When COVID-19 hit in March 2020, pandemic emergency response plans embraced a singular education strategy – close all K–12 schools and default to hastily assembled, and largely untested, “home learning” programs. Nine months into the pandemic, public health authorities, ministries of education, and school superintendents are singing a different tune: keeping students in school is the first priority as we prepare to ride out the second wave of viral infections.
All of us are far more acutely aware of the accumulating academic, human, and social costs of shutting down schools, which fall unevenly upon children and teens in the most disadvantaged communities. Combating the relentless virus and keeping regional economies intact will not likely be greatly advanced through system-wide shutdowns.
With COVID-19 infection rates spiking again, school closures are becoming a distinct possibility, if only as a temporary respite for shaken-up students, fatigued teachers, and bewildered parents. Setting a relatively low infection positivity number, such as the three percent figure applied in closing New York City schools, is unwise because, by that standard, all schools will ultimately close at some point this school year.
What’s emerging is a “flexible response” doctrine that embraces a fuller arsenal of strategies and borrows the phrase popularized by former U.S. Secretary of State Robert McNamara in the early 1960s. Banishing the devastating pandemic requires a carefully considered set of options and a calibrated range of responses.
Let’s review some of the far more effective, targeted strategies:
A case-by-case isolation strategy in provinces and districts with lower transmission rates has proven reasonably effective, as long as the public health system can sustain contact tracing and isolate children and staff who have COVID-19 exposures. It was working, up until now, in most provinces covered by the Atlantic Bubble. Implementation challenges are compromising its effectiveness in Ontario, where the numbers of infections exceed the current capacity for contact tracing.
Extending school holidays is emerging as the most expedient way of applying an education “circuit breaker.” Starting the Christmas holidays early, as in Quebec and Alberta, and extending the break into January 2021, as in Manitoba, are the latest “quick fixes” gaining traction right across Canada. It’s much easier to extend school holiday time because that policy response resonates with teachers and education support workers, and is more minimally disruptive for working parents. Policymakers often opt for the path of least resistance.
Giving students and families the choice of completing courses in-person or online was implemented in Ontario and it caused an array of unanticipated, disruptive, and unpredictable consequences. Students and parents in more affluent school districts in the TDSB chose in-person schooling, while online enrolment was highest in the district’s poorest and most racialized communities. School schedules were constantly changing as students bailed out of in-person classes, generating unexpected demand for online courses. Hundreds of thousands of students in Toronto, Peel, and York Region have shifted online, rendering the two-track strategy essentially unsustainable over the longer term.
Moving to a hybrid blended learning model on a so-called “rotation system” is a response full of implementation bugs. Some Ontario school districts have resorted to dual track delivery models with classes combining in-person and video-streamed classes. That’s far from ideal because effective online teaching requires its own approach, not just televising in-class lessons. Since September 2020, New Brunswick has implemented a Hybrid Blended Learning Model with alternating days in all high schools, with decidedly mixed results. Curriculum coverage suffers, with losses estimated at up to 30 percent of learning outcomes, and student participation rates are reportedly low during the hybrid off days in the checkerboard high-school schedule.
Suspending in-person schooling and reverting to virtual or online home learning is an implementable option, only if it applies to all classes in Grades 7 to 12. Splitting larger classes in urban or suburban school zones is prohibitively expensive without significant hikes in provincial spending. That explains why so many school districts resort to shifting everyone to online classes. Younger children benefit more from teacher-guided instruction and do not spread the virus as readily, judging from K–6 in-person classes in Denmark and British Columbia.
Closing all schools should be the last resort this time around. That’s the consensus among leading British, Canadian, and American pediatricians and epidemiologists. Sending kids home should only be considered if positivity rates spike in schools. It’s an easy decision if and when transmission rates turn schools into vectors and staff infection rates make it impossible to provide a reasonable quality of education.
Resurgent rates of infection and community transmission in October and November have called into question some of the previous assumptions about the limited COVID-19 risks in schools. One recent research summary in Science Magazine painted “a more complex picture” of the very real risks and of the critical need to be flexible and responsive in the face of a rapidly changing, unpredictable public health crisis. There’s no perfect solution, but adopting a “flexible response” strategy, attuned to regional and local pandemic conditions, still makes the most sense.
Photo: Adobe Stock
This webinar is primarily for governments, education professional organizations, school and school district leaders, teachers and education support workers, and anyone interested in understanding current issues for changes to K-12 schooling for the education sector across Canada in the COVID-19 era.
This webinar broadcasted on October 7th, 2020 explores what has been learned so far about leading schools through COVID-19 as we prepare to enter into our second month of school reopening across the country.
Topics explored include:
how our understandings of the work of school leaders is evolving;
the ways in which educators and their professional organizations are navigating ever-changing expectations of schooling during the present time; and
how schools can maintain a focus on the social justice and equity issues that have been laid bare as a result of COVID-19 and its impact on marginalized and racialized communities.
Note: EdCan is a neutral third-party intermediary organization. Live presentations do not constitute an endorsement by the EdCan Network/CEA of information or opinions expressed.
This webinar is primarily for governments, education professional organizations, school and school district leaders, teachers and education support workers, and anyone interested in understanding current issues for changes to K-12 schooling for the education sector across Canada in the COVID-19 era.
This webinar explores what has been learned so far about leading schools through COVID-19 as we prepare to enter into our second month of school reopening across the country.
Topics to be explored include:
how our understandings of the work of school leaders is evolving;
the ways in which educators and their professional organizations are navigating ever-changing expectations of schooling during the present time; and
how schools can maintain a focus on the social justice and equity issues that have been laid bare as a result of COVID-19 and its impact on marginalized and racialized communities.
Note: EdCan is a neutral third-party intermediary organization. Live presentations do not constitute an endorsement by the EdCan Network/CEA of information or opinions expressed.
I still live with hurtful memories of being a timid and apprehensive gay boy who was bullied mercilessly and suffered immense mental anguish during junior and senior high school. I was subjected to incessant name calling and targeted by packs of boys on school buses and school grounds. Later, as a teacher, I was perpetually in fear of being outed as gay and losing my job. I dealt with unrelenting stressors, like finding pictures of naked men left under wiper blades on my car windshield in the school parking lot. These indelible memories are my impetus for wanting to make life better now for sexual and gender minorities (SGMs or LGBTQ2+ persons) in our schools. In Canada today, there is an established basis for doing this, bolstered by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Since the Supreme Court of Canada decision in Vriend v. Alberta in 1998, which granted equality rights to sexual minority Canadians, there have been continuous changes in law, legislation, and educational policy that have abetted recognizing and accommodating SGMs in school culture and curriculum. More recently, Bill C-16, An Act to Amend the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code, which became law in 2017, provided gender minorities with protection against discrimination on the grounds of gender identity and expression.
With such movement forward, what is it like for SGMs to have SGM-specific policy in place in our schools as social spaces where students learn and teachers work? I took up this question in research1 I conducted in a large urban school district in western Canada that had had a standalone SGM policy, rather than merely an umbrella or general equity policy, in place for five years. Having SGM-specific policy is far from the norm in school districts in our country, so I interviewed key interest groups that included students and teachers to learn about their experiences. Students were asked to discuss everyday stressors and supports as they talked about school culture, climate, curriculum, principals, and teachers. Teachers were asked to discuss the importance of having SGM policy and practice that impact the recognition, accommodation, and well-being of SGMs. Here, I share some of their perspectives.
Students’ perspectives: What teachers do matters
The high-school students I interviewed commonly spoke about the need to educate others about SGMs and our issues and concerns. One student who was president of his high-school GSA (Gay-Straight Alliance or Gender-Sexuality Alliance) spoke pragmatically about this:
“I think having more education would be helpful because when people are uneducated, they don’t like what they don’t understand or what they don’t perceive to be normal. I think having education is a really big aspect. Incorporating LGBTQ+ case studies into courses would be really helpful.”
Another high-school student spoke about her former faith-based school where sexual orientation was still a taboo topic. She related, “It was never spoken about. There were no comments on it, and anything you did to try to bring it up, they’d put you down.” She spoke positively about the SGM-inclusive culture in her current school, stating, “I find it very welcoming. You see same-sex couples in the hallway, and there’s nothing – nobody blinks an eye.” She spoke about the teachers, saying, “One of my friends had a teacher who used their preferred pronouns and names. So that’s one teacher I know who’s very accepting. I’m pretty sure there are multiple other teachers who would as well. On the first day, they read off the attendance list and, of course, that’s your legal name. But if you ask, there are multiple teachers who will use the student’s preferred name and pronouns.” Another high school student also spoke about the naming issue, using an example to indicate how students can be negatively impacted in a public way: “One thing that sucks is for Valentine’s Day, they do the hearts. They write everyone’s name on a heart and put them in the lunchroom downstairs. But because they use the attendance list to do it, it’s birth names and legal names. So that can cause anxiety.” One trans-identified student who uses he/him pronouns provided this particular concern regarding naming and roll call. He recounted, “A big issue that you need to work with is substitute teachers. My legal name and the name that I go by are not the same, so I always need to talk to the substitutes ahead of time. That’s a bit stressful. Sometimes they forget. They always try, but you can’t remember everything.” Regarding his teachers in general, this student pondered, “I wish there was some way for the teachers to understand how significant it is to respect pronouns and labels and titles because I feel like some of them don’t understand some of the consequences. The first few times don’t bother you that much, but the more it happens, the more it bothers you. Most of my teachers don’t seem to understand how much it affects me. It makes me feel crappy.” Like other students I interviewed, this student spoke about the need to educate teachers:
“I feel because teachers are directly interacting with and impacting queer youth, it should be part of training them on a PD day or something, just to take a crash course on understanding. I don’t know if those things do happen or what the situation is with that. I just wish in general that people knew more about us and just the facts and less of the perceptions. I don’t know specifically what would be available to them, though. I do wish there was more information that was commonly known. Overall, I think our teachers are pretty supportive – some more than others – just because they’re more educated on everything. And some really try to learn with you, which is helpful. They want you to tell them stuff that they don’t know. There’s still a lot of improvements that can be made, a lot more information that can be shared. With more knowledge, there’s less misunderstanding, there’s less judgment, and everybody can just live together more peacefully and not be angry at each other or confused.”
Teachers’ perspectives: Knowing school culture, being an advocate
Supportive teachers I interviewed saw schools as social spaces where they engaged in strategic actions to advance SGM inclusion. One high-school teacher provided this perspective on what constituted an SGM-inclusive culture in her school:
“The school is very welcoming and comprehensive in terms of how staff accept students and how students themselves are perceived around the school. There isn’t a lot of discussion that we have to do because the SGM policy dictates behaviour. It’s more about creating a culture: We’ll do it because that’s what people do. This results in fewer students seeking out the GSA on a regular basis because the culture of the school itself is so open and accepting that everywhere is a safe place. The school encounters zero parent resistance to pink shirt day and other GSA events. The administration is very vocally supportive of the students wherever they are in their identity journey. They want to put those students first, ahead of any reservations of parents or complaints from community members. Everyone realizes that comfort is not covered under our provincial human rights legislation, but lack of discrimination and the ability to exist in your identity are covered.”
Of course, creating a genuinely accepting SGM-inclusive school culture takes time. Another high school teacher spoke about his GSA work to help non-heterosexual boys become more comfortable with their sexual identities: “In the GSA, it’s always more girls than guys – substantially. It’s probably 80 percent girls and 20 percent boys, if not lower. I’ve talked to other GSA teachers, and they’ve seen the same thing. Many times, I’ve heard girls say that they felt safe. I haven’t really heard a boy commenting either way. Maybe that’s why fewer boys come to the GSA meeting. There generally is more of a stigma for them, especially in high schools.” Paralleling this perspective on non-heterosexual boys’ discomfort, another high school teacher provided this observation: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen any boys holding hands, but I’ve seen lots more girls holding hands – girlfriends. That’s now just as okay as heterosexual couples walking down the hallway.” A junior high school teacher offered a similar perspective, indicating it is not just a high-school issue: “The girls seem to be far more comfortable at the junior high age for sure compared to the boys. Absolutely, I don’t think boys are quite there yet at this stage, which is sad. It’s unfortunate.”
Many teachers spoke to the importance of having a standalone school district policy on sexual orientation and gender identity to fortify the work to create an SGM-inclusive school culture. In this regard, one teacher working in an all-grades setting provided her perspective on living out this policy in word and action:
“It’s about a district level of support that starts with leadership. It’s about letting all staff know that it’s about not having prejudice and discrimination based on a student’s perceived or actual sexual orientation or gender identity. It’s about being appropriate with our responses as a staff if we encounter that, whether it’s in behaviours, comments, or the actions of other students. But it goes so much deeper. It’s in the way you would group students, in washroom use and locker use, in language use in the classroom, and in resources and approaches. So, it’s really helpful in building on safe and caring schools. It gives us something to work toward so we’re all consistent. We have a policy and we have the support of our district to continue to do that.”
