The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Contributors: Jorunn Dahl Norgård, Steffen Handal, Øyvind Sørreime and Berit Anne Halkjelsvik

Five of us from the Union of Education Norway had the good fortune to be invited by the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) to visit Alberta last February to study school improvement work. Our desire to visit Alberta had been sparked by the province’s good results on the OECD PISA tests and writings by Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley, who analyzed the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) project. What makes AISI unique is that much school development work around the globe tends to be driven too much from the top-down. AISI fosters more of a bottom-up approach.

Although we were saturated with information and impressions after a week’s stay in Alberta, we do not pretend that our knowledge of education in Alberta is more than just superficial. However, our impressions from a Norwegian perspective might be of interest to teachers. In an increasingly globalized environment, many of the challenges faced by education are similar across most jurisdictions. These challenges must be met with changes adapted to the different political, social, organizational and economic climates.

The ATA is in an enviable position because of the mandatory membership of all teachers and school leaders working in the province’s public education system. In most European countries, there exist several teachers’ unions that compete for the same members. Because the ATA represents the entire teaching profession, it speaks and acts with authority on professional issues. This helps to push back attempts to politicize professional issues and solutions in the education sector, which is a major obstacle to creating the necessary trust to implement reforms. We noticed that the ATA in its organization, its distribution of resources and its cooperation with the political authorities used its unique position as a professional organization to take charge and assume responsibility for reforms and school improvement.

Although we attended an AISI conference and a provincial conference and visited three schools during our stay, little time was available for discussion with practitioners closest to the students. We did, however, have the opportunity to talk to school leaders at different levels. They struck us as strong leaders with clear visions and purpose, with the energy and the will to implement changes they believed in. They were determined to develop a collective culture where all employees should take a fundamental responsibility for the well-being and success of students.

The schools we visited vibrated with energy. The teachers we met and talked to briefly were open, kind and eager to share information about what they were doing and trying to achieve. We’d have liked to study further the forums that are set up to discuss professional issues in the schools. It was also difficult to judge to what extent school policies and practices were developed through a collective process or were decided by school management alone.

We’re aware that AISI’s financial foundation has been severed. AISI is an exceptional model for school development that should be maintained and developed further. Although it became obvious at the AISI conference that the degree of bottom-up engagement in different projects varied, we still think this is a special feature of the project’s design. Also, we’d like to stress the use of action research as a fundamental method of development work. This stimulates the important cooperation between academia and education and motivates teachers to experiment through scientific approaches that promote a more systematic learning of the teaching profession. A continuing professionalization of the teaching profession is an essential prerequisite to develop better education for all students.

Our study tour of Alberta inspired us to continue guiding the Union of Education Norway toward becoming a professional organization that will take more responsibility for the development of good quality education and for the instruments and forums needed to ensure such processes. In that respect, we now know we have much to learn from Alberta education and the ATA.

From our experience, we found that Alberta’s teachers and educators are members of a proud profession—another good reason to develop our relationship with the ATA and Alberta education. If we were to give Alberta one piece of advice at this early stage in our relationship, it would be to save a portion of your oil revenue for hard times, as Norway has done with its oil money.

Roar Grøttvik is a political adviser with the Union of Education Norway.