, food facilities, and stores, they also contribute to the economy by shopping. Claiming crime instances and theft, many malls have instituted bans for under-18 shoppers unless they are accompanied by a parent. Yet according to a 2016 Government of Quebec report, while youth are accused of shoplifting and vandalism over three times more often than adults, they are less likely to shoplift and vandalize (Lowrie, 2018).
Public space is democratic – not corporately or politically democratic. It is a space where one can feel safe. A place that allows movement, sound, art, quiet, the ability to congregate, the ability for a group of people to make known something important to them. But public space creates a difference between children and youth regarding access. Public space for children, of course, is chaperoned, shepherded. Children are with a teacher or an adult of some sort: a babysitter, a youth, someone who’s helping facilitate their enjoyment of the space. They interact in a place where they can climb on toys, wade, walk; someone is there to ensure little children are safe and nurtured. Adults and caregivers support children to enjoy public space, to run, to feel, to experiment. How important that experimentation becomes. Successes can happen for children in public spaces. The first time a child walks, runs, throws a ball, or rides a bike speaks to enormous growth and success. Public space is special for children, allowing socialization, physical activity, environmental awareness, fresh air, and wellness.
For youth, it can be a different scenario. North American youth are often seen as a population to be feared. My work has focused on the notion that many adults just don’t like youth (Steinberg, 2018). According to many adults, they are a revolutionary group, nonconformists. Along with their clothing, music, art, their way, the fact that they are youth, they become something to fear. Youth are often not allowed to be in a public space without adult supervision. There are dramatic differences in parental attitudes between a baby’s space and the space for a youth to be. With new babies, an obsession with advanced and appropriate development ensues. We watch for babies to roll over at four months, sit up at six months, and walk at one year. Potty training tends to be a milestone, with parents and family applauding as they stand around the toilet. Talking is an enormous concern for parents; expectations for the first word, then sentences haunt most parental minds. From preschool through Grade 1, expectations and hope surround the development of a child. Tying shoes is a stressful hurdle and the first playdate and friendship is a celebration. Riding the first trike and then a two-wheeler become kidhood capstones. Parents wait for their young children to become self-sufficient, independent, and able to entertain themselves. Up until nine or ten, each success is heralded and compared to other children of the same age.
By the time a child is a tween, parents reverse course and fear their child’s independence. No longer do parents push for their progeny to make their own decisions, pick out the day’s clothing, be creative. Parental complaints often barrage teens: their hair is wrong, their clothing is inappropriate, and their language is appalling. North American parents go from finding success in children to finding failure in teens. The same parents who pushed their little ones to make decisions, talk, choose clothes, and ride bikes are now fearful of skateboarding, rollerblading, pink hair, and midriff tops. Such irony in our childrearing. Adding to the nixing comes suspicion, doubt, fear and distrust… for both the teen and the parents. I contend that most adults just don’t understand or like teens; consequently, the rules pile on, adult/youth discord and tumultuous years commence. Along with this discord comes the restriction of places where teens are free “to be” and an adult need to control and surveil youth. To have healthy youth, we must find ways to have healthy public spaces available throughout the year for teens to create communities, hang out, and dangle their legs. Social distancing isn’t the problem; finding a place to safely socially distance is. Safe, public spaces must become a priority for our Canadian youth.
Dislike and fear of youth is uncovered regarding where the youth are, where they hang out, and who they are with. With limited safe spaces to be, our youth seek refuge in social media, online gaming, and smartphone addiction, all resulting in loss of socialization, healthy spaces, and shared communities. Space for youth to gather is limited: cars, homes with oft-gone parents, basements, and barns can become evening spaces to act out, kick back, and engage in exactly the activities the parents are so worried about. Without healthy special alternatives for youth, safe places to be, our teens resort to whatever they can find.
I was recently on a committee with city planners, university professors, and architects. Our charge was to discuss ways to turn a downtown walking mall into a viable and energetic public space. The area is known to be a haven for runaway youth and people who sleep rough, somewhat itinerant in nature, and many citizens avoid the area. I suggested creating a public space to serve youth, both the vulnerable teens who populate the mall and after-school kids in general. I noted that little ones run free in public spaces and are urged to experiment and climb, yet youth are often stopped or given signals that “you can’t be here, this space isn’t for you.” The same public space changes depending on the age of the occupant. I proposed a public theatre space – one that would allow crevices and climbing spots to serve both little ones and teens in physical movement and exercise, with the space also being used for impromptu performances, slam poetry, and improvisational theatre. Using the notion of theatre as public space, participants could mould the area to suit their visions. Possibly this area could offer some sort of wall in the same area that could be designated to create changeable graffiti where youth organizations could sponsor a space for artistic expression in a city where graffiti is completely illegal and has a full-time quasi police force patrolling for it. A small bit of interest was generated, but most of the group was anxious to turn back to exploring pop-up stores, picnic tables, and museum space.
I once found a place in the Highlands of Scotland by following an old sign, “Stone Circle” written with crayon or old paint, it had an arrow pointing to the left. I remember driving up there, just another pretty road. It led me to an enormous meadow of soft, green green moss, in the moss was a stone circle – a sort of Stonehenge, but not really. It didn’t have a name. There was a sense of mystery that I loved. One could walk all over…. there were no ropes, no signs, no poster that told us where we could take a picture. It was just a free space where anyone could run and touch the stones, chase around, or sit, as I chose to, in the very middle of the middle. I was in a space that was private and public at the same time. Low mountains were all around me, magical mountains with moors and the pillow softness of the Earth in all directions.
I’m not a meditator but I was able to do my way of meditating while I was there. Years later, when I want to put myself in a space that gives me peace, I still think of that free, unencumbered public space: a stone circle with no one in charge, no rules or cameras… it was free to the universe, free to the rain, the snow, and the people who touched it. I want our youth to know that they can go to a space, be safe, breathe fresh air, and just be. They need that. They deserve that.
Photo: courtesy Shirley R. Steinberg
First published in Education Canada, September 2021
Lowrie, M. (2018, May 2). Quebec shopping mall bans unaccompanied children and teens. The Canadian Press.
Means, M. & Tims, C. (2005). People make places: Growing the public life of cities. Demos.
Steinberg, S. R. (Ed). (2018). Activists Under 30: Global Youth, Social Justice & Good work. Brill/Sense Publishing.