In sum, teachers provided an array of reasons why a standalone SGM policy is a good thing. One high-school teacher saw it as assurance enabling SGM inclusion when teachers couldn’t rely on the school principal. He concluded, “Putting a policy on this was a good thing because you’re not always going to have an understanding administrator, a forward-thinking administrator.” A junior high school teacher felt the policy enabled him to start a GSA, which subsequently contributed to more SGM inclusion in his school. He said, “I’ve had students say how much better it is in the school since we started the GSA. I used to hear students say, ‘That’s so gay’ – constantly. I can’t even remember the last time I had to say something to a student about that. It’s just known that that’s not acceptable to do anymore. Those sorts of things to do with language and what’s acceptable in schools – I think a lot of that has to do with the policy.”
A standalone SGM policy that is consistently implemented… is a clear indicator that a school district has the backs of SGM teachers and allied teachers.
Considering whether the standalone policy made a difference for teachers in her district, a teacher working in a K-12 school responded, “I think by our surety that we’ve got our backs covered, that makes us stronger in what we’re trying to achieve.” She also saw the policy as effective in assisting SGM students who require basic accommodation that includes having their physical needs met: “I know last year, one student would go home to go to the bathroom. Of course, they wouldn’t come back. Washroom access is something so simple and so painful at the same time.”
Supporting SGM teachers, creating an SGM-inclusive school
Increasingly today, young SGM teachers choose to be vocal and visible at work, which is enabled when there is policy in place to protect them. However, many SGM teachers in our country still navigate homophobia and transphobia in their schools. Their challenges and concerns are well documented in The Every Teacher Project on LGBTQ Inclusive Education in Canada’s K-12 Schools.2
Importantly, a gay junior high school teacher spoke about the significance of having the policy in terms of SGM teacher welfare:
“I think it’s fantastic. I think it’s awesome. When it got put in place in our school district, it just seemed quite far advanced from where the rest of the province was. Just being able to know you’ve got the backing of the board is huge. Knowing that you can go in and ask these questions and do these things and not be petrified is massive. Not that it ever felt like there was a lot of homophobia in my district. I know people have encountered pockets of it here and there. I know of some horror stories, but I came out in my second year as a teacher. It was never a big deal, but it’s still nice to know that the board has your back.”
Indeed, having a standalone SGM policy that is consistently implemented and periodically reviewed is a clear indicator that a school district has the backs of SGM teachers and allied teachers engaged in SGM-inclusive work. Such specific policy can nurture an SGM-positive school culture and encourage principals to lead the way in being there for SGM students and teachers. In the end, policy is protection and its purposeful implementation is true recognition and accommodation of SGM students and teachers.
In terms of being there for SGM teachers, here are three constructive ways to be accommodative: First, show support. Notably, having strong support from school leaders can create a more open dialogue and space whereby SGM teachers feel safe to deliver and engage in SGM-inclusive education. Second, develop inclusive workplace policies. At the school district level, standalone anti-homophobia and anti-transphobia policies covering SGM staff and students – rather than generic equity policy – should stand alongside workplace harassment policies and be implemented to protect and support SGM staff. Third, create a professional and/or informal network. SGM teachers within the district can form a professional GSA where they meet to share their experiences, learn from one another, and develop trusting and supportive professional relationships.
As well, teachers – including SGM teachers needing mentors – students, principals, and parents can learn from the good work that openly LGBTQ+ educators do. Here is an excerpt from an interview I conducted with an openly gay elementary school principal in the school district who spoke about his work to be a change agent and advocate in his school:
“What do I do at my school? Certainly, we have our safe-contact teachers identified. We also have the safe and caring rainbow stickers. There’s one right as you enter the school, and there’s one on my office door, my assistant principal’s door, and on the classroom doors of the safe contact teachers and other supportive teachers. I’ve had many conversations with my parent council around the work we’re doing in order to have their support for the SOGI [sexual orientation and gender identity] work in our school. Our library collection is also growing as we find more and more stories that depict the LGBTQ+ youth and their families and same-sex families. I also have conversations with my staff about heteronormativity, the gender spectrum, and the language we use with students. So, is it working? I certainly know that my staff is very aware. Also, my sexuality is not hidden from my staff, so my staff know who I am. I also let them know that my partner is male and he’s a grade one teacher. I do it because I want them to know that I believe in the normalization of sexuality and gender in our schools, that it is no big deal. It is just who we are.”
Illustration: Diana Pham
First published in Education Canada, September 2020
1 The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded this research.
2 C. Taylor, T. Peter, C. Campbell, et al., The Every Teacher Project on LGBTQ-inclusive Education in Canada’s K-12 Schools: Final report (Winnipeg, MB: Manitoba Teachers’ Society, 2015). http://egale.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Every-Teacher-Project-Final-Report-WEB.pdf
“Teachers should not feel that it’s normal to feel unsafe at school.”
– Special education resource teacher
Violence in schools is usually framed in relation to student-on-student bullying, but schools are also workplaces for (predominantly women) teachers and educational assistants: workers who are entitled to – but do not always experience – a safe and violence-free workplace. Over the last decade, unions representing education workers have mobilized to shed light on the “dirty little secret” of educator-directed violence, and the issue has received a measure of media attention. Surprisingly, however, while there are numerous studies examining peer-on-peer violence among students, the harassment and violence experienced by educators has received limited scholarly attention. Indeed, while research on bullying, harassment, and violence against students number in the thousands, we were able to locate less than ten studies on educator-directed harassment and violence in Canada.
To start to address this gap in the scholarly literature, we surveyed 1,688 Ontario English public elementary school educators (contract and occasional teachers, PSP/ESPs, ECEs/DECEs, and other educational professionals) in December 2018 about their experiences of workplace harassment (e.g. slurs, insults, and put-downs) and violence (i.e. acts, attempts, and threats of physical aggression) in the 2017-2018 school year. The Harassment and Violence against Educators (Ontario) Survey endeavoured to assess the frequency, impact, and response to harassment and violence against educators as well as to determine how experiences of, and the response to, harassment and violence are impacted by intersecting factors such as gender, dis/ability, and racialization.
Our full report, Facing the Facts: The escalating crisis of violence against educators, can be downloaded at www.educatorviolence.net. Below, we have summarized select key findings.
The escalating crisis
“I love teaching… However, the emotional and mental abuse that I have been subjected to on a daily basis, and the physical toll it has been taking on my body is unbelievable… I took a medical leave from work due to the stress and abuse. I learned that [my health issues] are due to a prolonged exposure to these conditions.” – Grade 2 French Immersion teacher
The 2017-2018 Harassment and Violence against Educators (Ontario) Survey provides stark evidence that educator-directed harassment and violence is escalating and quickly becoming a crisis. Indeed, rates of harassment and violence are critically high. In a single year, as many as one in two educators will experience violence and as many as 70% will experience harassment, whether from a student, parent, colleague, or administrator. Moreover, harassment and violence are increasing dramatically. Rates of harassment have at least doubled, and rates of physical violence have increased seven- to ten-fold over the last two decades. At the same time, we see a disturbing normalization of violence against educators by administrators, educators, and students operating in tandem with the widespread minimization and/or denial of its multifaceted impacts by administrators, school boards, and politicians. In addition, findings from the Harassment and Violence against Educators (Ontario) Survey indicate that workplace violence is being underreported, and when reported, is all too often accompanied by blame and reprisal. This suggests that official rates underestimate the true prevalence and speaks to an organizational culture that is ill-equipped to address the issue. In real terms, while school boards have embraced the language of progressive discipline mandated under the provincial Education Act, educators told us that, in practice, there are few consequences for students’ harassing and violent behaviour. Finally, findings from the current study suggest that many educators feel neither adequately supported nor prepared and trained to deal with the student-initiated harassment and violence that they are experiencing.
Rates of harassment have at least doubled and rates of physical violence have increased seven- to ten-fold over the last two decades.
The escalating crisis of educator-directed harassment and violence speaks to the compounding impact of structural, fiscal, and social factors. The past 20 years have seen significant changes in society, including growing income disparity, social inequality, and economic stress, a rise in both moderate and severe mental health difficulties among children,3 and the ubiquity of electronic devices, all of which have increased the needs of students. At the same time, we have seen significant shifts in provincial education policies, including a commitment to mainstreaming (placing students with complex needs in regular classrooms with correspondingly decreased use of segregated classrooms) institutionally structured “corrective and supportive” progressive discipline policies,4 and ministry-mandated “Learning for all”5 approaches based on the recognition that “all students learn best when instruction, resources, and the learning environment are well suited to their particular strengths, interests, needs, and stage of readiness.”6 To be successful, these evidence-based practices require significant investment in infrastructure, materials, professional development, and human resources. Unfortunately, as needs and expectations increase, funding formulas have not been recalibrated. Indeed, in Ontario, the impact of deep funding cuts introduced under the Mike Harris government (1995 to 2002) continues to echo.7 In classrooms across Canada, educators are scrambling to meet ever-expanding expectations – from more Individual Education Plans to increased class size to standardized testing requirements – with decreasing levels of support and resources. The result is entirely predictable – frustrated, struggling children whose needs are not being met are “lashing out.”
Harassment and violence, coupled with inadequate (and potentially declining) resources to meet the needs of students, the normalization of harassment and violence against educators, a fear of reprisal for reporting, low levels of support, increasing levels of incivility, the uncertainty about how to effectively respond to harassment and violence, and an unwillingness on the part of administrators to consequence aggressive behaviour is having detrimental impacts on the classroom learning environment, students, and the health and well-being of educators. Indeed, in light of the high rates of harassment and violence experienced by educators in the performance of their duties, it is reasonable to expect that most educators will suffer a mental injury (e.g. PTSD, burnout) at some point in their careers. Accordingly, in addition to strategies to reduce harassment and violence in schools, it is essential that adequate resources (such as access to mental health professionals) are available to ensure that educators who experience harassment and violence have the opportunity to address any mental or physical injuries they sustain, as well as to learn the skills needed to cope with ongoing exposure to harassment and violence.
Action is needed
Addressing this significant problem will require a commitment to immediate action, including:
The workplace violence educators experience has significant and far-reaching costs. It impacts educators’ health, well-being, careers, ability to do their jobs, and relationships. In real terms, the violence reverberates through their personal and professional lives and in turn though the lives of their families, their colleagues, and the students they teach – creating ever more ripples that impact other families and indeed the broader community and society. The impacts also ripple over time – we can only imagine how the casual normalization of violence against (predominantly women) educators is shaping the perceptions and expectations of a generation of students.
Illustration: Diana Pham
First published in Education Canada, September 2020
1 David R. Lyon and Kevin S. Douglas, Violence Against B.C. Teachers: Report of the Simon Fraser University/British Columbia Teachers’ Federation violence against teachers survey (Burnaby, B.C.: SFU Mental Health, Law and Policy Institute, 1999).
2 The financial costs associated with days of work following an incident of harassment and violence were calculated in the following manner. Assuming a conservative rate of violence or harassment that would require time off work, of say just 10% (which is less than one fifth of the rate reported in this survey), then it can be expected that some 8,000 educators would have taken time off work at the time that the survey was conducted. If 25% of those 8,000 educators took the average number of 6.84 days off work, the average cost of replacing these educators in the classroom would be $1,652.31 each, amounting to over 3 million dollars annually. It is important to keep in mind that this estimates a very low rate of exposure to harassment and violence and estimates only the replacement costs associated with a single incident of harassment (and not violence) in any given year. It is important to keep in mind that educators in this survey reported multiple instances of violence and harassment in a single year.
3 A. Boak, H. A Hamilton, et al., The Mental Health and Well-being of Ontario Students, 1991-2017: Detailed findings from the Ontario Student Drug Use and Health Survey – CAMH Research Document Series No. 47 (Toronto, ON: Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, 2018).
4 Ontario Ministry of Education, Supporting Bias-Free Progressive Discipline in Schools (2013). www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/policyfunding/SupportResGuide.pdf
5 Ontario Ministry of Education, Learning for All: A guide to effective assessment and instruction for all students, Kindergarten to Grade 12 (2013). www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/general/elemsec/speced/LearningforAll2013.pdf
6 Ontario Ministry of Education, Learning for All: 8.
7 H. Mackenzie, Course Correction: A blueprint to fix Ontario’s education funding formula (Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, 2018). www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/Ontario%20Office/2018/03/Course%20Correction.pdf
In Canada, K-12 education systems have a key role in developing strategies to support the mental health and wellbeing of students and staff. While stand alone programs have provided useful content for educators in addressing mental health and wellbeing, it is increasingly recognized that more systemic and sustainable solutions are required to address these issues over the long-term.
Grounded in discussions that took place at two National Roundtable events, this paper outlines why and how K-12 system leaders and their partners must move beyond one-off interventions, programs, and professional development towards an approach where mental health and wellbeing is integrated in the core mandate of public education.
This webinar is primarily for governments, education professional organizations, school and school district leaders, teachers and education support workers, and anyone interested in understanding current issues for changes to K-12 schooling for the education sector across Canada in the COVID-19 era.
In March of 2020, Canadian education systems first began to close schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As well as the emergency response shift to remote learning from home, we must also begin to turn our attention to the inevitable task of planning for the future of schooling over the short and medium term. As school reopenings internationally are showing, this is not simply a return to schooling as normal. Moreover, since education in Canada is a provincial responsibility, responses to COVID-19 have been diverse and we would expect plans for the future to be appropriately varied. Fundamentally, what we will need to ask ourselves is: “What conditions need to be in place for students to learn and for teachers to teach, and how will leaders across the system adapt to support these conditions?”
