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Gordon Thomas
With Inspiring Education’s report about to be released, with School Act revisions being written and with a clear focus on preparing Alberta’s public education system for two decades from now, Minister of Education Dave Hancock has talked about the need for transformational change. It should not be change for the sake of change; it should be change that enhances the capacity of children to learn and to be successful—and that must mean change that enables the teaching profession to better prepare Alberta’s students.
For too long, we’ve seen initiatives that are disconnected from this fundamental view. Alberta’s standardized testing programs do not begin by considering how to improve the capacity of students to learn; they begin with definitions of accountability—indeed, systems of accountability. To truly achieve an education system with the ability to meet the many complex challenges of the 21st century, we need to take a different approach.
Fundamental to this is one very straightforward reality: a teacher’s classroom conditions are a student’s learning conditions. And creating conditions for a student to learn and to be successful is crucial. The starting place for Minister Hancock should be student learning conditions. After all, much turns on the profession’s capacity to meet student learning needs. For the minister, transformational change should mean establishing teaching and learning conditions that improve the profession’s capacity to meet student learning needs.
For starters, this means attention paid to class size and class composition. It means creating conditions, in the context of public policy decision making, that allow teachers to do their best work. It involves focusing on how the teacher can be supported in meeting student learning needs. That’s a different starting place for government, but it can make an enormous difference.
In transforming education, the minister needs to stand the province’s role in testing and accountability on its head. Instead of developing testing (and accountability) models for the province’s purposes and pretending that they can be easily used to improve teaching and learning, it’s important to develop testing around the needs of the student and the teacher—testing that helps a teacher further determine student learning needs. It’s always possible to extract accountability data from such a testing regimen. The result of such an initiative is an improved capacity to meet student learning needs.
In transforming education, the minister needs to provide greater capacity to the profession. That means providing professional development time and resources to help meet learning needs. These can’t be top-down initiatives from those-who-think-they-know-best—the starting place should be teacher-identified professional development priorities. The minister has talked about special education, teacher-based student assessment, FNMI (First Nations, Métis and Inuit) education and technology as provincial issues, but program priorities need to be determined by teachers. Giving greater capacity to the profession also means enhancing the profession’s responsibilities by assigning to the teaching profession the principal responsibility for standards and certification. Full self-governance for the teaching profession would be a statement of confidence in teachers to take the leadership role in the profession’s affairs.
In transforming education, the minister needs to value good public policy decision making. For example, given the growing number of students in Alberta schools and the aging teaching force, it makes public policy sense to find ways to recruit and retain teachers and to keep veteran teachers around a little longer to assist with successful induction and orientation of young teachers. Given teacher shortages in some areas, such as career and technology studies, additional attention needs to be paid, from a public policy perspective, to recruitment and selection. There are big-picture public policy questions, too. What’s the role of the province in K–12 education? Of school boards? What legislative, regulatory and policy structure is required? Government can make a very real difference in dealing with these issues.
In transforming education, the minister should not be sucked in by technology as a silver bullet that will enhance results and reduce government expenditures. It is naive to view technology in education and students’ digital literacy in monolithic terms. The conversation needs to be more focused on the uses of technology as differentiated by age, gender, culture and socioeconomic background. We need a more sophisticated conversation led by teachers as opposed to jumping on the latest techno-popularized trend that fixates on the machinery (for example, videoconferences) rather than the learning activity (for example, connecting with an expert). Of course, learning takes place at different times, in different places and at a variety of paces, but it is not a technological activity that is self-directed and autonomous. We know much about teaching and learning: we know that learning is a social construction that is highly relationship-based. Learners need to be engaged in active and inquiry-oriented experiences that contribute to collective and collaborative knowledge building. The use of technology must improve the teacher’s capacity to meet student learning needs.
The Association is committed to helping Minister Hancock get transformative change right. There are significant opportunities ahead to strengthen Alberta’s public education system for new generations of teachers and students—and for Alberta’s citizens.