At east city high, a large high school in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, the gymnasium was located in an outbuilding. There were two entrances, one on the east side for girls and one on the west side for boys. These entrances led to gendered washrooms and changerooms and then flowed into the main gymnasium, where all classes met at the start of the period to rendezvous with their teachers. This setup required students to select a binary gender just to get into class.
At the start of the year, Mr. Gonzalez,1 a Physical Education (PE) teacher at East City High, gave Raeyun,2 one of his Grade 10 students, special permission to use the boys’ changeroom. However, Raeyun did not want to use the boys’ changeroom. He was worried that being surrounded by other boys would only serve to underscore the ways he was different from them. Not only did Raeyun never use the boys’ changeroom, but he also never once got changed for PE at school. Instead, Raeyun came to school already in his PE clothes and stayed in them all day, no matter how sweaty he got during class. Raeyun cleverly figured out that he could sneak into the gymnasium through the back entrance by taking a staircase up from the staff parking lot. This tactic allowed Raeyun to avoid choosing a gender at the start of class.
I spent a year at East City High, moving alongside several gender-nonconforming3 youth as they went to class, attended extracurricular activities, fanned out across the campus for lunch, participated in artistic and musical performances, and just generally lived their lives. The youth who participated in the study all had different relationships with gender nonconformity, like Raeyun, whose relationship was complicated. He was a Filipino trans guy and aspired to pass; however, he experienced the world of East City High as a gender-nonconforming person most of the time. Even though he wanted to pass, Raeyun’s gender was not easily understood at East City High. Often people struggled to see Raeyun as he saw himself. Raeyun once described this complexity to me, saying: “I’m not like completely [gender nonconforming], but I’m also not like a cis guy, so, kind of like midway. Like I’m part of the binary but I’m also like part of the binary in a weird way.” Though few adults at the school understood Raeyun’s gender, many people noticed that Raeyun did not “fit in” and responded to his presence in accordance with the accommodation approaches laid out by the district’s trans-inclusive policy. Throughout Raeyun’s time at East City High, teachers pulled him aside and offered individualized workarounds and alternatives, ways for Raeyun to still participate in gendered activities without feeling left out.
As accommodation approaches become more popular in North American schools, it is important to consider which students are welcomed by it (or not), and how a reliance on accommodation neglects to challenge cisheteronormativity. While the current emphasis on inclusive washrooms and changerooms is important, this focus does not address the larger issue of rethinking how pervasively schooling is organized around a system of visible, binary gender. Accommodation as a primary approach relies on gender nonconformity as a visible identity – an identity that sticks out and can be easily categorized as not fitting in at school. Visibility, as scholars have examined, relies on racialized, ableist, and settler colonial norms (Beauchamp, 2018; Gill-Peterson, 2018). For instance, popular ideas about gender nonconformity privilege white, thin, andro-masculine forms of expression. Since people at East City High frequently struggled to understand the complexities of youths’ genders when they did not fit into these normative expectations, most of the youth that I worked with were not seen as gender nonconforming by others at the school.
How do schools’ accommodation practices privilege binary enactments of trans identities? What might it mean for all youth if we, as educators, did not rely on the presumption that we can see our students’ genders? What types of relationships with gender beyond the binary might we be able to welcome into our classrooms and schools if we let go of the need to know youths’ genders? I aim to open up these questions through highlighting the experiences of two of the gender-nonconforming youth I moved alongside during my research.
Schools across North America have responded to the growing awareness of trans and gender-nonconforming students by implementing trans-inclusive policies and procedures. These policies often rely on creating and providing accommodations. The concept of accommodations has a long history in North America, from race politics to disability law. Currently, educators, activists, and legislators are using the language of accommodations as a framework for including trans students in schools. The basic intention of offering accommodations is to create greater equity of access. One of the main criticisms of accommodation approaches is that they focus on the individuals who encounter obstacles, rather than the systems and institutions that create those obstacles.
At East City High there was a hard-fought trans-inclusive policy that instructed teachers, counsellors, and administrators in responding to trans and gender-nonconforming students. This policy directly named possible accommodations that students could receive at school: the right to access the washroom or changeroom that matched their gender identity, to be addressed by the name and pronoun they “prefer,” to dress in clothing that aligned with their gender expression, and to join athletic activities that corresponded with their gender identity. Though these rights were written for all trans students, including gender-nonconforming and non-binary youth, the material conditions and knowledge of staff largely limited the policy’s reach to binary trans students. For instance, there were only gendered sports teams and gendered changerooms, so a gender-nonconforming student who was not a boy or a girl had no sport team to join or changeroom that matched their gender identity. Also, few teachers at the school were familiar or comfortable with gender-neutral pronouns. As a result, students rarely felt invited into sharing “they/them” pronouns with anyone but close friends. The policy facilitated the experiences of students who knew they wanted to transition from one binary gender to another, but there was little space or understanding for youth who related to their genders as fluid, flexible, and changing.
In listing out specific accommodations, the policy also indicated the presumed points of conflict, concern, and/or challenges for trans students in schools. The policy attempted to highlight when and where trans students would encounter difficulties moving through their days in the same manner as cisgender students, and then offered possible workarounds. There are two main issues with this approach. First, this framework singles out trans students as problems in need of a solution in school. This issue has been covered extensively elsewhere in critiques of accommodation practices generally and specifically in relation to trans youth (Airton, 2013; Loutzenheiser, 2015; Travers, 2018). Second, this approach hinges on the intertwined ideas that trans students are visible to educators and that only visibly gender-nonconforming students will benefit from gender-inclusive schooling. Let’s examine this idea further.
Each term, Mr. Gonzalez led his Grade 10 PE class through fitness testing. Fitness testing is not required by the province and not all PE teachers at East City High incorporated this activity into their curriculum. However, it was a main feature of Mr. Gonzalez’s class. To pass a fitness test, Mr. Gonzalez instructed students that they had to perform according to an index of gendered standards that he maintained at the front of his binder. Though Mr. Gonzalez had elected to use these tests in his classes as forms of assessment, he still worried about how they excluded Raeyun. “What am I supposed to do with my trans students?” Mr. Gonzalez once asked, pointing at his page of gendered standards. Mr. Gonzalez was worried about fairness and safety, and he wanted to protect Raeyun. Therefore, he worked to create modifications for what he viewed as Raeyun’s “unique” situation. The assumption was that Raeyun, as a visibly gender-nonconforming student, was the only one who would benefit from a less binary alternative in class.