This one-hour webinar panel discussion originally broadcasted on June 11th, 2020 explored how we will understand effective leadership across the education sector for the coming months and years by considering implications for governments, teacher organizations, and school leaders.
Why does the Canadian apprenticeship system have relatively low participation and completion rates, despite a chronic labour shortage in skilled trades? Closing this apprenticeship training gap by developing a more integrated, accessible, and expanded apprenticeship system will ensure more effective transitions from school to work for many students.
Canada has one of the most fully developed systems of general formal education in the world. There are diverse and relatively accessible programs of studies from early Kindergarten to post-doctoral university levels. By international standards, the quality of many of these programs is outstanding, as confirmed by the recently released OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests for reading, mathematics and science.1 The proportion of Canadians who have completed a post-secondary university or community college program is among the highest in the world. Canadian school systems still have a lot of room for improvement on equity issues, but in terms of general levels of participation and quality of provision, they have few current peers.2 In addition, it is well documented that Canadian adults are very active lifelong learners, spending much more time in informal learning activities than organized formal education.3 But the Canadian apprenticeship system is quite a different story.
In stark contrast, the Canadian apprenticeship system has had relatively low participation rates and low completion rates. There is long-time agreement among policymakers that there have been chronic shortages of certified skilled trades, and public opinion surveys consistently show that the majority of Canadians want to give among the highest funding priorities to apprenticeship programs.4
The German apprenticeship system has frequently been suggested as one Canada could emulate.5 According to recent estimates, about half of Germans in their 30s have completed an apprenticeship. Most of these start at high school age, with extensive information about a wide range of occupations – and placements into them – available through school-related agencies and networks of employers. The vast majority of apprenticeships are completed and most lead to permanent jobs. Most Canadian apprenticeships begin after high school is finished, when both information and placements remain fragmented, and completions are probably less than half. So, only around ten percent of Canadians in their 30s have completed apprenticeships. (See Figure 1.)While there are many differences between German and Canadian apprenticeship systems and both systems are changing, it is reasonably clear that the Canadian system has a lot of room for development.
On the other hand, Germans in their 30s are only about half as likely as Canadians to have university or college completion. So, it could be argued that many Germans are being denied opportunities to reach their full educational potential by early selection into specific occupations, however effective their apprenticeships are. The bottom line for Canada is that there is great potential for closing the apprenticeship training gap by providing more opportunities for practical job-related training in conjunction with our current high post-secondary educational levels.
It is reasonably clear that, whatever decent jobs are available in the foreseeable future, more of them will involve working with knowledge rather than handling material goods – the much heralded “knowledge economy.” Since the 1980s, both industrial trades and clerical, sales and service jobs have been declining, while professional and managerial jobs have grown greatly.6 Rapid increases in popular demand for, and completion of, post-secondary education reflect public awareness of these employment changes. But there is a serious and increasing disconnect between advanced education and jobs. There are now many more highly qualified graduates than jobs with matching requirements, a condition we call underemployment or over-qualification. Canada has one of the most underemployed labour forces in the world. Of course, in a dynamic market economy, there are continual technological changes that call for new technical skills. But with Canadian students and workers continuing pursuit of new qualifications and informal lifelong learning, specific skills gaps do not last long and their underemployment continues to grow.7
One response to this condition would be to narrow access to post-secondary education. While this might now appeal to some short-sighted, austerity-minded elites, denial of educational opportunity is never a good idea and it would also fritter away Canada’s current leading post-secondary education position. Much better to find ways to close the gap by improving the linkage between advanced education and 21st century jobs.
The most effective means of linking education and jobs has been apprenticeship. Prior to the era of industrialization and mass schooling, most work-related learning occurred on the job from others who had already mastered it. In countries with well-established skilled trades apprenticeship systems, like Germany, these systems became integrated with emerging school systems. In Canada, we relied for a long time on importing skilled trades from abroad while schooling developed quite separately. The technical skill-focused programs in high schools had little connection with relevant job experience.
The relatively small apprenticeship programs in Canada and the U.S., generally with poor linkage to the educational system and low completion rates, have changed only gradually. This contrasts with more rapid evolution and expansion in countries like Germany, Australia and England to many occupations beyond the dwindling numbers in traditional skilled trades. Canada may now finally be producing more auto mechanics and plumbers on a per capita basis than Germany, but Germany is producing far more apprenticed IT professionals, health technologists and other knowledge workers better matched to the growing numbers of knowledge economy jobs. We are producing plenty of potential knowledge workers through our universities and colleges, but without effective linkage to apprenticeship experience, many of their skills are wasted: nearly 50 percent of clerical, sales and service workers in Canada are now underemployed and their skills are unrecognized by their employers. There is also serious continuing underrepresentation of women, visible minorities and immigrants in apprenticeships. All these conditions cry out for coordinated national action.
Policymakers in some countries (e.g. France) have recognized the value of creating effective new pathways between post-secondary education and apprenticeships in response to the growth of knowledge work that requires advanced formal education to perform well. The challenge for Germany is to produce more post-secondary graduates to link with its apprenticeship system. This is probably a greater institutional and resource challenge than Canada’s need to create apprenticeships for its much higher proportion of post-secondary graduates.
An anemic apprenticeship system is not the only reason for the large gap between educational qualifications and workplace utilization in Canada. A branch-plant economy focused on extraction and export of raw materials rather than more complex value-added jobs has been a factor. Governments responded keenly to popular demand for more post-secondary education programs in the simplistic belief that such educational investment would naturally lead to job creation – it did not. Antagonistic workplace relations led employers’ organizations with similar faith in human capital investment for job creation to encourage the production of large numbers of highly qualified potential workers – perhaps also in the hope that their presence as a “reserve army” would serve to discipline already hired workers. Unions in this context found little chance of working with either employers or governments cooperatively to determine working conditions or workplace training programs, as was the case for many years in Germany’s “co-determination” model.
But all of these conditions are changing in Canada – with growing recognition of underemployment of post-secondary graduates, the evident need to “harness” the talent of more of these highly qualified people for a “knowledge economy” and an increasing level of organization of professional employees into unions and associations to contend for greater recognition and reward for their skills. The need for an apprenticeship system linking workplace experience more fully and effectively with both high schools and post-secondary institutions is becoming painfully obvious to anyone who cares to look closely at education and work in this country.
Many people now recognize the value of linking formal schooling and job experience. For many years, some of our universities have reached out to networks of employers and developed effective programs integrating schooling and work in applied fields like engineering. Most community colleges now have administrative departments established to aid in providing practical job experience for students. There have also been increasing efforts to provide pathways to apprenticeships via high schools (e.g. Co-op Diploma Apprenticeships in Ontario). Individuals are making increasing efforts to find more effective pathways to jobs – more university graduates are going to community colleges to acquire technical job skills, for example. In sum, there are increasing numbers of largely ad hoc efforts at all levels of the education system to find means to ensure needed job experience for prospective graduates, but most have proven temporary and difficult to sustain. Coordinated initiatives to further develop the apprenticeship system in this country continue to suffer from a lack of commitment by employers, labour unions and governments. At the same time, there is probably no other public policy issue on which there is currently greater declared agreement between the general public, employers, unions and governments across this country than the need for a more fully developed apprenticeship system for more effective preparation for 21st century jobs. There are working models all around us. They have to be more effectively organized and expanded. But that is a task that neither Canadian employers, unions nor governments are inclined to own at the moment.
Employers, unions and governments have alluded ad nauseum to an array of barriers preventing growth of our apprenticeship system much beyond 50 odd Red Seal trades recognized since the 1960s. Familiar factors include: regional economic differences, inequitable funding responsibilities, overly complex administrative processes, low status of apprentices, and parental bias toward more academic programs. All of these may be valid from the standpoint of current vested interests. But all are also directly surmountable through concerted action such as:
A more fully developed apprenticeship system would not be a panacea for all education-job transition problems, but it would ensure more effective transitions from school to work for many and reduce underemployment for large numbers of post-secondary graduates. We have seen exceptional personal efforts by Canadian young people in recent decades to invest in higher education. They deserve decent jobs to use their achieved qualifications for the good of themselves and society. Canadian employers, labour unions, governments and the highly educated general public all now increasingly recognize the value of apprenticeships. Concerted efforts by our governments, employers and unions are needed now. Let’s do it.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, June 2020
1 Snapshot of Student Performance: www.oecd.org/pisa/publications/pisa-2018-resultshtm.htm
2 David Clandfield et al., Restacking the Deck: Streaming by class, race and gender in Ontario schools (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2014).
3 D. W. Livingstone, Lifelong Learning in Paid and Unpaid Work: Survey and case study findings (London: Routledge, 2010).
4 Doug Hart and Arlo Kempf, Public Attitudes Toward Education in Ontario 2018: The 20th OISE survey of educational issues (Toronto: Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, 2018). www.oise.utoronto.ca
5 For an extensive comparison of the Canadian apprenticeship system with Germany, England, France, Australia, the U.S. and several other countries, see Erica Smith and Ros Brennan Kemmis, Towards a Model Apprenticeship Framework: A comparative analysis of national apprenticeship systems (Geneva: International Labour Office, 2013).
6 D. W. Livingstone and B. Watts, “The Changing Class Structure and Pivotal Role of Professional Employees in an Advanced Capitalist ‘Knowledge Economy’: Canada, 1982–2016,” Studies in Political Economy99, No. 1 (2018): 79-96.
7 D. W. Livingstone, “Underemployment of Highly Qualified Labour in Advanced Capitalism: Trends and prospects,” Journal of Education and Work 32, No. 4 (2019): 305-319.
What can we learn from British Columbia’s system-wide educational transformation efforts to shift from a centralized standards-based curriculum toward flexible learning paths? Leyton Schnellert identifies the factors that have supported success.
British Columbia is undergoing large-scale change within its K-12 education system, with a commitment to transform education to better meet the needs of all learners. To be successful within and contribute to an evolving global context, B.C. is currently implementing a new curriculum designed for 21st century learners. Twenty-first century learners need to be flexible, creative and able to learn from and within a variety of real and virtual environments.1 B.C.’s new curriculum offers an opportunity for innovation and significant shifts in teaching practice.
B.C.’s current system-wide educational transformation efforts position the province as a global pioneer in the shift from a centralized standards-based curriculum toward flexible learning paths. Worldwide, the real challenge in education is not to reform systems but to transform them; not to fix them through a collection of disjointed efforts but to change systems through collaborative partnerships among the public, educational professionals, and governments. B.C.’s efforts aim to evolve an already successful educational system into one that takes into account current research on teaching and learning to prepare learners to succeed and lead in a changing world. In particular, the aim is for learners to develop the skills of “creative thinking, problem solving, initiative, curiosity, and the ability to lead and work well in groups.”2 To achieve this goal, notions of what needs to be learned, how, and where have changed significantly; these transformational changes require all stakeholders to take risks, develop innovative practices, and work together.
Fortunately, in B.C. there currently exist a number of promising professional development practices that support the above transformation. These include inquiry-based approaches which have been found to impact not only teachers’ learning, but also their practice in classrooms. When engaged in cycles of inquiry, teachers identify challenges and opportunities in relation to student learning, pose questions, develop criteria for monitoring success, draw on resources to enhance their own learning, and then embed new ideas in practice.3 In contrast to short-term, more fragmented professional development approaches such as one-shot workshops, inquiry-based professional development assists teachers to sustain attention to goals over time and to integrate new ideas into practice. Particularly impactful inquiry-based professional development approaches are collaborative in nature, and either develop or are based in collaborative networks of professionals that are generative and enduring over time.
In this article I outline some of the key scaffolds and lessons learned over the past seven years as B.C. shifted from piloting our K-9 renewed curriculum to full K-12 implementation. It is important to note that B.C.’s renewed curriculum significantly decreases content outcome requirements and instead emphasizes big ideas (concept-based learning), disciplinary competencies, and cross-curricular core competencies (critical, creative and reflective thinking; communication; collaboration; personal and social awareness and responsibility). This shift has required teachers to rethink what they teach and opened the door to thinking about how they teach.
In preparation for the Learning Forward Conference held in Vancouver in December 2016, I interviewed educational leaders, teachers, and government representatives about the key scaffolds that were already in place prior to our current education transformation agenda, and how these had helped us to embrace the renewed curriculum.
The most common response had to do with our province’s long-standing action research culture. A second key theme highlighted multi-partner initiatives that brought together the Ministry of Education, B.C. Teachers’ Federation, and university researchers. When these two factors combined, significant and sustained education change across rural and urban school districts occurred. (By contrast, some past change initiatives failed to build inquiry-oriented learning partnerships and were stymied.) A number of previous initiatives4 all contributed to B.C.’s collaborative inquiry culture through cross-institutional partnerships. Of note, in each of these initiatives, there was a critical thinking focus, voluntary professional development that brought educators together from across schools and school districts, and resources offered as fuel for inquiry and exploration. Teachers were situated as action researchers engaging in classroom investigations, bringing samples of student work to networking sessions and contributing to the development of shared provincial criteria using exemplars from their classrooms. The sense of agency and ownership that participating educators felt resulted in grassroots change. Countering top-down notions of implementation, educators were recognized as curriculum and pedagogy creators. This benefitted B.C. greatly as teachers, schools, and school districts used these criteria to pilot research-based approaches that made space for student voice, focused on critical thinking, and required responsive teaching.
