The Alberta Teachers’ Association

Crossing borders and connecting globally

Many teachers who worked through the brutal Klein-era cuts of the early 1990s recall the government’s specious “research” claims to justify its short-sighted education policies—for example, kindergarten doesn’t contribute to student learning gains, class size doesn’t matter, and competition and privatization will drive innovation in the public education system.

At the time, Alberta teachers not only had to experience the frustration of countering these absurd and pernicious claims but also had to endure the consequences in their classrooms: regressive early childhood learning policies, unsustainable classes and misplaced funding priorities that failed to address the growing disparity among Albertans.

As a former teacher looking back at these difficult times, one of my most disquieting memories was the recurring comment I encountered during the provincial diploma examination marking sessions in Edmonton: “Marking these exams is some of the best professional development I get these days.” In those difficult times of cutbacks and attacks on the public sector, it was painfully true that the chance to work elbow to elbow with colleagues was rewarding—what could be more fun than hanging out with 150 Grade 12 social studies teachers marking essays for five days?

Almost 20 years later, what strikes me most about my colleagues’ appreciation for their “great once-a-year PD opportunity” is how teachers had grown accustomed to not only longer hours and working harder (marking included working weekends) but also working increasingly in isolation and experiencing ever-decreasing access to PD during the school day. The cuts not only meant increased workload; they also peeled away many of the PD programs that supported teacher teams and collaborative inquiry, and terminated opportunities that supported teachers working between schools and other jurisdictions to build teaching resources and share teaching practices.

Today, we see the challenges of education reform and school improvement. While governments continue to call for innovation and risk-taking in schools, the reality is that resources for programs that support teachers reaching across their classroom, school and system boundaries continue to be undermined—witness the decision last spring to end the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement.

Internationalizing Reform

The Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), rather than sitting back and waiting on the government to fund sustainable resources for networks of teacher inquiry, has over the past three years undertaken major research to demonstrate the effect of boundary-crossing collaborative inquiry that supports transforming Alberta’s K–12 education system through the “internationalization of education reform” (Sahlberg 2011) to help school communities address commonly shared “wicked problems” (Murgatroyd 2010).

In 2010, the ATA, in collaboration with the Finnish Board of Education, the Centre for International Mobility and Alberta Education, initiated the Finland–Alberta (FINAL) partnership with the following goal: “Education partners in Finland and Alberta advance international educational and policy development through a shared commitment to provide a great school for all students.”

FINAL is driven by the principle that transformation is best enabled by educational systems that support local innovation. Finland is an exemplar of this approach because the locus of control in Finland is at the school-community level. As a counterweight to the global education reform movement (GERM) driven by bureaucratic control and an overreliance on technology, FINAL has demonstrated how international partnerships sustain local innovation and creativity at the school level while encouraging innovation throughout the system. This is a key conclusion of the external research team that has monitored the progress of the partnership (Shirley and Lam 2012).

Transformation from the inside out is best understood by viewing school development as part of the internationalization of educational development achieved through three strategies reviewed at the FINAL Summit held in Helsinki, in May 2012:

1. Thinking ahead—principals, teachers and students committed to the values of equity, community and responsibility while being visionary and forward-thinking in aspiring to create a great school for all students

2. Delivering within—principals, teachers and students supporting local innovations while avoiding “the perniciousness of the present” (Hargreaves 2009) and favouring inappropriate technology as a driver of school reform

3. Leading across—principals, teachers and students reaching across school and other jurisdictional and political boundaries to learn from each other

Building trust that engenders collaborative professional autonomy focused on high-quality teaching practice is evident in many of the FINAL partnership’s initiatives. Thinking ahead and leading across involve activities focused on big-picture policy issues aimed at bringing about structural reforms and long-term strategic shifts in our two jurisdictions. For example, the Finnish government is overhauling its basic education sector to deal with the growing challenges of globalization and economic instability. Over the past two years, the partnership has examined schools sharing practices in re-visioning what is meant by student engagement, innovation and global citizenship. FINAL initiatives include projects between students, teachers and principals that examine art education, student leadership, school assessment, a healthy school culture, literacy initiatives, and literature and film studies.

Supporting Leadership

International partnerships can’t be about simplistically copying policies and practices from exotic locales and shoehorning them into a patchwork of reform. Rather, in the case of the FINAL partnership, we are considering extending the partnership to include Singapore.

The FINAL partnership has garnered international attention and has been profiled at international conferences and in publications (Shirley and Lam 2011). As Dennis Shirley and Karen Lam (FINAL research team members) noted in their assessment of FINAL at the Helsinki Summit: “Ultimately FINAL is neither about Finland nor Alberta, it is about the internationalization of education in order for two high performing jurisdictions to learn and grow together.”

Leadership strategies (thinking ahead, delivering within and leading across) and international partnerships can be a catalyst for transforming education (ATA 2012). Innovation focused on optimizing the human potential of our school communities is the driving force behind educational transformation in our international partnerships.

References

Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA). 2012. A Great School for All—Transforming Education in Alberta. Edmonton, Alta.: ATA.

Hargreaves, A. 2009. “Real Learning First Through the Fourth Way: An Invitational Symposium.” Public lecture given in Calgary, Alta., April 28.

Sahlberg, P. 2011. Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? New York: Teachers College Press.

Shirley, D., and K. Lam. 2012. “Fourth Way FINAL: The Power of the Internationalization of Networks of School Leaders.” In Rethinking School Leadership—Creating Great Schools for All Students, ed. J-C Couture and S. Murgatroyd, 112–37. Edmonton, Alta.: Future Think Press.

Murgatroyd, S. 2010. “‘Wicked Problems’ and the Work of the School.” European Journal of Education 45, no. 2: 259–79.

Dr. J-C Couture is associate coordinator, research, with the Alberta Teachers’ Association.