However, many of the trans youth that I worked with over my year at East City High were never seen by their teachers, counsellors, or the administrators as gender nonconforming. Since they were not visibly gender nonconforming, like Raeyun, these students were never presented with any options for workarounds at school. For instance, almost no one read Scarecrow Jones, a Grade 9 non-binary student, as gender nonconforming. “In terms of other people, no, I think that they probably do not see me [as gender nonconforming],” Scarecrow Jones explained. “Since I’m not out to many people, I don’t want to give anyone any reason to think that I am not what I appear to be.” Scarecrow Jones’ gender nonconformity did not align with others’ expectations, so they were not offered any special permissions. To others, Scarecrow Jones did not look as if they needed them. Therefore, Scarecrow Jones got ready for PE in the girls’ changeroom, was counted as a girl during activities, and was judged based upon the standards for girls. Even if Scarecrow Jones’ teacher had noticed that they were non-binary, there was nowhere else for Scarecrow Jones to get changed, no other team for them to join, and no other standards by which they could be evaluated. Scarecrow Jones described PE as “this weird heteronormative culture, like heteronormative, cisgender ingrained into everyone’s brain that’s just making it so much more difficult, and so much weirder for everyone every day.” Scarecrow Jones understood the gendered dynamics in PE class as affecting “everyone every day,” not just gender-nonconforming students. Furthermore, they believed that teachers’ strategies of offering individualized alternatives for visibly nonconforming students did not address, let alone disrupt, the cisheteronormative culture and curriculum of PE class that they found so difficult and weird. Scarecrow Jones did not want a third option; they wanted a less gendered experience of PE in general.
While PE class is perhaps more easily understood as a gendered space, these issues transcend subject areas. Though East City High had a reputation for being progressive, diverse, and inclusive, I was never in a class in which an adult created space for the possibility of gender nonconformity without either being asked to by a young person or in response to the presence of a known trans youth. Both Raeyun and Scarecrow Jones were enrolled in French Immersion at East City High. At the start of the year, Madame Blanchet took Raeyun aside and asked him what pronouns he wanted to use in French. His visible gender nonconformity compelled Madame Blanchet to reach out and initiate this conversation. While this act was helpful for Raeyun, it also singled him out as not fitting in and in need of an alternative in class.
The first time I went to Mr. Gallagher’s French drama class, he conducted a mini-lesson on French gender-neutral pronouns. I did not attend his class until the beginning of October, which meant that Mr. Gallagher had not believed it necessary to broach the existence of these pronouns until compelled to do so by the presence of my visibly gender-nonconforming body. However, Scarecrow Jones was in that class. We spoke about this situation months later. Scarecrow Jones told me, “The only time anything (related to trans topics) has ever happened is when you were in Mr. Gallagher’s class and he explained the gender-neutral pronoun.” Mr. Gallagher only brought up pronouns the first time I attended, though he always used them for me. Since he was not able to see Scarecrow Jones as gender nonconforming, Mr. Gallagher never pulled them aside, as Madame Blanchet had with Raeyun. Mr. Gallagher understood accommodating trans people as important, but by waiting until I arrived to tell students about these pronouns, Mr. Gallagher communicated both his belief that knowing this information was only pertinent if it directly affected someone, and that he would be able to tell if that were the case.
Accommodation approaches rely on the assumption that gender nonconformity is a visible identity. There is a presumption that we as educators will be able to tell if our students are trans, which allows us to respond by creating alternatives in our classrooms and schools. I argue that instead of understanding trans-inclusive policies as providing resolutions for gender-nonconforming youth in schools, we look beyond accommodation strategies to our pedagogies. For instance, rather than require our students to make their genders visible to us in ways that we can understand, we can always teach for the possibility of gender nonconformity. Educators do not need policies to create classrooms that reimagine normative expectations about gender; we can cultivate this shift by not only teaching trans topics but also through actively challenging gender roles and heteronormative assumptions in our own teaching and among students. This move means no longer categorizing students by gender, abandoning gendered assumptions that inform how we teach and interact with our students, and integrating material throughout all subjects that likewise invites these complexities.
Welcoming gender nonconformity into our classrooms means we do not need to pull students aside to ask about their pronoun preferences, because those pronouns already exist as possibilities in the classroom. Furthermore, if we approach our classrooms with the idea that students may be gender nonconforming, we no longer have to be on the lookout for signs a youth may be trans and thus in need of an accommodation. What harm would it cause to tell all students about gender-neutral pronouns and use them in our teaching? What relationships with gender might we invite into our schools if we let go of the belief that gender is binary, visible, and that we have a right to know how our students identify on any given day? Instead of asking students to make their genders known to us, we can let go of the idea that knowing students’ genders is the same as knowing them.
Illustration: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2021
1All names are pseudonyms.
2The youth participants chose their own names and pronouns.
3 “Gender nonconforming” is an expansive term that encompasses a multiplicity of gender identities. It underscores how a person either intentionally challenges or is perceived to disrupt normative gender constructions, including not conforming to expectations connected to their gender designated at birth.
Airton, L. (2013). Leave “those kids” alone: On the conflation of school homophobia and suffering queers. Curriculum Inquiry, 43(5), 532–562.
Beauchamp, T. (2018). Going stealth: Transgender politics and U.S. surveillance practices. Duke University Press.
Gill-Peterson, J. (2018). Histories of the transgender child. University of Minnesota Press.
Loutzenheiser, L. W. (2015). “Who are you calling a problem?”: Addressing transphobia and homophobia through school policy. Critical Studies in Education, 56(1), 99–115.
Travers, A. (2018). The trans generation: How trans kids (and their parents) are creating a gender revolution. University of Regina Press.
If there is a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, one could argue that it demonstrated the critical role schools play in a functioning society, the interdependence of education and health, and the importance of a whole-school approach to health and well-being. We witnessed schools everywhere do their part in the crisis, going to great lengths to limit viral transmission. Imagine that! Every school in Canada took steps to protect public health that involved home, school, and community, while addressing social and physical environments, policies, teaching and learning, and partnerships and services. This, in essence, is Comprehensive School Health.