As we began the 2010s, and draft revised curricula became available, various groups in B.C. built on the processes (action research/inquiry teams) and focuses (critical thinking, open-ended pedagogies, formative assessment) of these previous initiatives. Educators were invited to try out draft competency-based curriculum in their classrooms and offer feedback. Many school districts around the province created professional learning series where teams of teachers co-planned units of study that were competency-based and, in particular, aligned formative and summative assessment. Many educators embraced inquiry teaching and learning within these explorations, in part because with decreased content demands, they had time to explore big ideas and concepts over longer periods of time. Different conceptions of and approaches to inquiry (e.g. open inquiry, guided inquiry, project-based learning) were debated and explored. For example, I had the opportunity to work with a learning team in School District No. 43 (Coquitlam). Two teachers from each school in this large suburban district attended as inquiry partners. In each of our five sessions, I highlighted some aspects of the renewed curriculum:
While I introduced theoretical perspectives and research as part of these sessions, teacher researchers decided what fit for them in their classrooms and infused these ideas into their planning and teaching. The work was not without tensions, such as concerns expressed about a lack of pre-existing and/or grade-specific teaching and learning resources that aligned with the new curriculum. However, participants engaged in transformational work in their classrooms, designing classroom experiences and units that took into account the strengths, stretches, and interests of their students and opportunities for learning in their contexts.
Another key scaffold in our change efforts has been B.C.’s decades-long commitment to and extensive work in inclusive education, equity, and social justice. In the 1980s, B.C. embraced calls for inclusive education, dismantling segregated programs and classrooms and striving to develop classroom communities that welcome and celebrate diverse learners. Most recently, there has been important and significant attention regarding equity and access to learning for our Indigenous learners. For example, Laura Tait’s work in SD68 (Nanaimo-Ladysmith) focuses on collective ownership regarding Indigenous learners. Defining collective ownership as every person in the system embracing and taking responsibility for the success of our Indigenous students, she calls for us to shift our thinking away from “Indigenous education for Indigenous students” to “what’s good for Indigenous students is good for all students.”
B.C.’s renewed curriculum asks educators to teach “how Aboriginal perspectives and understandings help us learn about the world.” Due to this change, B.C. educators have been seeking ways to incorporate Indigenous voices and perspectives into curriculum, ensuring that Indigenous content is a part of the learning journey for all students and that the best information guides the work. This opportunity – and tension – has led to rich professional inquiry and learning.
Just previous to the development of B.C.’s renewed curriculum, the First Peoples Principles of Learning, a set of nine principles, were developed by the First Nations Education Steering Committee and the Ministry of Education to reflect some of the common Indigenous perspectives and understandings in B.C. However, it is important to note that these principles do not reflect the beliefs of any individual Nation. Teacher inquiry teams across the province have been exploring synergies between the renewed curriculum and Indigenous learning principles5, such as:
One example of equity-oriented collaborative inquiry is School District No. 67’s Through a Different Lens (TADL) initiative. SD67 had consistently achieved an 80-85 percent six-year school completion rate at the outset of the TADL initiative. But their two most at-risk populations, students of Indigenous ancestry and students with behavioural challenges, had, respectively, just 50 percent and 40 percent respective completion rates. Wanting to make a difference for students who were at risk of not completing school, a small inquiry group of interested middle and secondary teachers formed. They were committed to teaching and assessing in more innovative ways and tracking the results of these shifts in their practice. TADL grew to include 75 educators who meet in collaborative inquiry groups of 10-15 teachers six times throughout the year. Teachers identify a student who is at risk of not completing school, and learn from this student as an expert (curriculum informant) throughout their inquiry. Following Universal Design for Learning principles, TADL teachers interview and observe their expert students and develop and offer pathways for learning based on this student’s strengths, interests, and passions. They then offer these pathways to all students in the class. In their inquiry team meetings, the educators use a common “four-square” graphic organizer where they reflect on their actions and successes. Finally, group members brainstorm next steps to learn from and with their students, and adjust their teaching accordingly.
B.C.’s curriculum renewal has offered a catalyst for change across B.C. I close with a few lessons we’ve learned about supporting innovation as educators respond to and implement curriculum change.
Educators’ role as inquirers, action researchers, and change-makers has been central. Other jurisdictions in Canada have introduced new 21st century learning-oriented curriculum. What makes B.C. unique is that it has made space for grassroots exploration, feedback, and ongoing interpretation of its concept- and competency-based curriculum. Previous initiatives in B.C. have faltered when educators were directed to implement approaches without opportunities for action research within the development process. Another tension that has repeatedly surfaced over the past 40 years is government and school district approaches to “accountability.” Instead of uniform evaluation of curriculum implementation based on notions of fidelity and reliability, our enduring approach has been one of contextualization and creative exploration. This culture has lived through many changes of government.
Studying one cross-province inquiry network that explored the implementation of the draft curriculum6, Paige Fisher, Kathy Sanford and I found that inquiry spaces that welcomed diverse educational perspectives and approaches were crucial in disrupting teachers’ pre-conceptions of education and allowed them to see new possibilities. Teachers whose practice embraced outside-of-the norm approaches (e.g. project-based learning, interdisciplinary teaching in secondary schools, etc.) were important catalysts in the professional learning network.
Despite a change in government during the implementation of B.C.’s new curriculum, progress was safeguarded through ongoing collaborative efforts. Key partners in B.C. have been the Ministry of Education, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation, Faculties of Education, and school districts. When these groups have been engaged as learning partners with shared and reciprocal goals, change efforts have not only been sustained, but evolved. Past and current efforts are vulnerable when we do not take the time to revisit shared goals and the processes and activities that define and operationalize our collaborations. Earlier I mentioned a more relational and contextual approach to accountability. When partners identify indicators to assess how their initiatives are making a difference, they need to consider that innovation benefits from creativity, adaptability, and a sense of agency from those closest to the learning and practice. When we seek the voices of students and educators as key informants and co-creators of change, it distributes ownership and recognizes that teaching, learning, and education are emergent, contextualized, and relational.
Finally, studies during this time of curriculum change in B.C. have highlighted how beneficial documenting and sharing innovations from different parts of the province have been. The Growing Innovation in Rural Sites of Learning study has surfaced visible and tangible examples of innovative practices derived in rural communities in response to a local need, but shared with other rural teams across the province. Time and again, the situated innovations shared by those who generated them with students, colleagues, and community partners have been referenced as key to inspiring divergent thinking, risk taking, and educator renewal.
INNOVATION and curriculum transformation are dependent on the knowledge and expertise of educators. When educators have opportunities to collaboratively inquire into innovative pedagogies and new curriculum and create and adapt practices to meet local needs, meaningful and sustainable change is possible. Fostering teachers’ creativity and recognizing them as knowledge creators nurtures morale, collective ownership, and investment in innovation.
1. OECD, Schooling Redesigned: Towards innovative learning systems (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2015).
2. British Columbia Ministry of Education, BC’s Education Plan (2015). www.bcedplan.ca/theplan.php
3. Schnellert, and D. L. Butler, “Collaborative Inquiry: Empowering teachers in their professional development,” Education Canada 54, No. 3, (2014): 18-22.
4. Specifically the Young Writers Project in the 1980s, the Reading/Writing/Thinking References Sets created in the 1990s, the Performance Standards for reading, writing, numeracy, and social responsibility developed in the 2000s, and Changing Results for Young Readers in the 2010s.
5. First Nations Education Steering Committee, First Peoples Principles of Learning (2015). http://www.fnesc.ca/learningfirstpeoples
6. L. Schnellert, P. Fisher, and K. Sanford. (2018). “Developing Communities of Pedagogical Inquiry in British Columbia,” in Networks for Learning: Effective collaboration for teacher, school and system improvement, C. Brown and C. Poortman (Eds.) (Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2018), 56-74.
Photo: iStock
This webinar is primarily for governments, education professional organizations, school and school district leaders, teachers and education support workers, and anyone interested in understanding current issues for changes to K-12 schooling for the education sector across Canada in the COVID-19 era.
In March of 2020, Canadian education systems first began to close schools in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As well as the emergency response shift to remote learning from home, we must also begin to turn our attention to the inevitable task of planning for the future of schooling over the short and medium term. As school reopenings internationally are showing, this is not simply a return to schooling as normal. Moreover, since education in Canada is a provincial responsibility, responses to COVID-19 have been diverse and we would expect plans for the future to be appropriately varied. Fundamentally, what we will need to ask ourselves is: “What conditions need to be in place for students to learn and for teachers to teach, and how will leaders across the system adapt to support these conditions?”
This one-hour webinar panel discussion will explore how we will understand effective leadership across the education sector for the coming months and years by considering implications for governments, teacher organizations, and school leaders.
It was on the third walk of the day, a couple weeks into our COVID isolation norms, that it hit me. My little girl, at the formative age of five, was living in a global pandemic. We were pointing out the teddy bears that neighbours placed in their windows for children to spot during the pandemic. It warmed my heart that so many of my community members, many without children, found old teddies and dolls to place on display to join in the bear campaign. A couple walking their dog approached from the opposite direction, and my daughter, who was walking ahead, without hesitation or reminder took her long six-foot arc around them as we passed. She turned and mouthed the word “virus” to us and carried on.
As we all attempt to restore normalcy in our lives and jobs (whatever our “normal” may be) in the aftermath of a global crisis, there is much to consider. For teachers, this is above and beyond the daily challenges we already face. For some students, COVID 19 may result in, or amplify preexisting, anxiety, depression or trauma. For others the transition back to school and routine will be seamless. Coronavirus will become a distant memory for them, and life will carry on as it did before. I think about my daughter and her support system and how she’s been so fortunate in her life. Others aren’t as lucky, before or after COVID 19.
Much is unknown about the circumstances in homes across this country during the pandemic. What happened in the months of isolation? We may never fully know. How did the long confinement affect homes where domestic violence, abuse or neglect was already present? Of course we know there were students and families who were struggling long before the global pandemic. Some children live within circumstances that are troubling and far beyond their control. Families living on the edge of poverty may have already been struggling with food and home insecurity, lack of childcare, stress over jobs, community violence and more. We know that along with increased risk factors from COVID 19, families have also been deprived of many of their normal coping measures. Spending time with friends and family, going to the mall, seeing a counselor or engaging in extra-curricular activities, among others, have been disrupted. And for many students, their place of refuge, connection or support, is school itself.
Trauma has and will continue to be a pervasive and challenging issue for teachers and students alike. This global crisis has placed a spotlight on various aspects of society, including its multi-faceted inequities – trauma included. It also has certainly served as a reminder that children in schools need more than just their educational outcomes, and that schools serve as more than just educational institutions.
Students who experience chronic trauma (persistent and ongoing, such as adverse living conditions or abuse) are at risk for developmental deficits, attachment disorders and difficulties with learning and behaviour.1 This causes problems for them in school as they attempt to navigate the social, academic and behavioural expectations for their chronological age, while potentially lacking skills in one or more of these areas. Teachers are faced with a multitude of challenges as they work to meet the needs of all their learners. It is challenging to give each child individual attention in addressing their needs while also managing the classroom and curriculum outcomes. This may result in compassion fatigue, feelings of being overwhelmed or exhausted, and a reduced ability to function as they normally would. Some identify compassion fatigue as the cost of caring.
So where do we go from here? What is the teacher’s role in supporting students impacted by trauma? Teachers are not therapists, psychologists, counselors or social workers. Many therapeutic interventions do exist, that support students in one-on-one or in small groups. These are often beneficial and necessary for some students. However, due to limited resources and access, not all students have the opportunity to engage in such programming. Additionally, as Perry2 and Bath3 have noted, research shows that the most healing for trauma-impacted children actually takes place in what some call the “other 23 hours” of the day. A supportive environment for children in all aspects of their day is essential. Equipping teachers with the understanding and strategies to provide this supportive environment can benefit both the students in need, and fortunately, also the teachers themselves.
Being trauma-informed requires educators to have a knowledge base about trauma itself. This does not require teachers to become experts in brain functioning or psychology, but rather a general understanding for the potential impact of chronic trauma for students they teach. This means understanding that trauma is a result of experiences that exceed an individual’s capacity to cope in healthy ways, and which render them unable to function normally. Chronic trauma may be a result of living in poverty, experiencing forms of abuse, experiencing racism, being witness to violence, experiencing significant loss, and more. While adversity is common (and often productive) throughout life, trauma results when our support systems and coping mechanisms for that adversity are not enough. Therefore, trauma is less about events themselves, but our responses to them.
When a child has experienced chronic trauma, the result may be delays in various aspects of their development. This may affect their social skills and ability to form relationships, their cognitive, physical and emotional development, their ability to regulate, learn and cope with daily demands. Trauma-impacted children walk through their world with a heightened sense of danger and can be triggered into a fear response for situations that are perceived as threatening. School is a place where students not only learn, but navigate various situations, relationships and challenges. Children who are trauma-impacted therefore often struggle in many aspects of school.
