The Alberta Teachers’ Association

In the summer 2015 issue of the ATA Magazine, University of Alberta professor José da Costa discussed a landmark 2001 class size study he co-authored entitled Literacy Achievement in Small Grade 1 Classes in High-Poverty Environments.

Working with staff from Edmonton Public Schools, the U of A research team examined improvements in student learning when classes were limited to 15 students and participating teachers were supported by professional development activities focused on balanced literacy and/or early literacy.

The following is an excerpt of that Q&A.

Q: Can you tell us about some of your key findings?

A: Our main finding showed that teachers with smaller class sizes had more time to devote to each child, to support and scaffold their learning more effectively.

I recall one teacher who realized, with the switch to the substantially smaller class, that one student who appeared to be progressing with the class was in fact falling behind but was skilfully masking this by asking her classmates for help and borrowing other students’ work. This sort of falling through the cracks happens when we expect teachers to work with large numbers of students with complex learning needs.

Q: In the decade that has passed since your team’s study there has been a lot more research and much more controversy. How, if at all, has your thinking changed on the class size issue?

A: I think where we saw the greatest shift as a result of our work and the work of many other researchers was in the recognition of the importance of smaller class sizes in the critical formative years in lower elementary school. This seems to be the time during which students develop their efficacy as learners.

If we’re serious about having students learn curriculum in ways that are meaningful to them and in ways that positively impact their communities, we can’t just herd them through a factory funding and mass-production model, allowing them to sort themselves. Every child who we fail to support to reach his or her maximum ability is a loss for our local communities and society as a whole. What is the loss to society when, because of excessive numbers in a classroom, a student gains only the knowledge required to get a good grade but fails to gain mastery that would allow deeper understanding of a subject at advanced levels of learning?

What have we gained as a society in the long term by saving education dollars by putting 35 students in a class when the child who had the aptitude and ability to be successful doesn’t learn in elementary and junior high school the nuances necessary for this success?

Q: Many pundits and policy-makers, citing international studies including those emanating from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, claim that the Alberta government should focus on quality teaching instead of class size reductions. Do you see merit in these claims?

A: The education system we currently see in our publicly funded schools is the product of the Industrial Revolution, when an efficient mass production approach to education was put into place. The system then was meant to enable students to gain a sufficient but rudimentary understanding of reading, writing and arithmetic so they could be productive factory employees. These rudimentary skills are a far cry from our expectations of learners today.

Today’s classrooms cannot simply be places in which teachers, as talking heads, deliver their lessons and then have students regurgitate what they heard on meaningless worksheets. Today’s classrooms must be focused on individualizing instruction to facilitate meaningful learning, starting with what the learner knows, understands and is meaningful — it’s about creating learner-centred experiences rather than teacher-centred experiences.

We also need to recognize the great diversity of our learners. These include abilities such as intellectual capacity and cultural and linguistic diversity. The diverse learning needs in our classrooms are accentuated by mainstreaming initiatives that have seen the desegregation of students with learning disabilities. This is a move in the right direction for learners, but this shift does place additional demands on classroom teachers to meet the learning needs of an even more diverse group of learners than ever before.

Of course quality teaching is critical. However, increasing class size beyond what the literature suggests as optimal simply results in teacher time being spread more thinly across the increased number of learners. This simply results in a system in which students are seen to be learning as long as they meet whatever external benchmarks have been established. This takes away the focus from enabling students to learn and achieve to the best of their ability.

For example, the student who consistently achieves the standard of excellence on external tests but isn’t actually pushing herself to do so is achieving below her capability. 

Teachers don’t have the time, in large classrooms, to push that student to reach her individual capacity. If we fail to do this, we fail the student and our province’s future.

Q: As a researcher, you have seen decades of debate on class size in this province. How might we engage education partners and the public at large in a meaningful discussion around the class size issue?

A: This is a very difficult question. I think it is more a political question than a research one, although research can obviously inform the discussion.
Parents who see their children in classes with large numbers of other students with diverse learning needs are often the ones who notice their children aren’t getting pushed to the limits of their ability. Those parents who have the social capital and financial ability often enrich their children’s learning by providing them with enrichment activities outside of school.

Members of the general public who don’t have direct connections to contemporary schools are less likely to be sympathetic to the learning needs of students in large classes, or of students in smaller classes that have unprecedented numbers of children with a variety of individualized learning needs.

We can only understand schools from the point of view of our experiences with schools. People who are not directly connected to K–12 schools typically view the education system based on their own experiences as a learner in that system, even if that dates back four, five, six or more decades. While schools and education have changed drastically, even in the last couple of decades, our experiences are always grounded in what we know and what we think is still true. I believe the issue is, how do we challenge those preconceptions to the point where people understand that today’s classrooms are not what they experienced decades ago?