Physical health – mask-wearing, sanitizing, and distance between desks – was a dominant educational point for months, but perhaps the school health imperative we now face is the mental well-being of students, teachers, and staff. Can we learn from and leverage the education system’s pandemic response as a template for how to address health in other ways, and not only heal from the impacts of the pandemic, but also promote mental well-being in schools for all stakeholders?
If we ask the right questions now – with intention, compassion, and courage – we can reprioritize the value we place on well-being in school settings. Now more than ever, Comprehensive School Health needs to be on the national education agenda.
Courtesy of the Pan-Canadian Joint Consortium for School Health
Wellness is a balance of mind, body, and spirit that results in a feeling of well-being. As part of their social purpose, schools have a fundamental role to play in the well-being of children and youth. It is important to consider the systemic influences and environments in which children and adolescents emerge into adulthood. Young people spend a lot of time in educational contexts. When schools provide health-promoting environments, it creates capacity and opportunity for students to reach their full potential.
Comprehensive School Health (CSH) is gaining recognition among school districts across the globe, and across educational tiers in Canada, for its value in promoting wellness for students, teachers, and other members of the school community (staff, parents, community partners, etc.; Russell-Mayhew & Ireland et al., 2017). The CSH framework, which is based upon the knowledge that health and wellness enhance children’s ability to learn, provides a multifaceted structure for improving wellness within the school community.
Comprehensive School Health is an approach that includes:
It is an internationally recognized framework that places students as primary beneficiaries of improved health and learning outcomes through coordinated action with all members of the school community (Koenig & Rodger et al., 2018; Langford & Bonell et al., 2015). This framework is based on evidence that healthy students have increased capacity for learning and that well-being has a positive effect on academic achievement throughout their lifespan (Byrne & Pickett et al., 2016, 2018). Health and education are interdependent. In other words, healthy students are better learners, and better-educated students are healthier (Squires, 2019; Viner & Russell et al., 2020).
A whole-school approach like Comprehensive School Health considers the well-being of the whole student and the whole community. It is not a program or curriculum, it is a process that integrates health promotion into the daily life of the school. The CSH framework takes advantage of a community development approach to enable customization to each unique site and the local context of a school.
The CSH framework seeks to harmonize actions across four components:
• teaching and learning
• social and physical environments
• policy and partnerships
• services.
These components guide actions in schools, such as: Ensuring high-quality health education, addressing teacher and staff well-being, revising school development plans to include well-being, and/or increasing social engagement opportunities for students. Ultimately, the CSH framework is intended to foster local autonomy to shift the culture to embrace well-being practices.
Increasingly, teachers are recognized as key agents of socialization, as they occupy positions that allow them to positively influence school wellness and student well-being. Teachers are our most important resource for the well-being of school communities; there is no profession with such profound influence. They influence people, places, and spaces in education. We know that health and education are deeply interconnected and intertwined, so if we want to influence outcomes, we need to focus on the whole person – not just academic outcomes – whether that is faculty, teachers, staff, or students. This includes post-secondary teacher preparation programs, which both serve as a feeder system for, and are an active part of, the education system. Supporting the well-being of pre-service teachers prior to their involvement in K–12 schools is an innovative way to promote transformational systemic change.
The potential cumulative effects of widespread, comprehensive wellness action across educational contexts are exciting to imagine. How might the world be different if every educational space was a place where each student, staff, teacher, and faculty felt a sense of belonging and was able to reach their full potential? What if every school was a healthy school? What if every BEd program was offered in a health-promoting post-secondary context?
We urgently need coordinated strategies that support action at all levels of school governance to address mental health, safety, belonging, and other psychosocial outcomes in schools.
Recasting educational spaces as health-promoting spaces is a systemic change that requires societal support and commitment from across the health and education sectors, as we have recently experienced with the pandemic response. Now we know it is possible, and on a dramatically large scale, too. Comprehensive School Health gives us the framework, and the pandemic gave us the experience. In Figure 2, we explore how schools can leverage their experience of a system-wide approach to health through their pandemic practices into an opportunity for action that supports the mental health and well-being of students, staff, and teachers.
This may seem like a daunting task that is beyond any one individual, and it is. Still, there are small steps we can all take to do our part from both within and outside of the education system to drive change. A good first step is to educate ourselves and others about Comprehensive School Health (see Learn More).
Real and sustainable change is possible if the education system is structured, and supported, to embrace its role in creating health-promoting environments. At their best, education systems can support all children, youth, and young adults to reach their full potential, while ensuring teachers first learn and then work in health-promoting environments to facilitate learning and nurture the well-being of future generations. This type of system-wide embrace of well-being in Canadian education is not just the imaginings of idealists, but was proven possible in the context of the pandemic response.
Education is a human endeavour. In the context of CSH, this means attending to all the ways of wellness – physical, social, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, environmental, and occupational – across educational contexts. The well-being of students, staff, teachers, and faculty is at stake, and we can now better imagine the difference it will make.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, September 2021
For some excellent self-paced learning, check out:
Byrne, J., Pickett, K., et al. (2016). A longitudinal study to explore the impact of preservice teacher health training on early career teachers’ roles as health promoters. Pedagogy in Health Promotion, 2(3), 170–183. doi.org/10.1177/2373379916644449
Byrne, J., Pickett, K., & Rietdijk, W. (2018). Teachers as health promoters: Factors that influence early career teachers to engage with health and wellbeing education. Teaching and Teacher Education, 69(1), 289–299. doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.10.020
Koenig, A., Rodger, S., & Specht, J. (2018). Educator burnout and compassion fatigue: A pilot study. Canadian Journal of School Psychology, 33(4), 259–278. doi.org/10.1177/0829573516685017
Kolbe, L. J. (2019). School health as a strategy to improve both public health and education. Annual Review of Public Health, 40(1), 443–463. doi.org/10.1146/annurev-publhealth-040218- 043727
Langford, R., Bonell, C., et al. (2015). The World Health Organization’s Health Promoting Schools framework: a Cochrane systematic review and meta-analysis. BMC Public Health, 15(1), 130–130. doi.org/10.1186/s12889-015-1360-y
Russell-Mayhew, S., Ireland, A., et al. (2017). Reflecting and informing a culture of wellness: The development of a comprehensive school health course in a bachelor of education program. Journal of Educational Thought, 50(2&3), 156-181. www.jstor.org/stable/26372402?seq=5#metadata_info_tab_contents
Squires, V. (2019). The well-being of the early career teacher: A review of the literature on the pivotal role of mentoring. International Journal of Mentoring and Coaching in Education, 8(4), 255-267. doi.org/10.1108/IJMCE-02-2019-0025
Viner, R. M., Russell, S. J., et al. (2020). School closure and management practices during coronavirus outbreaks including COVID-19: a rapid systematic review. The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health. doi.org/10.1016/S2352-4642(20)30095-X
LIKE SO MANY FAMILIES and children around the world, Canadians are looking with relief to a more open, carefree summer and normal return to school later this year. But after 18 months of profound disruption, will “normal” be good enough? Are we on track to set all children up for success in a world that often seems more uncertain – and unequal – than ever before?