Attachment is protective factor against trauma. Many children who experience chronic trauma, however, struggle with relationships and trust. They also may not have fully experienced secure and healthy relationships in their lives. Building positive relationships with students is therefore critical, for feelings of safety, acceptance and love. Giving unconditional positive regard and showing patience are ways to build this trust. This does not mean lifting boundaries and expectations. In fact, boundaries are more important than ever. Setting and sticking to limits is essential, but done with patience and compassion. Teachers have the opportunity to spend a considerable amount of time with their students throughout the school year. They can demonstrate and model positive and consistent relationships and establish new understandings of what a healthy relationship is. Child psychiatrist and trauma expert Bruce Perry talks about the power of small positive encounters and interactions for children throughout the day. “Therapeutic dosing”4 as he calls it, is a simple yet effective way for these new patterns to develop. He asserts that “just as traumatic experience can alter a life in an instant, so too can a therapeutic encounter.”5
Children impacted by trauma often are on high alert, ready to respond. Learning is virtually impossible for children who feel unsafe. Physical and emotional safety are essential in schools, as is the importance of felt safety. It is possible for trauma-impacted children to feel unsafe regardless of whether or not this is reality. Teachers are able to increase feelings of safety by creating consistent and predictable environments. This means creating a safe space where classroom community is a primary focus, and being cognizant of preparing children for transitions and change. Our responses and behaviours as teachers must also be consistent and predictable. We can recognize that some behaviours we are witness to, may be a response to feeling unsafe, versus a desire to misbehave. Behaviour is about communication. A meltdown or act of defiance, might be a fear response, or manifestations of a need. Maintaining a consistent and supportive role in responding to all behaviour with compassion and understanding, strengthens the teacher-student bond and establishes trust. We can be the calm they need, when they are not. Students will often mirror our reactions and behaviours. Keeping this thought in our minds can support us in our reactions and the way we assist students in regulating their emotions.
All children have strengths. Seeking them out and helping students to see them for themselves, as “inner-wealth,”6 is an important part of supporting growth and learning. As previously mentioned, students impacted by trauma may also have deficits in areas of development. Teachers can support all students by teaching to specific “lagging skills.”7 Lessons on social skills, problem solving, organization, self-regulation, friendship skills, mindfulness, conflict resolution and more, may be valuable in filling gaps in much-needed development. Social-emotional learning is a necessary component of trauma-informed classrooms. We can acknowledge and begin with student strengths that build confidence and engagement, and seek out the areas where more explicit teaching is needed.
An often-neglected focus for teachers, yet an essential component of trauma-informed practice, is self-care. As teachers, we simply cannot give what we don’t have. We must not only take care of ourselves through intentional self-care planning (exercise, leisure activities, support networks, eating well, etc.) but also be vigilant in noticing and identifying when we feel overwhelmed. There is vulnerability in reaching out to our colleagues and administrators when we require support, but it is a valuable step for our own wellness. As colleagues, we need to support one another and create a space where everyone feels empowered to reach out. This work is not easy and cannot be done in isolation.
Returning to work after months of remoteness may bring new feelings of anxiety and fear, or heightened preexisting mental health issues. Let us name it. We must be patient with ourselves and check on our colleagues. Let’s debrief our days and take a breath. We are not alone, and the load should not be solely ours to bear. Focusing on strong working relationships and a team approach will be crucial. As teachers, we need to open our classroom doors and support one another. The feeling of pressure on the shoulders of the classroom teachers alone, increases the risk of burnout and fatigue. “Our” students are also part of the whole school community and the community beyond the school. We benefit from creating partnerships outside of the school, building relationships with parents and community members and collectively wrapping our arms around our students and ourselves.
TEACHERS’ DAYs are often a whirlwind. Decision-making is happening constantly, and our attention is split in many different directions. Teachers don’t need more on their plates. We do, however, benefit from new knowledge for making teaching and learning more successful. Fortunately, trauma-informed strategies, such as those listed above, are good teaching practices for all students – and many are already happening all through Canadian schools. If we keep relationships at the centre and have more understanding for our students through a knowledge of the pervasive impact of chronic traumatic experiences, we will be making a difference. We will be contributing to the supportive environment that children require, to reach their full potential. With this understanding, teachers too, can feel the positive impact of a trauma-informed classroom and school. Caring doesn’t always have to come at significant cost, but instead, can provide meaningful and effective experiences that leave teachers feeling more empowered and connected.
As we transition into our post-COVID lives (whenever “post” will be), it is important to recognize how this virus may have impacted the lives of our students, and our own. We must also keep in mind that well before COVID 19, some of our students have struggled with trauma and adversity that will continue to impact their lives and learning. Our students who were accessing counseling or psychological services prior to school closures, and making gains, may experience setbacks. We may feel that impact throughout our schools. During these last devastating months, this virus has certainly opened the eyes of many to various societal inequities, in addition to forms of trauma. Those issues, however, were always and will always be present in the lives of many of our students. This unprecedented event has also taught us how precious life and time truly are. The entire world seemed to stand still at moments, causing many of us to reflect upon our jobs, roles, purpose and values. I was certainly one of them. It reminded me of how strongly I believe in our nations’ teachers and our ability to care beyond the curriculum.
With small doses of kindness, intentional teaching, and a heightened awareness of trauma’s impact, we can add to the environment needed for all to heal and grow. Our students are worth it, and so are we.
PHOTO: ISTOCK
This research brief examines the sources and effects of teacher stress, highlights programs and policies that can reduce teacher stress and improve teacher well-being and performance, and recommends next generation research, real-world policies, and systematic, sustainable practices that can build and sustain a culture of health for teachers in U.S. schools.
This issue brief, created by the Pennsylvania State University with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, is one of a series of briefs addressing the need for research, practice, and policy on social and emotional learning (SEL). SEL is defined as the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.
Safe and inclusive school environments are especially important to those who have marginalized experiences, such as those who are lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, queer, 2-spirited, or other gender or sexuality minorities (LGBTQ2+). This article reports on the efforts by the Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD), in partnership with the LGBTQ2+ community, to transform schools into spaces where all children and youth are equitably included, validated and affirmed.
A sense of safety, acceptance, and belonging at school is essential to the academic development and well-being of children and youth. Safe and inclusive school environments are especially important to those who have marginalized experiences, such as those who are lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, queer, 2-spirited, or other gender or sexuality minorities (LGBTQ2+).
The Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD), in partnership with the LGBTQ2+ community, is on a journey to transform schools into spaces where all children and youth are equitably included, validated and affirmed. To allow people to authentically live and express their identities, meaningful and purposeful changes are being made to school spaces, the student information system, curriculum, policies and guidelines, and school-based resources. Although significant changes have occurred to better support the educational experiences of LGBTQ2+ learners, we remain committed to reaching every classroom in every school.
Queer youth are not simply waiting for us to catch up; instead they have become the force of transformation within the education system. Almost unimaginable a decade ago, the subject of gender identity, expression and sexuality has become an undeniable part of the landscape within schools today. Young people are erasing the lines created by the historical binaries of gender expression and heteronormative expectations. Youth, their allies, and parents have called upon the education system to examine how schools need to change to support the identities of all learners and to ensure they have equitable access to all aspects of school life. A report by EGALE Canada (2011), Every Class in Every School,1 stresses the importance of appropriate consultation when considering vulnerable groups, GSAs, teacher preparation, curriculum and policy development.
Over the past several years in Nova Scotia, a strong collaborative partnership has grown between EECD and the Youth Project, a non-profit organization whose mission is, “to make Nova Scotia a safer, healthier, and happier place for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth through support, education, resource expansion and community development.” The Youth Project, through first voice and leadership, has played an integral role in supporting schools and EECD with student workshops, teacher and leadership professional development, Gender and Sexuality Alliances (GSAs), curriculum and resource consultation, and facility design. Through our collaboration with the Youth Project, the education system is becoming more informed, inclusive and intentional in its design and practice.
In December 2012, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Act was amended to disallow discrimination based on gender identity and gender expression. In 2014, the Nova Scotia Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD) responded with the Guidelines to Support Transgender and Gender-nonconforming Students.2 The guidelines were prepared in consultation with youth and organizations representing the LGBTQ2+ community, and included topics such as: supporting students and their individual process, preferred name and pronouns, maintaining school records, gender expression, school-based activities, and access to washrooms and changerooms. They helped educators grow in their understanding of current issues facing transgender and gender-diverse children and youth in schools, and also brought to the surface a recognition of how gendered and non-inclusive many of the beliefsand practices are in the education system, and how they need to change.
Nova Scotia Education and Early Childhood Development data from 2016-17 indicated that approximately 65 percent of schools in the province, with Grade 7 -12 students, had a Gender Sexuality Alliance (GSA). Since this time, the number of GSAs has been growing, with a number of elementary schools now participating. Queer youth tell us that when GSAs are present in schools, they feel safer, more accepted and supported. They can identify and express their gender and/or sexuality more freely and with pride. EECD, with our partners, continues to work to increase the number of GSAs in schools and to ensure they are active and impactful school-based supports for learners. Our goal is to have a GSA in every school, that is celebrated and recognized as an important impetus in changing school culture.
Included in the Guidelines to Support Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Students, is a recommendation to provide safe access to washroom and changeroom facilities in accordance with the student’s gender identity. The guidelines state:
“All students have a right to safe washroom and change-room facilities. They have the right to use facilities that they are comfortable using and that correspond to their gender identity, regardless of their sex assigned at birth. Transgender and gender-nonconforming students have the right to supports that best meet the student’s individual needs.” (pg. 15)
In response, the team at Facilities Management began to think differently about traditional washroom and changeroom design. They began exploring ways these spaces could be changed to support transgender and gender-diverse students. As a result, a highly consultative process began which included, educators, school administrators, EECD staff, architects, engineers, Youth Project staff, and students, including local LGBTQ2+ students. Through this process, it became evident that addressing gender and gender identity rights actually addresses the universal rights of all people. As a result, new school construction and renovations include innovative washroom and changeroom designes that are non-gendered and inclusive, and respond to concerns in relation to the safety and privacy of all students. Darrell MacDonald, Director of Education Facilities Project Services for the NS Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal, explains,
“Our focus on universality has been the cornerstone of the success of the initiatives. The two foundational elements of privacy and safety, which aren’t limited to any particular segment of society but are truly universal, have allowed us to overcome social stigmas.”
In 2017, EECD introduced the Pre-primary Program to several schools across Nova Scotia, with a commitment to have the program available in all schools by 2020. The initiative provides free and accessible early childhood education to four-year-olds. The Youth Project (YP) consulted with EECD staff in the development of Nova Scotia’s Early Learning curriculum framework. which introduces gender flexible practices and an opportunity to interrupt the traditional gendered behaviours and expectations in early learning environments. We must intentionally support gender-creative children to affirm how they feel and allow them to explore who they are.
Providing children and youth the opportunity to safely express their name, gender identity and preferred pronoun affirms who they are and enhances their sense of belonging. We are reprogramming and creating spaces in PowerSchool, our student information system, and the school registration process, where learners and/or their parents can equitably document their authentic identity. This allows us to register learners without causing undue harm and stress, or inadvertently outing individuals.
Although there was previously a process by which students could identify a preferred name that would be used by teachers and school staff, it was not visible in all areas of PowerSchool. For example, lists generated by the student information system, such as substitute roll call, honor roll, student fees and even yearbook pictures, still displayed the legal name and not the learner’s preferred name. To correct this issue, in 2018, PowerSchool was updated to display the preferred name on all school documents including report cards, and in all areas of the system. Although the legal name remains in PowerSchool, it is only presented on official documents, such as academic transcripts and provincial high school diplomas.
In 2019, the Nova Scotia Vital Statistics Act was amended to include the gender marker “X”, in addition to M (male) and F (female), similar to the change made to Canadian Passports. This has resulted in further updates to PowerSchool and the school registration process. The system will now record gender, instead of identified sex at birth, include the gender marker “X” for non-binary and other gender identities, and will no longer require a legal gender change through Vital Statistics in order to have one’s identity documented in schools. For the majority, sex assigned at birth and gender identity align, therefore no change is necessary. For learners who are transgender, gender fluid or diverse, this change will empower them to safely identify who they are without fear and unwanted stigma. These changes will continue to challenge the strictly held lines of traditional binaries and expand our understanding of diverse identities.
More recently, we have been focusing on the complexities of intersectionality, such as race and socio-economics, in relation to our work in gender, gender identity and sexuality. In addition, we are attempting to make connections with other initiatives, such as inclusive education, culturally responsive pedagogy, and relational approaches. There is an ongoing need to support educators, through professional learning opportunities, relevant curriculum and resources, and innovative leadership. Through all this, it is our obligation to create school cultures that acknowledge and respect all learners and their families. Our experience tells us, this cannot be done in the absence of safe, trusting and authentic partnerships with community.
To guide our future direction, we remain focused on the voices of our LGBTQ2+ learners and the affirmation of who they are in all areas of their lives. Issues of equity must remain at the core of our vision for education. From classrooms, to schools, to government, we are called to educate ourselves, challenge our biases and beliefs, and revise our processes and practices to ensure a safe and inclusive educational experience for all.
