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The best is yet to come
It’s a milestone in the Association’s colourful history—50 years of specialist councils, and this issue of the ATA Magazine pays tribute to these important Association subgroups.
The birth of specialist councils is chronicled in this issue—our archivist has located the original 1959 memorandum that proposed specialist councils and some of the reports that appeared in this magazine 50 years ago are reproduced here. Professional development programs expanded considerably during the tenure of S.C.T. Clarke, the Association’s third executive secretary, and the Association hired its first Professional Development staff officer—Ernie Ingram. Clarke came to the Association from the University of Alberta and led the ATA through a huge expansion of the teaching profession.
Association committee structures that focused on curriculum, student evaluation, and teacher education and certification advanced the professional interests of teachers, including representation to the minister of education. The establishment of specialist councils was seen as a critical development—“specialists” were everywhere (the tradition of the one-room school generalist was declining). There were other advances, too—the Association conducted extensive work on internship and proposed approaches to teachers’ transition from preparation programs to practice. A Leadership Course for School Principals was initiated by the Association (characterized by ATA historian J.W. Chalmers as a “fortnight-long brain-scrubbing ordeal”). Summer Conference expanded to include sessions for professional development operatives, too. In addition, the Association started to offer conferences on education that were a major focus for professional discussion.
We’ve grown from 6 specialist councils to 21, and I’m proud of that record. Specialist councils have truly made a difference in professional practice. Though the annual conferences and various publications are important, specialist councils bring fellow teachers together and encourage the forging of career-long professional friendships.
I’m hopeful that specialist councils will become even more important Association subgroups in the future. They offer enormous potential for teacher professional development and could play a role in the current move to transform Alberta’s education system. Of particular importance in educational transformation is the place of curriculum, and I believe that teachers should play a much larger role in the development of curriculum than they do today in Alberta. Teachers in Finland certainly do in that country. Finland has a national core curriculum established by the state and offers teachers employed by individual school authorities the chance to develop their own detailed curriculum. This model means that teachers engage in rich conversations about what and how they teach and establish a community of professional practice. The engagement produces a better curriculum and better teaching. Finland’s pedagogical associations play a major role in curriculum development: they provide support materials and share ideas. Some associations also publish textbooks and undertake inservice. The Association’s specialist councils are well placed to play a larger support role in curriculum development and instruction, and I’d welcome that.
So let’s celebrate our specialist councils. They have advanced the professional practice of teachers in their first 50 years of life and the best is yet to come.