This article begins by examining how Canadian schools have fared during COVID-19 compared to those in other jurisdictions. We then turn to evidence-based ways that educators can ensure a better, stronger, and more equitable start in September 2021.
While students are less likely to contract or die from COVID, around the world their lives have been deeply disrupted by the pandemic. At its peak, schools serving 1.6 billion students were closed. Today, UNESCO’s global tracker shows that, a year into the crisis, “partial opening” is the norm. Overall, North American schools were closed in whole or in part for online learning for longer durations than experienced in most other parts of the world.
A sobering reality of the COVID-19 schooling experience is that even the best-resourced and highest-performing education systems in the world have heightened their tendency to privilege better-off children (UN Secretary General, 2020; OECD, 2020). Students from households with greater levels of connectivity, higher levels of parental education, greater availability of parental time for engagement, and in-home availability of books and materials have much better ability to access and benefit from distance learning.
In Canada as elsewhere, responses to COVID-19 have led to a patchwork of educational offerings. While students in Atlantic Canada and British Columbia have largely enjoyed face-to-face instruction, in other parts of Canada, students continue to experience periods of full-time or blended online learning from home. “Virtual schools” – intended as an emergency response – are a new feature of the landscape in Ontario and Alberta. Across the country, sports and extracurricular activities that build engagement and keep kids active have been paused.
Connectivity has not saved us. Access to broadband is not considered an essential service in Canada; coverage is both expensive and sometimes unavailable, especially in rural areas. Schools in some jurisdictions are still struggling to deliver appropriate devices to students. Stories abound of Canadian children who, one year into the pandemic, have limited bandwidth, are using old technologies, and are functioning without microphones or earphones. It is common to hear of kids whose attendance has dropped, who are disengaged, or who are missing from school altogether.
A growing body of large-scale international evidence shows that educational disruptions today and during other periods have caused impacts both on students’ academic achievement, and on their social and emotional well-being. Virtually all large-scale studies in OECD countries during COVID-19 (including from Belgium, the Netherlands, England, and the U.S.), have shown that students’ learning has fallen behind where it would have been for their age and grade levels in previous years. Overall, math scores have declined more than scores in literacy-related assessments and the youngest learners seem to have lost the most ground (Bailey, 2021; Education Endowment Foundation, n.d.).
For example, one U.S. study of over 400,000 students showed that the proportion of students starting Grade 1 two years or more behind grade level had risen from 27 percent to 40 percent. “As a result, a hypothetical school that needed to offer intensive intervention to 100 students in the fall of 2019 is faced with making up for the lost instruction for 148 students in 2020.”(mClass/Amplify, 2020).
Other studies from past crises and disruptions are even more concerning. These show that learning gaps can continue to grow even after schools return to normal (Andrabi et al., 2020). Further, school disruptions can have harsh cumulative effects, lowering chances of secondary completion and reducing labour market earnings of affected children many years later (Jaume & Willlen, 2019).
Perhaps most importantly, COVID-19 will not impact students equally. Recent studies show larger average gaps for relatively disadvantaged students, such as those living in low-income households or where parents have less education, or additional language learners. In the U.S., which tracks measures of racial inequality, Black and Hispanic students are also, on average, further behind. When surveyed during COVID-19, these are the same populations of learners who report facing a larger number of barriers and disruptions to their learning; who have lower access to technology; and who report fewer opportunities to get support from an adult at home or in the school (Chu & Lake, 2021).
In Canada, we know that all our kids are under strain. But we have little empirical evidence, beyond immediate experience, to tell us how our kids are doing overall, much less to spotlight where equity gaps are most severe. For the most part, large-scale provincial assessments and high-quality comparable surveys of student well-being are not available. Small-scale studies – such as one conducted recently in Alberta, and a recent report from the Toronto District School Board – show significant year-on-year gaps in early reading proficiency (Johnson, 2021; Alphonso, 2021). Education budgets and plans for the 2021 school year are being settled now, before school boards and higher educational institutions have begun to release data on school attendance, graduation, and applications to post-secondary education. Already, we can see that this lack of data on equity and other vulnerabilities is leading to a limited focus on educational recovery in planning and budget processes for 2021/2022. In this sense, Canadian educational systems may be flying blind.
Yet even before COVID-19, we knew that Canadian students from households in the bottom income quintile across Canada achieved the equivalent of one year less of schooling than students from households in the top income quintile. A recent study suggests that in many Canadian jurisdictions, the average student from a low-income household does not leave compulsory school with the skills needed to proceed to post-secondary education (Haek & Lefebvre, 2020).
In summary: International evidence and recent trends in Canada suggest that harms from COVID-19 will almost certainly exacerbate educational inequality. COVID-19 has disrupted learning and wellbeing for most students in Canada – but its impacts are unlikely to be evenly distributed.
Around the world, countries have responded to the educational needs created by COVID-19-related disruptions with programs and initiatives that aim to jump-start learning and support social and emotional well-being for those students most disadvantaged by the pandemic. For example:
These examples suggest a strong focus internationally on academic catch-up programs. We know less about what governments are doing to ensure that schools adjust to meet the social and emotional needs of kids, an area that research suggests is of great importance after the widespread trauma of the past year (Hough & Witte, 2021).
Apart from a few small or failed initiatives, it appears that Canadian policymakers are just beginning to think about how to redress the impacts of COVID-19 on student learning and well-being. Quebec recently announced a program to hire online tutors to support struggling students; while B.C. has announced a $23-million supplement for vulnerable learners that could cover tutoring, mental health support, or additional staff hiring.