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First published in Education Canada, May 2019
Notes
1 Taylor, C. & Peter, T. (2011). Every class in every school: Final report on the first national climate survey on homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia in Canadian schools, Egale Canada Human Rights Trust. https://egale.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/EgaleFinalReport-web.pdf
2 Department of Education and Early Childhood Development, (2014). Guidelines for Supporting Transgender and Gender-Nonconforming Students (Nova Scotia: 2014). http://studentservices.ednet.ns.ca
Suicide is an important health concern and prevention at school has increasingly become a focal point for educators and policy makers aiming to decrease the number of youth who die by suicide. Unfortunately, the business of suicide prevention has become a fruitful source of revenue for companies and organizations, even though robust scientific evidence on the effectiveness and safety of school-based suicide prevention products and programs does not exist.
Research cannot conclude what really works in preventing suicide in young people. The first study to demonstrate a positive impact in preventing youth suicide was published in February 2019, which considered youth in a psychiatric hospital and not students at school. Furthermore, some school-based programs that report success actually cause harm. For example, a study showed that the Signs of Suicide (SOS) program increased suicide attempts in the group receiving the intervention, while the SafeTALK program was found to improve self-reported self-confidence in talking about suicide but caused half of the students involved to be sent for professional evaluation. A recent Canadian review also identified a relation between the increased use of suicide prevention programs and increased suicide rates in young girls.
At best, most studies measure students’ self-reported knowledge about suicide, self-confidence in talking about suicide, or self-reported suicide attempts or ideation. None of these are valid measures that can determine whether a program actually prevents suicide.
Student suicide is an emotional topic that demands our considered, rational and best available response based on what the research says.
As schools may be caught between the wish to do something helpful and the sophisticated marketing of products and programs that take advantage of this intent, it is necessary that school staff think critically before they apply any suicide prevention intervention.
Statistics Canada: Suicide rates: An overview
TeenMentalHealth.org:
Knightsmith P. Youth suicide prevention research needs a shake-up: lives depend on it. 2018. Accessible from https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/suicide/youth-suicide-prevention-research-needs-a-shake-up-lives-depend-on-it/
Kutcher S., Wei Y. The vexing challenge of suicide prevention: a research informed perspective on a recent systematic review. 2016. Accessible from https://www.nationalelfservice.net/mental-health/suicide/vexing-challenge-suicide-prevention-research-informed-perspective-recent-systematic-review/
King CA., Arango A., Kramer A., et., al. Association of the Youth-Nominated Support Team Intervention for Suicidal Adolescents With 11- to 14-Year Mortality Outcomes. Secondary Analysis of a Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2018.4358
Schilling EA, Lawless M, Buchanan L, et al. Signs of Suicide shows promise as a middle school suicide prevention program. Suicide Life Threat Behav. 2014; 44(6): 653-67.
Bailey E, et al. Universal Suicide Prevention in Young People: An evaluation of the safeTALK Program in Australian High Schools. Crisis. 2017; 38(5), 300-308.
Kutcher S., et al. School-and Community-Based Youth Suicide Prevention Interventions: Hot Idea, Hot Air, or Sham? The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry. (2016): 1-7.
Suicide postvention refers to activities that support the grieving process and may help prevent suicide contagion among family, friends and classmates of a student or teacher who dies from suicide. While this is a challenging topic for any educator as waves of strong emotions take grip on a school community, acting primarily on emotions is not likely to bring optimal outcomes.
To be effective, suicide postvention must be adapted to the unique needs, situations and realities of the affected school and community. While a conservative estimate counts six people connected to the deceased who will be most personally impacted, suicide affects a web of individuals including parents, siblings, friends and acquaintances, classmates, healthcare providers and others.
Although numerous suicide postvention programs are available, school leaders have a responsibility to select evidence-based strategies that are likely to be effective – and avoid those that lack solid evidence and may do more harm than good – in preventing suicide and supporting those who are grieving.
Kutcher, S. (2018). Suicide Postvention in Schools: Addressing an emotional issue using best available information and critical thought. CAP Journal.
Szumilas, M. & Kutcher, S. (2011). Post-suicide Intervention Programs: A Systematic Review. Can J Public Health, 102 (1), 18-29.
Why should student well-being be part of the education agenda? Reporting on a four-year-study conducted in Ontario, the authors argue, “Get the well-being agenda right, and it will support and be supported by effective learning, so that all our students can be successful and well.”
Canada is a global leader in educational change. It has widely-acclaimed results on student achievement and equity on international assessments.1 Only Finland exceeds Canada in terms of equal opportunity combined with positive outcomes for low-income students. Canada also has stronger democratic self-governance and greater multicultural inclusion than many other high performing systems.
But Canada’s record on student well-being is less impressive. UNICEF places Canada 26th out of 35 nations on a table measuring well-being across four indicators of life satisfaction, health, education, and income.2 On OECD indicators of life satisfaction, Canada’s students are “not significantly different from the OECD average.”3 Like a number of countries in East Asia, its record on student achievement is not matched by its performance in student well-being.
In response, Ontario made well-being one of its four policy priorities in 2014. As anxiety and depression among the young skyrocketed, its educators began giving greater attention to their students’ emotional, physical, and spiritual development. Our new research from interviews with educators in ten Ontario school boards over the past four years shows that educators started teaching students a range of ways to improve their well-being.4 Students are now learning meditation, practicing yoga, and serving on school-based mental health committees. Teachers are providing programs of emotional self-regulation that help students calm down when they are angry or anxious, and they are showing students how to use apps to report to counselors when they are worried about their own or others’ well-being. Educators have also been changing the curriculum to be more inclusive of the identities of all young Canadians (though this is now a point of contention with the province’s new government).
But is well-being just a self-indulgent distraction from the basics of real learning? Conversely, is it being used to compensate for the ill-being that is created by standardized testing and out-of-date approaches to teaching and learning? Do achievement and well-being occupy separate silos that have no connection with each other? Or is there a relationship between well-being and success – and if so, what do Ontario’s educators believe that it is?
Get the well-being agenda wrong and opponents will easily portray it as emotional self-indulgence or trendy identity politics that are distractions from academic basics. Get the well-being agenda right, and it will support and be supported by effective learning, so that all our students can be successful and well. In their 2017 report on student achievement and well-being, the OECD argued that “most educators and parents would agree that a successful student not only performs well academically but is also happy at school. Indeed, schools are not only places where students acquire academic skills; they are also social environments where children can develop the social and emotional competencies they need to thrive.”5 This is the educational policy challenge for Canadians now.
From 2014 to 2018, our research team from Boston College worked collaboratively with a representative sample of 10 of Ontario’s 72 school boards to understand what work they were doing on the ground to implement the province’s four pillars of educational reform at the time. These were: achieving broadly defined excellence; securing equity for all students that also involved how included they felt in their learning and their schools; promoting well-being; and establishing public confidence. Part of this research involved interviewing 222 educators about this implementation and asking them questions concerning their beliefs and reported practices about well-being and achievement.
Our interviews with Ontario’s educators revealed that they find three different kinds of relationships between well-being and achievement.
There are multiple sources of ill-being in many of Ontario’s communities. An assistant principal of one rural school stated, “We have a lot of kids that are high-anxiety, with a lot of developmental trauma. A lot of kids are in [foster] care.”
“We look at our role as addressing the whole student,” a fellow principal said. One of the teachers in this board asked, “How did they sleep? Are they hungry? Are they feeling OK? Are they happy? You are starting bare bones and you work your way up until you they are ready to learn.”
Many educators agreed that before real learning could begin, a minimum threshold of well-being had to be attained. They did everything they could to address issues like poverty or social exclusion to prepare their students for academic achievement. A board in a working-class city with a 24.2 percent youth poverty rate (compared to a provincial rate of 17.3 percent) was grateful for the commitment of trades unions and philanthropy. “It’s a part of the culture here,” one said. “There’s huge care around mental health, huge care around the partnerships, huge care around poverty,” a colleague observed. “There’s this belief in helping others.”
Educators in another board reported that ill-being can affect the affluent as well as the poor. “Some of their anxiety is related to parental pressure,” a teacher commented. One way that schools supported students in this community was by providing a calming space that helped them to settle down and “just go and relax” when they were stressed or upset.
A superintendent summed up the relationship between well-being and achievement when he said, “Take care of people; take care of everything.” But caring for students at risk of ill-being is not sufficient to ensure well-being. Learning requires discipline and zest, the ability to focus, the capacity to empathize with different points of view, the social skills to interact with others, and the stamina to persevere through difficulties and bounce back from disappointment. These dispositions call for positive well-being to support the dynamic learning that leads to widespread success.
In a second point of view, well-being is supported by academic success, while failure perpetrates ill-being. Some administrators expressed this idea when they said that they wanted to raise students’ mathematics results “to boost their confidence” and to “make them feel good about being learners.” Here well-being was regarded as an outcome of deliberate efforts by students and their teachers to secure earned achievement.
Clarity of purpose and direction around improving achievement was also important for both students and their teachers. One school board director stated, “I think it’s stressful to waste time and not know where you’re going. In the absence of direction, people do what they want. It isn’t always the most purposeful thing.”
Almost half the boards in our study described projects that put a priority on developing “growth mindsets” among students and their teachers.6 Compared to fixed mindsets where people believe things cannot change, in growth mindsets, people believe that difficulties, including ones that involve their own learning and development, can be overcome.
A growth mindset orientation was used in one board to promote mathematics achievement in the belief that it would, in turn, contribute to students’ self-regulation and resiliency. A special education consultant in this board spoke about “building in mindset activities in every single session” of her coaching with teachers. A teacher in another board gave students the URLs of video clips on growth mindsets to encourage them to work harder to develop a greater sense of accomplishment. By promoting the belief that everyone can achieve, educators treated well-being as a result of hard-won effort, including the effort to achieve academic success.
Having a sense of achievement isn’t or shouldn’t be all about getting good test scores, though. Having meaning and purpose is integral to people’s sense of well-being. Well-being involves far more than happiness, and accomplishments go far beyond test success.
A sense of purpose and accomplishment in this broader sense was behind many learning innovations across the ten boards. These included comparing water quality on First Nations Reserves with that in neighbouring communities, and learning about and raising funds to adopt and accommodate Syrian refugee families, for instance. In cases like these, students deepened their own learning and sense of accomplishment by addressing the well-being of others.
Getting back to basics shouldn’t mean moving away from well-being. Many East Asian parents and their governments in Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea, for example, now realize that excessive emphasis on tested academic achievement has led to anxiety, depression and even suicide among young people. They are easing up on testing requirements now and putting greater emphasis on quality of life.
Almost every board we studied addressed students’ ability to self-regulate when they became angry, anxious or depressed. One widely used program was called Zones of Regulation.7 Here, students learn to identify their emotions with reference to four categories or colours: red, where children are angry or overly exuberant; yellow where they are anxious, nervous or silly; blue where they are sad or depressed; and green when they are calm, alert, and ready to learn.
Educators everywhere were enthusiastic about this program. According to one principal, they were “seeing some gains” because of this approach. Suspension numbers had dropped. “Kids are able to take responsibility for behaviour a little more easily than they used to,” the principal said. “They’re able to articulate what went wrong.” It took less time to calm students down before they could rejoin a class. It was better to give students the time and space they needed to get in the right frame of mind to focus on learning, teachers believed, than to punish them when their minds were racing or their bodies were restless.
Another strategy to support well-being was resiliency. “You build resiliency. You’re not born with it,” one principal said. One elementary school took the idea of “building” resiliency literally. They developed “toolkits” for students and “built a resiliency wall. Every student had a brick and they could [write] on, ‘Who supports me when I’m feeling down?’” Students sometimes searched through these toolkits when they needed help in dealing with a worrying or frustrating issue – from a blockage in their learning to coping with the death of a fellow student.
In Ontario, students have become increasingly engaged in the well-being agenda themselves. For example, one board created student-led well-being groups called Sources of Strength. The group consisted of student “leaders from every part of the school. You get kids who aren’t the jocks, and they are not the artsy kids. You want it to be representative of everybody.” The students received training from mentors at the school. They organized events such as a Walk for Depression awareness day, so that students and community members wouldn’t ignore any student who was struggling. A student mental health committee in another board consisted of students who were acquainted with problems such as experiencing a friend committing suicide, or being treated for a speech impediment. Elsewhere, in a student-designed poster on “50 Ways to Take a Break,” students were encouraged to “sit in nature,” “read a book,” or “pet a furry creature,” for example. In these ways, boards encouraged students to reach out to others with kindness, and make sure that no one was left to suffer alone.
In testing times, let’s be wary of the cheap shots that are easily made against well-being or achievement. On the one hand, we don’t want a school system that is obsessed with well-being to the point where young people live in a superficial and self-indulgent world of undemanding happiness. That path leads to a nation of narcissistic adults who feel that success and earned expertise are unimportant, and that all that matters is the needs and opinions of themselves and of others who happen to agree with them.
True well-being doesn’t come without sacrifice and struggle, perseverance, and empathy for others.
Equally, achievement shouldn’t be reduced to grades and test scores where students are expected to apply themselves with grim determination even in the face of poor teaching, irrelevant tests, or a curriculum that is so boring that students cannot see what value it has for them. Achievement should be about accomplishing things of purpose and value for oneself and for others. It should bring a sense of lasting fulfillment, not just test-score completion or evanescent fun.
