Alberta Education: more scuttlebutt

Minsiter of Education Dave Hancock is listening to the people and following models such as Singapore and Finland while re-calibrating education in Alberta. (It's important to note that Alberta is not following the United States version of test and punish accountability)

Recent scuttlebutt tells us that there may be a move for more professional development days to be installed in the school year. This could mean 10 days in the school calendar that has teachers at school, with no students, working collaboratively with each other, advancing their professional development.

There are some obvious growing pains to come of this progressive change. Firstly, parents may not be too keen on having to provide care for their children for these days, and secondly, teachers may not appreciate having even less time to accomplish what seems like an infinite list of curriculum outcomes. To be fair, these teachers have a very legitimate gripe.

This brings us to the 500 pound pink elephant that is sitting on the education reform table that no one really wants to talk about - Curriculum.

So what's the problem with curriculum?

There's too much.

There's a reason why Robert Marzano, American education guru, says that in order for students to learn all the curriculum outcomes in school, we would have to rename school from K-12 to K-22.

The good news is that Alberta Education's key project working group titled Curriculum Process and Standards Redesign has been hard at work for the last year to address this over-wieght, pink elephant. The word on the street is that they have been given the task of slimming and trimming the program of studies. This

To understand what this committee is doing, let's use a popular analogy. If you have jar and you need to put a bag of sand and a couple big rocks in the jar, you have to place the rocks in first, then the sand will fit as needed. But if you place the sand in first, you'll never get the big rocks to fit.

So, if the curiculum is a jar full of sand and rocks, the idea is to focus less on prescribing the millions of sand particles and focus more on the big rocks.

So what might this look like?

If you are an experienced teacher who's been doing this gig for some time, you might remember a time when teachers had more time in their year for teacher or student electives. Again, the word on the street is this could equal 10% to 30% of the curriculum being left for the teacher and students to decide what it is they need or want to learn.

This all brings us back to why professional development is so important: How do we get those big rocks to fit in the jar? What are the big rocks? Are they more about process or content, or both? Will the sand take care of itself?

Ofcourse, I am being metaphorical.

Teachers need far more time to work together to develop their teaching practices. Finland provides a powerful model in this area; they understand that there is a lot of truth in the idea that if you teach less, you can learn more. Quality of instruction can not be driven by sheer quantity. Sometimes teachers are so busy teaching, they don't have time to stop to make sure the students are learning.

With the prospect of less curriculum on our plates, teachers will be better able to see these professional development days as supportive rather than an albatross.

It takes great courage to look at the United States' test and punish education reform and say "No Thanks", and it takes even more testicular fortitude to look at the seemingly counter-intuitve paradoxes of the Finnish model of education to shape our own progressive education reform.

Our most difficult challenges most likely still await us, but it would appear that Alberta is going in the right direction.