In many parts of the country, community organizations have stepped in with academic and other kinds of support. But a federal program that promised to provide funding for university-level volunteers, with enormous potential for serving the needs of disadvantaged students, fell apart in the shadow of scandal, leaving the energies of tens of thousands of registered volunteers untapped.
It will take a whole-of-society effort to ensure Canadian students make a successful return to school in September 2021. We already know that the economic challenges faced by some households are intensifying, and that national and provincial budgets are likely to contract. Policymakers will need to focus on a few cost-effective ideas to guide their actions. Research points us in three main directions:
Summer learning programs – especially those that utilize trained teachers, structured pedagogy, enrichment experiences, and high levels of teacher-student engagement – have been shown to provide strong gains in learning (Alexander et al., 2016). Even modest efforts to promote learning over the summer months can be effective. For example, Harvard’s summer learning program mailed ten books to students over the summer, matched to students’ reading interests, with email/texts to parents. This simple program was shown to promote more than one month of gains in reading skills.
Tutoring – through one to one or small group instruction – is also highly effective, especially when based on sustained relationships between a tutor and student, and when using good-quality materials aligned to classroom instruction. Even programs offered by volunteers, peers, or family members, when trained, produce surprisingly strong outcomes for kids ranging from stronger academic performance to increased confidence and self-efficacy. Such programs need to be designed with equity in mind – but can also benefit from inclusion of all students in a grade level to reduce any negative stigma and ensure broader organizational commitment (Robinson et al., 2021).
Much more can be done to tilt our education systems toward greater equity post-COVID. We need our education leaders to plan beyond a return to the normal in September 2021. Promising strategies include: starting where kids are, rather than where they are supposed to be; leveraging the engagement of parents and communities; and providing new opportunities for kids to get up to grade level. Each of these holds a key to a successful return to school for Canadian students, regardless of social advantage.
Watch the full webinar related to this article:
Alexander, K., Pitcock, S., & Boulay, M. (Eds.). (2016). The summer slide: What we know and can do about summer learning loss. Teachers College Press.
Alphonso, C. (2021, March 26). Early years literacy has suffered: Signs of pandemic consequences from Canada’s largest school board. Globe and Mail. www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-early-years-literacy-has-suffered-signs-of-pandemic-consequences-from/
Andrabi, T., Daniels, B., & Das, J. (2020). Human capital accumulation and disasters: Evidence from the Pakistan earthquake of 2005. RISE Working Paper Series 20/039.
https://doi.org/10.35489/BSG-RISE-WP_2020/039
Bailey, J. (2021). Is it safe to re-open schools? An extensive review of the research. Center on Reinventing Public Education.
www.crpe.org/publications/it-safe-reopen-schools
Chu, L., & Lake, R. (2021). The kids are really (not) alright: A synthesis of COVID-19 student surveys. Center on Reinventing Public Education. www.crpe.org/sites/default/files/final_ep_student_survey_synthesis.pdf
Education Endowment Foundation. (n.d.). Best evidence on the impact of COVID on learning.
https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/covid-19-resources/best-evidence-on-impact-of-school-closures-on-the-attainment-gap/
Jaume, D., & Willén, A. (2019, October). The long-run effects of teacher strikes: Evidence from Argentina. Journal of Labor Economics, 37(4), 1097–1139.
Haeck, C., & Lefebvre, P. (2020). Trends in cognitive skill inequalities by socioeconomic status across Canada.
https://grch.esg.uqam.ca/wp-content/uploads/sites/82/Haeck_Lefebvre_GRCH_WP20-04_1-1.pdf
Hough, H., & Witte, J. (2021). Evidence-based practices for assessing students’ social and emotional well-being. EdResearch for Recovery Brief No. 13. https://annenberg.brown.edu/sites/default/files/EdResearch_for_Recovery_Brief_13.pdf
Johnson, L. (2021, March 12.) Alberta Education research aims to track learning loss during COVID-19. Edmonton Journal.
https://edmontonjournal.com/news/politics/alberta-education-research-aims-to-track-learning-loss-during-covid-19.
Murray, V., Jacobson, R., & Gross, B. (2021). Leveraging community partnerships for integrated student support, Ed Research for Recovery Brief 14. Brown University Annenberg Center.
mClass/Amplify. (2020). Instructional loss due to COVID-19 disruptions. Amplify Education.
https://amplify.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/mCLASS_Flyer_CovidBrief-LearningLoss_v8.pdf
OECD. (2020). Lessons for education from COVID-19.
www.oecd.org/education/lessons-for-education-from-covid-19-0a530888-en.htm
OECD. (2021). Canada coronavirus education country note.
http://www.oecd.org/education/Canada-coronavirus-education-country-note.pdf.
Robinson, C., Kraft, M., & Loeb, S. (2021). Accelerating student learning with high-dosage tutoring. EdResearch for Recovery, Brown University Annenberg Center. https://annenberg.brown.edu/sites/default/files/EdResearch_for_Recovery_Design_Principles_1.pdf
Srivastava, P., Cardini, A. et al. (2020). COVID-19 and the global education emergency: Planning systems for recovery and resilience [Policy brief] G-20 Insights.
www.g20-insights.org/policy_briefs/covid-19-and-the-global-education-emergency-planning-systems-for-recovery-and-resilience/
UN Secretary General. (2020). Policy brief: Education during COVID-19 and beyond [Policy brief]. United Nations.
www.un.org/sites/un2.un.org/files/sg_policy_brief_covid-19_and_education_august_2020.pdf
Winthrop, R. (2020). Can new forms of parent engagement be an education game changer post-COVID-19? The Brookings Institution.
www.brookings.edu/blog/education-plus-development/2020/10/21/can-new-forms-of-parent-engagement-be-an-education-game-changer-post-covid-19
Winthrop, R. (2020). COVID-19 and school closures: What can countries learn from past emergencies? The Brookings Institution.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/covid-19-and-school-closures-what-can-countries-learn-from-past-emergencies/
COVID-19 shook up our ingrained ways of “doing education” and has pushed educators, students, and parents to their limits. It opened up new possibilities and revealed deep inequities. Now it’s time to get “back on track.” But which track? We asked two prominent Canadian educational thinkers to share their vision, both immediate and longer-term, for education in the post-pandemic. Read also “Shore Up the Foundations for Future-Proof Education,” by Paul W. Bennett.