Well-being is needed to support achievement, especially where children come from backgrounds that present them with great challenges. Achievement and accomplishment are also sources of well-being. It’s hard for young people to maintain dignity and self-respect if they feel like they’re failing all the time.
But well-being and achievement shouldn’t exist in two different worlds, with different specialists populating them – mathematics and literacy people on one side; counselors and mental health specialists on the other. Canada could do better at mathematics. But it is also not doing well at being well. We don’t want Canada’s schools to produce a nation of happy, stupid people. But we don’t want Canada to be a land of smart, sick people either.
Well-being is a long-overlooked policy agenda for schools that is now working its way into education around the world. Our work in Ontario points to many different ways in which educators have eagerly seized the opportunities to develop their students’ well-being. But when budget cuts loom, initiatives in yoga or meditation, or support roles in counseling and similar areas, can seem like the easiest options for making economies, compared to literacy or math. To sustain its importance and focus, the emphasis on well-being therefore has to find its proper relationship to the learning mission of schools. Whether we work in times of plenty or in an era of austerity, we shouldn’t have to choose between success on the one hand or well-being on the other. Instead, let’s turn out young adults who are successful and fulfilled at the same time.
Photo: iStock
First published in Education Canada, December 2018
1 C. Campbell, K. Zeichner, A. Lieberman, and P. Osmond-Johnson, Empowered Educators in Canada: How high-performing systems shape teaching quality (Marblehead, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2017).
2 UNICEF, Fairness for Children: A league table of inequality in well-being in rich countries (Florence, Italy: 2016).
3 OECD, PISA 2015 Results: Students’ well-being (Paris, France: 2017), 39.
4 A. Hargreaves, D. Shirley, S. Wangia, C. Bacon, and M. D’Angelo, Leading from the Middle: Spreading learning, well-being, and identity across Ontario (Toronto: Council of Ontario Directors of Education, 2018).
5 OECD, PISA 2015 results, 232.
6 C. Dweck, Mindset: The new psychology of success (New York: Ballantine, 2007).
7 L. M. Kuypers, The Zones of Regulation: A curriculum designed to foster self-regulation and emotional control. (San Jose, CA: Think Social Publishing, Incorporated, 2011).
The changing demands on the teaching profession require a serious rethink to our approach to teacher preparation – perhaps most importantly, from a focus on teaching to a focus on learning.
Each year I have the opportunity to meet a new class of aspiring teachers. I ask the teacher candidates, “What is a teacher’s particular expertise?” Almost without hesitation a number of them answer, “Teaching.”
“Really,” I respond. “And physicians are expert in physicianing, and lawyers are expert in lawyering?”
The answer to the question, “What is a teacher’s particular expertise?” is not as straightforward as it might first appear. Similar to other professional disciplines, the professional landscape for initial teacher education is in a continual state of flux. Impacted by often competing forces – global, political, economic, technological, social, linguistic, and cultural – the institution of schooling in Canada has evolved and changed over the past 150 years, both regionally and nationally. And it continues to evolve.
From the mid-1840s to today, local control of teacher certification was assumed first by colonial and then provincial authorities. Normal schools were established in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Canada to “standardize both instructional content and teaching methods to ensure quality.”1 Teacher education has evolved from requiring a few months of formal education to requiring a university degree. There was a time when it was sufficient for a teacher candidate to hold a few years of high school and good moral standing to obtain a teacher certificate. Seen as agents-of-the-state, teachers were initially trained to meet the basic need for functional literacy and numeracy, create a common citizenry, and establish a suitable workforce for an emerging industrial economy.2 This teacher training was generally undertaken at a normal school requiring applicants to provide certificates of good moral standing and records to verify that the individual completed high school. Today, teacher candidates in Canada undertake four or more years of university study. Many teacher candidates hold a four-year bachelor’s degree prior to entering a Bachelor of Education degree program. Some take a five-year concurrent Bachelor of Education program alongside a bachelor’s degree in another faculty. Still others complete a four-year Bachelor of Education degree program.
In addition to an increase in the years of university education required by teacher candidates, Alcon indicates there have been common trends across teacher education programs globally.
A rise in academic standards for entry into teacher education; an expectation that teacher educators should be researchers as well as teachers; a widening scope for teacher education from early childhood to post-secondary; an assumption that teachers need professional and academic development; and changes to concepts of professionalism, accountability and standards.3
These trends have also impacted initial and ongoing teacher education in Canada. In sharp contrast to the 1950s, when only two percent of Canadians aged 15 and over had university qualifications, the expectation today is that all young people will have the qualifications to carry on to post-secondary education. Teacher education programs across Canada have increased their academic standards in various ways over the years. Some universities have increased the length of time required to obtain a bachelor’s degree in education. Others have created master’s programs for after-degree teacher candidates. Most, if not all, have increased entry requirements into teacher education. In addition to the rising expectations for teacher education, at least one provincial government has introduced new standards for teachers, leaders, and superintendents. While universities strive for teacher education programs that cohere with contemporary research in the field, they must also ensure these programs meet the provincially regulated requirements so graduating teacher candidates are eligible to apply for teacher certification. The tension created by rising provincial expectations and global trends, combined with the need for universities to also ground their teacher education programs in contemporary research in the areas of learning, curriculum, pedagogy, diversity, etc., can be daunting.
While it is important to establish the various historical, global, local, political, and economic forces that impact teacher education, it is also essential that faculties of education across Canada take a serious look to determine how these shifts are reflected within their programs. Those involved in teacher education should remember that shifts, in fact, are not a problem and are instead indicative of how education, as a living practice, is alert to the issues of what is called for in initial teacher education. Moreover, because of education’s relationship with the young and the newness of the demands they bring with them and that shape their lives, such responsiveness is itself part of the nature of education as a living, intergenerational project. Echoing a phrase from the late Dr. William Doll, “keeping knowledge alive” is therefore in the very nature of education itself. Understanding teacher education with an eye to this inevitability is the key to understanding the challenge and opportunity for those responsible for designing and redesigning teacher education programs for our contemporary society.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, teacher education emerged to meet the needs of an agrarian and industrial society – hierarchical, bureaucratic, and highly segmented. The shift called for in contemporary teacher education requires us to design teacher education that effectively addresses the needs of our time. The shift is from a focus on teaching, teaching strategies, and classroom management, to a focus on learning that includes:
For the most part, tinkering won’t work. A pattern of minor revisions and changes have created teacher education programs in which overall programmatic cohesion is lost.
Shifts from a teaching-focused program to a learning-focused program might at first appear fairly straightforward. In an attempt to respond to the pressing need to re-examine teacher education, a common approach is to tinker at the edges of existing programs by adding new courses, increasing time in field experience or moving the placement of field experience, or adjusting the credit structure in order to make room for the new courses. Such tinkering can be observed in the addition of courses such as Indigenous education, inclusion, diversity, and assessment, which are frequently added while at the same time clinging on to all the courses previously offered. As a result fewer hours (and fewer credits) are assigned to each course and students must complete more courses to meet the requirements of the degree.
While each of these changes to existing programs has met with varying degrees of success, it is also true that for the most part, tinkering won’t work. A pattern of minor revisions and changes have created teacher education programs in which overall programmatic cohesion is now lost. Instead, students take a bit of this and a bit of that, recreating an assembly-line image and its premise of fragmentation and isolation. Some teacher education programs have become incoherent combinations of old and new forms and ways, frequently pitting faculty member against faculty member, with each arguing for the value and necessity of a particular course and vying for time within an already overburdened curriculum. Alternatively, a program may try to appease everyone by creating a teacher education program with a few core courses, on which all faculty members can agree, and a series of options and electives. While giving the initial appearances of responding to the new landscape, such responses do not adequately address the shift that is needed. Against such a backdrop, teacher candidates are left with no choice but to make sense of the entire endeavour on their own – constructing their own knowledge and meaning out of a series of disconnected courses. And as strange as that might appear at first glance, there is a hint here of trying to put the initiative and involvement of individual students, which had been previously effaced, back into the educational mix. However, if the presumption of a teacher education curriculum constituted by a series of unrelated and disconnected courses is left in place, efforts at responsive changes to teacher education will eventually collapse.
Within each of these efforts at changes to teacher education programs, there is what could be called a “future wanting to emerge.” Each of the responses is a genuine and well-intended effort to make the difference that will provide teacher candidates with a coherent teacher education program appropriate to meet the challenges and opportunities of a 21st century society. However, a serious and deliberate rethinking of the entire endeavour is needed, one that examines the underlying set of assumptions that underpin many teacher education programs. Currently many of the attempts to change curriculum, pedagogies, or time leave undisturbed the need for a more radical change to teacher education. A few of these assumptions include:
More frequently than not, these unexamined assumptions silently drive reactionary responses underground. Left in place, they serve to undermine and sideline the ability to pose the question, “What might constitute a vibrant, coherent 21st century contemporary teacher education program?”
The recent rise of ideas of ecological interdependence, sustainability, living systems, learning systems, knowledge as dynamic, and the like provide an analogy for how to reimagine the enterprise of teacher education for a contemporary society. These ideas require those involved in redesign efforts to be attentive to the obligations toward dynamically evolving social, cultural, and ecological circumstances. Ecology offers a way of thinking about things and systems that does not begin with isolated bits and pieces, but with webs of relationships. These relationships are not simply contextual of individual things but constitutive of them. So a particular life form, for example, is not simply “surrounded” by other things in an “environment” but is constituted, formed and shaped by those surroundings.
In the educational context, too frequently a response to this emerging understanding of interdependence is to add courses on sustainability, diversity, and/or inclusion, which get inserted into the curriculum of teacher education as simply one more thing to be covered. However, when understood as constitutive of the environment itself, mechanical efficiencies give way to systemic complexities and open the space for new understandings and the emergence of new organizing principles on which to create teacher education programs.
The Association of Canadian Deans of Education released a revised Accord on Teacher Education in 2017. This Accord is based on a vision for teacher education in Canada “that fosters skilled professional educators who cultivate knowledge, critical thinking, and responsible action among learners, in order to foster an inclusive and equitable society.”4 The Accord is based on three principles:
The Accord “asserts that effective teacher education programs demonstrate the transformative power of learning for individuals and communities.”5 I suggest that those charged with teacher education in universities attend not only to the various contexts impacting contemporary education, but also examine the assumptions about learning that underpin many teacher education programs.
Within many universities, teacher education programs are undergoing processes of revision, renewal, and redesign to adapt to ever-changing conditions. As we consider the transformations required for a contemporary teacher education program, we need to acknowledge two things: 1) As a society, we have been in this place before; and 2) no one is to blame for the current need to change. The world has once again changed, and teacher education needs to be “set right anew.”6 Within teacher education, we need to once again direct our efforts by asking, what does a teacher candidate need to know, do, and be in a diverse, inclusive, and equitable society where the demands to create highly educated youth are at the top of everyone’s agenda?
Returning to a question that I asked at the beginning of this paper, “What is a teacher’s particular expertise?” Teachers are experts in learning. As experts in learning, students in initial teacher education programs need to know how to create the conditions within which rich powerful learning emerges, flourishes, strengthens, and deepens. They need to know how to adapt their teaching in response to learning. They need to understand that learning occurs in formal and informal environments and settings. Teachers who know how to learn, are inspired to continue learning, and collaborate with each other, know that learning individually and collectively is essential in today’s world. To meet this challenge and seize this opportunity, teacher education programs need to go about the work of creating highly connected, collaborative, and intellectually robust contemporary programs that are sharply focused on learning for teacher candidates.
Photo: Mary Kate MacIsaac / Werklund School of Education
First published in Education Canada, September 2018
Notes
1 H. Raptis, “The Canadian Landscape: Provinces, territories, nations, and identities,” in The Curriculum History of Canadian Teacher Education, ed. T. Christou (Routledge, 2017), 7-22.
2 A. Sears and M. Hirschkorn, “The Controlling Hand: Canadian teacher education in a global context,” in The Curriculum History of Canadian Teacher Education, ed. T. Christou (Routledge, 2017), 241-258.
3 N. Alcorn, “Teacher Education in New Zealand 1974–2014,” Journal of Education for Teaching 40, no.5 (2014): 456.
4 Accord on Teacher Education (Association of Canadian Deans of Education, 2017, 1.
5 Ibid., 2.
6 H. Arendt, “The Crisis in Education,” in Between Past and Present: Eight exercises in political thought (New York: Penguin Books, 1969), 192-3.
Dr. Sharon Friesen is a professor and the President of the Galileo Educational Network at the University of Calgary’s Werklund School of Education. Stephen Hurley sat down with the renowned scholar to discuss nationwide revisions and redesigns to teacher education programs, including where we’re headed next. For new and future teachers – including all you history buffs out there – this one’s for you!
A Future Wanting to Emerge: Challenging assumptions about teacher education
“We usually do not hear from or include the actual community members in planning our schools,” stated the superintendent of our school district. It was a watershed moment for the members of our small rural community group as we sat around a dining room table here in Sackville, New Brunswick. We were stunned by the statement that parents and local citizens were not really part of the design of what we believed to be the very heart of our community – our schools. We simply didn’t count.
Still reeling from the announced closure of a neighbouring community’s school and their bitter fight to keep it open, our small group worried that our community might be next to come under the so-called “sustainability study”: a provincially driven formula for determining school closures. It was at that table that we vowed to take our community’s precarious situation of shrinking demographics, aging schools and a feeling of isolation here on the margins of the school district in an entirely new direction. That commitment, now two years old, signaled that Sackville needed a new conversation and a new vision for transforming the community into a model for integrated, community-driven education. We believed that we had to have a clear vision for the education system in our community within the next five years, so Sackville Schools 2020 (or 20/20) was born.
Sackville Schools 2020 was born out of a desire to anticipate a highly uncertain future for our children, our teachers and our schools, and the lack of connection we felt with the centralized and isolated education system that had developed in our province over the past many years. The working group held several collaboration cafés and community visioning sessions that invited community members to share their ideas, frustrations, hopes and fears about our schools and our role in the care and feeding of our learning community.
Committee members also interviewed hundreds of students to ask them about their current experiences and what they imagined in their ideal school of the future. We were shocked to find that students had very little in the way of hopes and dreams about their ideal learning environments: perhaps a classroom with a window, or maybe proper heating so that they didn’t need to wear their coats to class. They seemed unable to even imagine features like a learning commons, outdoor gardens and greenhouses, or a climbing wall – environments where they could truly flourish. Such low expectations revealed a sense of hopelessness and isolation, as opposed to what the committee was finding in our national and international research on 21st century schools, such as deep learning, project-based and individualized programming, and experiential and outdoor learning beyond the walls of the school.
While there were certainly reports of some great teaching and learning, it seemed to be the exception, rather than the norm. Teachers reported a sense of feeling isolated in their work, with many new curriculum ideas and government programs, yet a school district that seemed to be preoccupied with the larger urban schools located down the highway. We seemed to be overlooking the power of ideas and the amazing wealth of talent and commitment in our own town, as seen over and over again in the creation of school beautification committees, outdoor education and wetlands centres, and the thousands of bright minds coming to the community to attend university and volunteering in our schools.
Our town is incredibly fortunate, in that education is the driving economic and social force of the community, with a range of preschools, elementary, middle and secondary schools, a vibrant seniors’ college, and one of Canada’s top undergraduate liberal arts universities – all within a town of just over 5,000 people. After two years of conversations and research on leading practices in school design from around the globe, we can now feel the energy and excitement of the children, parents, and teachers, as well as educational and political leaders across the region, in their hope of moving away from the traditional top-down, prescriptive, cookie-cutter approach to school design towards making learning a shared community effort. We have worked with the Mayor and Council to adopt the model as part of their strategic plan, with the Mayor stating that “education is the driving force of our community and it is simply too important to be left to others in far-off places. We have to take an integrated approach to learning and the Town supports this approach.”
Although our community meetings and consultations now attract 60 to 80 attendees, our start was slow and sometimes discouraging. While we certainly have gifted educators and highly involved and caring parents and civic leaders, it’s not easy for already overworked and stressed members of our education system to envision a new way of thinking about how we educate our children and where we do that type of teaching and learning. Although many have little faith in the existing school planning system, which is controlled from the larger school district office and the Department of Education in Fredericton, it has still been challenging to engage teachers, principals and our elected district education council members in thinking and acting from this grassroots level. Often our wonderful dessert parties and cafés resulted in committee members looking at each other and wondering why educational change did not seem to be important to the wider community. Many told us that you simply can’t take on the government and change the system. Even that same district superintendent commented that he was surprised that we were still trying, after two long years!
In spite of the lack of enthusiasm we encountered for taking on the system, our group was encouraged by what we saw as the alignment of the political and educational stars and planets within the province. We recognized that Sackville was already a wonderful learning environment for so many different stages in life, from pre-school to post-secondary and even in the retirement years. We wanted to change the way in which we approached the formal and informal aspects of education by purposefully planning and integrating the efforts of the individuals and groups across the community. We proposed an integrated educational model that could be developed by us and for us, with the potential to spread across the school district, the province and beyond. Our group members have now presented this model to groups in Ontario, Nova Scotia, P.E.I. and Oregon.
In January of 2016, the recently elected government of Brian Gallant announced the Education and New Economy Fund, and the Premier stated that the best way to give students the chance to succeed in whatever they would like to do with their lives was to invest in education, in training, in research and development, and in innovation. This was a profound commitment to education and the key to our economic and cultural future in this province. It also matched closely with what we wanted here in our community. The Premier wanted N.B. to be the educational leader in Canada, and we wanted to embrace this aspirational plan by being the first community to join with him in meeting this important goal. In view of this significant commitment to education, the members of Sackville Schools 2020 invited our newly elected Mayor and Council and the new Minister of Education to meet with us and to work with our community in being the first project to be developed through the Education and New Economy program.
The Government of New Brunswick also announced a new approach to education through a ten-year Education Plan, Everyone at their Best. Sackville was the only community to request that the educational reform commission come to meet with us. We presented a proposal out of the plan to develop Sackville as a pilot project to implement the major new programs and approaches to education through an innovative approach that includes all of the partners in the community. Since the release of the new ten-year plan in September of 2016, we have worked with the Minister and the Department of Education, the Mayor and Council of Sackville, our local schools, parents and students, as well as Mount Allison University, in achieving our goal of developing Sackville as an innovative, education-based place where students can thrive. Beyond the critical changes in teaching and learning, we also put forth a model where this learning can be supported in a modern, state-of-the-art, environmentally healthy system of educational facilities with a community-wide focus on the creation of 21st century learning. The early signal of community-based education is now evolving to include formal and informal learning, community outreach and recreation, social gathering and performance spaces, as well as shared facility agreements for the entire community, from young to old. The community is driving the process of change.
One amazing fact about the Sackville Schools 2020 movement is that it has all been accomplished by community volunteers, with no outside funding. Over two years, we have had world-class architects and educational design experts assist us in our work, as well as educational change leaders from across North America. Community schools and school change agents from across the province, the Maritimes, and the country, as well as the U.S. and Australia, have welcomed us to their schools, simply because they recognized that we were trying to engage our entire community in supporting an integrated approach to education. The Minister of Education for N.B., Brian Kenny, has certainly noticed these signals, stating that “education is not just bricks and mortar… it is about our community and I think that your group there in Sackville are doing some wonderful things. You have some very innovative thinkers there and to get the community together is a very positive thing. I commend you for trying to put the pieces together between your elementary, middle and high schools and for advancing education across the province.”
The shift we propose will require major changes to the existing educational facilities in Sackville, as they are old, disconnected and poorly designed for 21st century learning. We envision a centralized learning campus that connects all levels of teaching and learning to new and existing facilities within the community. This will allow for older structures to be phased out and a new learning campus to be developed within the heart of the town. The facilities will be designed to grow and shrink with the overall demographic changes in the community, saving the province millions of dollars.
Part of our work has been researching a number of innovative methods for building and financing this new educational model. Rather than the boiler-plate model that exists now, where schools are actually designed and built by the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, we have recommended a new approach: a community-based project management process, with a designated project management team at the local level, to lead the school design and development.
Mount Allison University, located in the centre of our town, will be a major feature in this unique learning complex, with new teaching, research and learning facilities developed on and near the campus. Local facilities, such as the Sackville and Mount Allison libraries, outdoor fields, arts and recreation facilities/parks, and athletics facilities, will become part of the complex, making Sackville the only community in Canada with an integrated, highly walkable and accessible education system in the center of the community. We believe that such a highly integrated education system will attract and retain students, faculty and new residents to the province and become the economic and social engine of the region. We have also been in discussion with educational researchers at a number of North American universities who are developing community-based action research on educational innovations such as ours.
This model will give students the opportunity to get out of the classroom and lecture halls and apply what they are learning as part of their everyday, lived experience, addressing real-world issues and problems at the local and regional level. It will allow younger students to engage with students and educators at the secondary and post-secondary levels, as well as direct engagement and experiences for students and faculty at the university, or retired teachers and faculty, to work with students and teachers in the local schools. Such a model affords everyone involved with a new and creative approach to teaching and mentoring students and creating an advanced and sophisticated learning community.
As the Assistant Deputy Minister of Education recently stated, “Sackville Schools 2020 is clearly a unique and compelling vision of how a town can impact the quality of education of its children… in 2017, we can’t still be using approaches to education that are, in some cases, hundreds of years old.”
This model would be unique within Canada, representing a true partnership between students and educators across all educational levels, as well as a range of community partners and citizens, local and provincial governments, businesses and nonprofit groups.
So now, two years after we started our conversation, we have signaled our intention to move away from the traditional top-down system of school planning and design. Our civic leaders, Department of Education officials, Minister of Education and business leaders have recommended the Sackville Schools 2020 vision to the Premier. It is on his desk and we wait for him to respond to this strong signal for change on the educational stage of New Brunswick. The “education premier” has been invited to the stage for the performance of his lifetime.
One of our central tools for consultation has been our committee-driven website, with resources, blog space and an interactive web documentary on our movement. You can see it at www.sackvilleschools2020.com
Photo: courtesy Michael Fox
First published in Education Canada, March 2018
Principal Daniel Villeneuve of Saints-Anges Catholic Elementary School in North Bay, Ontario was among the first wave of Canadian school leaders to take a stand against Fidget Spinners, the latest craze among children worldwide.
On May 23 and 24, 2017, the North Bay principal visited class after class to advise his students that the hand-held gadgets were being banned from school grounds, then sent a letter to parents explaining the decision. What he didn’t say was perhaps obvious – the classroom distractions were driving teachers crazy and making teaching almost intolerable.
Marketed as a “stress reliever” for anxious or hyperactive kids, Fidget Spinners became a major disruption, interfering with teaching and learning and affecting everyone in the classroom. Childhood crazes come and go, but this one was different because the gadgets were billed as therapeutic tools providing supposed benefits for children affected by ADHD and a host of school-age anxieties.
In May 2017, school authorities across the world stepped in to limit or eliminate the spinners in the classroom. While American and British education leaders were quick to react against the latest gadget, their Canadian counterparts were more cautious, and teachers were more receptive to claims that Fidget Spinners had therapeutic effects based upon what researchers term ‘pseudoscience.’
The arrival of fidget spinners on school playgrounds had a polarizing effect, pitting regular teachers against those serving special needs children. Influenced by child psychologists like Toronto’s Sara Dimerman, teachers recommended using spinners to help ease the anxieties of students in Grades 3 and 6 writing Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) exams in reading, writing and math during the week of May 22 to 26.
The critical question remains: why did it take so long for Canadian educators to confront the latest menace to effective teaching and learning?
Fidget Spinners, since their invention in the 1990s, have been used with some success to assist in teaching students severely challenged with autism. “We call them fidget tools because they really are tools,” Edmonton autism specialist Terri Duncan told CBC News. “Sometimes it helps to tune out other sensory information. Sometimes it helps them calm and focus. Sometimes it helps them with their breathing and relaxing. It’s a little bit different for every child.”
Serious problems arise when Fidget Spinners are used to simply relieve everyday stress and anxiety. While Dr. Jennifer Crosbie of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children sees value in the gadgets for treating autistic children, she’s not a fan of their widespread use in classrooms. In her words, “it’s too distracting” and “draws attention” to the user, disrupting the class. She and many other clinicians now recommend that schools limit their use to special education classes or interventions.
School authorities in Maritime Canada initially accepted the claims of the marketers and were swayed by their special education program consultants. Self-regulation, championed by Dr. Stuart Shanker of York University, has made inroads in elementary schools, many of which embrace “mindfulness” and employ “stress-reduction” strategies and tools.
Seeking to accommodate learning challenged students in inclusive classrooms, New Brunswick’s Anglophone school districts readily accepted Fidget Spinners as just another pacifying tool to complement their spin bikes and wiggle stools. In the Atlantic Region’s largest school district, Halifax Regional School Board, the policy decision was left up to individual schools and frustrated teachers took to social media to complain about the constant distraction and ordeal of confiscating spinners to restore order.
Prominent education critics and teacher researchers had a field day exposing the pseudoscience supporting the introduction of Fidget Spinners into today’s regular classrooms. A Winnipeg psychologist, Kristen Wirth, found little evidence testifying to their positive results and claims that it is a “placebo effect” where “we feel something is helping, but it may or may not be helping.” Canada’s leading teen mental health expert, Dr. Stan Kutcher, saw “no substantive evidence on spinners” and warned parents and teachers to be wary of the out-sized claims made by marketers of the toys.
The founder of Britain’s researched, Tom Bennett, was more adamant about the “latest menace” to effective teaching and learning in schools. The latest fad – Fidget Spinners – he saw as symptomatic of “education’s crypto-pathologies.” Teachers today have to contend with students purportedly exhibiting “every trouble and symptom” of anxiety and stress. Misdiagnoses, he claimed, can lead to children feeling they have some insurmountable difficulty in reading, when what it requires is tutorial help and ongoing support.
“Many children do suffer from very real and very grave difficulties,” Bennett pointed out, and they need intensive support. When it comes to “Fidget Spinners,” he added, “we need to develop a finer, collective nose for the bullshit, for the deliberately mysterious, for the (purely invented) halitosis of the classroom.”
Magic bullets – like magic beans – which do not pass the sound research test have no place in today’s classrooms. In many cases, they do far more harm than good to our students.