Two recurring public pronouncements still ring out from the early days of the pandemic: “We’re all in this together,” and “Can’t wait for things to get back to normal.” Simply put, there is no way we should revert to the old normal. More people than ever now know what some already knew before COVID-19. There are deeply embedded obstacles in the way for far too many to participate equitably in what society has to offer. All in this together should be an aspiration, not a false claim of where we’ve been and where we are now. Getting back to normal? Really? When it comes to education, the curtain has been pulled back to clearly reveal that chronic challenges for too many students mean that a vastly new normal is necessary.
Any discussion about the future of education should begin with the end game, a conversation about its ultimate purpose(s). Any input that I offer is informed by my view that education should ensure that the future is healthier, safer, more just, and prosperous for the many rather than the elite few. We need to start with imagining that better future. How about this superb example:1
“Imagine it’s 2041 and a group of publicly educated 20-year-olds from across Ontario have been asked how they feel about the years they spent in school. The conversation is animated and positive. They say school made them feel like they belonged. It nurtured their compassion for themselves and others. It helped them grow from their mistakes. It welcomed their contributions. And it prepared them for a world of constant change. They say these things regardless of the school they attended, the colour of their skin, their sexual identity, the faith they practice, their physical or intellectual abilities, the teachers they had or the home they grew up in. Though they came from different places, their shared experience of education was one of caring, inclusion and excellence.”
When it comes to most of the complex issues of the day – climate change, health and well-being, racism, our democratic processes, and public communications that seem to divide rather than bring about consensus – education is always noted as the force for improvement. Former head of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Murray Sinclair, regarding the devastating and recurring consequences of residential schools, noted that “Education got us into this mess and education will get us out of it.” Let’s make sure it does!
At this point, we need widespread, diverse, and transparent conversations regarding the future of education. As suggested, people and organizations should start with their view of the end game. What follows is informed by mine.
Given my overarching aspiration for education as the driver for that better future, what should receive priority attention?
A big problem with government policymaking, including processes that have an impact on education, is that the lens for change is microscopic rather than telescopic. Put differently, policymaking too often suffers from what I call hardening of the categories. We will not be able to reach the promises of a new normal in education unless we ensure that critical issues such as income distribution and wage policies, sick leave, affordable housing, child care, and parental leave are part of a holistic and integrative approach by governments. We need governments to think and act horizontally when it comes to policy development and program development. Regarding child care, for example, many have advocated for decades that high-quality, developmentally enriching, non-profit and universal child care should be seen, developed, and implemented as an extension of our education systems.
The pandemic, by necessity, has loosened the constitutionally driven ownership of educational responsibilities by the provinces and territories with short-term cash infusions by the federal government to assist their local “partners” with COVID-related school health and safety issues. Unfortunately, Canada continues its lonely global existence as a country without a federal department of education. Naturally, education needs to serve local cultural and environmental differences, but shouldn’t it mean the same to be a student in Melville, Sask., St. John’s, Nfld., or Toronto? How is it possible that we do not have federal leadership when it comes to the most important nation-building lever for our better future? It’s time for a Canadian Royal Commission on Learning!
It is an understatement to acknowledge that educators, and all those who support them, are treasured essential servant leaders who can take us to that better place for the many. Leadership matters. And to all those who have responsibilities in and around our education systems, I will let Alfred Lord Tennyson have the last word:
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Leading from the Inside Out
Hard-earned lessons from education, government and… baseball
By Charles Pascal
Onyx Publishing, December 2020
Photo: Adobe Stock
1Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board Bullying Prevention and Intervention Review Panel. (2021).
www.hwdsb.on.ca/about/safe-schools-review-panel
COVID-19 shook up our ingrained ways of “doing education” and has pushed educators, students, and parents to their limits. It opened up new possibilities and revealed deep inequities. Now it’s time to get “back on track.” But which track? We asked two prominent Canadian educational thinkers to share their vision, both immediate and longer-term, for education in the post-pandemic. Read also “With Education’s Better Future in Mind,” by Charles E. Pascal.
The global shock of the COVID-19 pandemic turned the K–12 education world upside down and then unleashed a succession of school disruptions. United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking in August 2020, predicted that the effects of the pandemic were destined to become a “generational catastrophe” in education (UNESCO, 2020). Since then, the full extent of the learning slide affecting all students, and particularly the most disadvantaged, became more visible. Much like earlier studies generated in the Netherlands, the U.K., and the U.S., the first wave of Canadian research reports and surveys testify to the combined academic and psycho-social impacts on children and families (Bennett, 2021).
Seeing the impact of school disruptions first-hand in her home, Nancy Small, a Vancouver mother of two increasingly tuned-out school-age children, cut to the heart of the matter: “Our kids are falling behind.” While the educational damage varies along regional, economic, and racial lines, there has been – until recently— little evidence of a coherent or coordinated plan to close the gaping “learning gap” and get today’s students back on track (Alphonso, 2021).
The COVID-19 pandemic shocks have exposed the fragility of the modern, centralized, top-down bureaucratic education state, identified and analyzed in my book, The State of the System. The massive disruption has also revealed the limitations of system-bound school change theories, conceived as hybrid “pedagogical and political projects,”(Fullan, 2009, 2021), ill-equipped to address the immediate crisis in K–12 education.
Education visionaries, school change theorists, and their academic allies were quick to offer up familiar ideas dipped in COVID-19 and accompanied by a beguiling “build back better” narrative (Chapman & Bell, 2020). The post-pandemic future, in their imagined world, will be a clash of two mutually-exclusive visions: social equality and student well-being versus austerity and academic standards – good versus bad. This is, as you will begin to see, a false dichotomy and a misreading of our current educational predicament.
A far better point of departure is provided in the World Bank’s report, COVID-19 Pandemic Shocks to Education (World Bank, 2020), surveying the collateral damage affecting school systems around the world. The immediate impacts were easier to spot, such as the economic and social costs, greater inequalities in access, and school-level health and safety concerns. Less so is the longer-term impact of “learning loss” and its worst-case mutation, “learning poverty,” marked by the inability to read and understand a simple text by ten years of age.
Shoring up the foundations has become a matter of urgent necessity. If we are facing a “generational catastrophe,” it’s time to reframe the challenges facing K–12 education. Teaching children how to read and to be functional in mathematics are now fundamental to social justice in pandemic times. Well-intentioned trauma-informed educational interventions, such as relaxing grading standards, suspending provincial tests, or reverting to pass-fail summative assessments, run the risk of perpetuating the cycle of diminished expectations, falling unevenly on learning-challenged or marginalized students.
Critical thinking remains the holy grail of K–12 education, but it’s hard to envision without a grounding in domain-specific knowledge. Equipping students with the content knowledge to think critically about a full range of important issues (Willingham, 2019) does not exemplify an “academic obsession” but rather a commitment to seeking deeper understanding. Nor are student well-being and academic success necessarily in conflict. At their best, and in the vast majority of today’s classroom, they are rather mutually reinforcing.
Educators looking for a more effective catch-up strategy would be well advised to challenge the prevailing narrative for two vitally-important reasons: 1) the mistaken assumption that an academic focus and student well-being are somehow incompatible; and 2) the gross underestimation of the realities of the “COVID slide” and learning loss compromising the future success of today’s pandemic generation of students (Engzell et al., 2020).
Confronting the magnitude of the crisis and solving the puzzle of what to do next can be daunting, so it is better to focus on a few more immediate, practical strategies. Establishing a clear and consistent focus on closing the learning gap does yield a few quick and proven learning recovery strategies. Most of the initial recovery strategies originated in the U.S., driven largely by independent research institutes such as the North West Education Association, Brookings Institution, and McKinsey & Company (Bennett, 2021). Countries with more experience coping with periodic disruptions are faring better and most of the lessons are coming from their school systems (Alphonso, 2021), most notably the Netherlands and Central European nations.
Academically-focused, supportive school environments and strong teacher-student relationships speed recovery from learning loss. Three strategies that have proven more effective (McKinsey & Company, 2021) are:
Top-down educational leadership has run its course and system-bound solutions will not work. The pandemic shutdown and continuing disruptions exposed what German sociologist Max Weber aptly termed the “Iron Cage” – a bureaucratic structure that traps individuals in an invisible web of order, rationality, conformity, and control (Bennett, 2020). We came to see how dependent students, teachers, and families were on provincial and school district directives. School shutdowns, delayed starts, shifting schedules, and unclear teacher expectations left students and teachers on their own to work out radically different home learning terms of engagement.
Building back the shaken and damaged system will involve confronting squarely the fragility and limitations of top-down, bureaucratic K–12 education. Cage-busting leadership will be required to transform our schools into more autonomous social institutions that, first and foremost, serve students, families, and communities. Challenging the technocratic ethos and language of “learnification” (Biesta, 2019) will be liberating for teachers and reduce the language barrier separating educators from parents. “Learners” will, once again, be students, “learning environments” will be classrooms, and “facilitating learning” recognized as the practice of teaching. Systemic reform will involve undertaking two fundamental structural changes: 1) the restoration of teaching-centred classrooms, and 2) the transition to community-focused, family-centric schools (Bennett, 2020).
Futuristic visions of technology-driven whole-system reform have always evoked skepticism among regular classroom teachers. Sitting around their kitchen tables helping their children with pandemic home learning has opened the eyes of thousands of parents to the everyday realities of technology-driven “21st century learning” and laid bare student skill deficits in mathematics and literacy. That may well explain why Big Ed Tech, exemplified by Google, Microsoft, and Pearson International, is finally attracting more critical scrutiny (Reich, 2020).
Imagining a better educational future may be inspirational, but what students, teachers, and families really need is “future proof” learning (Kirschner & Stoyanov, 2018). That term, coined by leading cognitive science expert Paul A. Kirschner, provides a viable and much-needed alternative to pursuing holistic, ill-defined “21st century skills” or embracing competency-based student graduation standards. The best way forward in pandemic times is deceptively simple: set aside the “21st century skills” panaceas in favour of “the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to continue to learn in a stable and enduring way in a rapidly changing world.”
Future-proof education is soundly based upon the science of learning and evidence-based research rather than sociological change theories. Redesigning schools and professionalizing teachers in 21st century learning strategies look attractive, but they are unlikely to make much difference and may produce heavier teaching workloads without really addressing our current educational crisis.
Cognitive learning specialists provide us with a far more reliable guide to how learning happens and the critical importance of working memory in the whole process. What Kirschner proposes is a three-stage approach:
The COVID-19 shocks to education will continue to reverberate in Canada’s K–12 schools in the near future. It’s a rescue mission and one that needs to begin by shoring up the foundations and putting the pandemic generation back on the path to sound education in purposeful schools, and better prepared to lead meaningful, productive lives.
The State of the System
A reality check on Canada’s schools
By Paul W. Bennett
MQUP, September 2020
Photo: Adobe Stock
Alphonso, C. (2021, Feb. 16). The COVID-19 grading curve: Schools rethink expectations for students who have lost time. The Globe and Mail.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-the-covid-19-grading-curve-schools-rethink-expectations-for-students/
Bennett, P. W. (2021, Feb. 1). How will the education system help students to recover from
learning loss? IRPP Policy Options.
https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/february-2021/how-will-the-education-system-help-students-overcome-covid-learning-loss/
Biesta, G. (2019). Should Teaching be (Re)discovered? Studies in Philosophy and Education, 38,549–553.
Chapman, C., & Bell, I. (2020). Building back better education systems: Equity and COVID-19, Journal of Educational Capital and Community, 5(3/4), 227–236.
Engzell, P., Frey, A. & Verhagen, M. (2020, Aug. 28). Pre-analysis plan for: Learning inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic. https://osf.io/download/5f995b4687b7df03233b06fe/
Fullan, M. (2021). The right drivers for whole system success. Centre for Strategic Education.
Hargreaves, A. (2020). Austerity and inequality; or prosperity for all? Educational policy directions beyond the pandemic. Educational Research for Policy and Practice, 20, 3–10.
Kirschner, P. A. & Stoyanov, S. (2018). Educating youth for nonexistent/not yet existing professions. Education Policy, 34(3).
Reich, J. (2020). Failure to disrupt: Why technology alone can’t transform education. Harvard University Press.
Willingham, D. T. (2020). How to teach critical thinking. NSW Department of Education.
World Bank. (2020). The COVID-19 pandemic: Shocks to education and policy responses. World Bank.
UNESCO. (2020, August 5). UN Secretary-General warns of education catastrophe, pointing to UNESCO estimate of 24 million learners at risk of dropping out. Press release No 2020–73.