Thursday, 17 December 2020
A New Project
Tuesday, 8 December 2020
Focus on Relationships
Focus on Relationships
When I was teaching in the College of Education for Niagara University in Toronto, I used to tell my students that, in many ways, teachers are like the pied piper. We lead the way and our students follow us if we are doing our job properly. Often my students would refer to me as a great teacher and I would remind them that it takes good students to make a good teacher. In many ways, those are two ways of looking at the crucial relationship between each teacher and student. I was reminded of this today while reading the notes from SmartBrief from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. These are compendia that I get daily into my Inbox about items of interest to teachers and administrators. I actually get three different lists but there are always items of interest in one or the other of the briefs that I get. Today, there were actually two. One of them referred to an article written in a blog by a principal from a school in Washington State. The other was commenting on a study conducted by teachers of Special Education when surveyed about their work online given the needs of the pandemic. In the latter, the study reported that teacher confirmed that it was important to understand the family environment because the teacher is actually a guest in the home of his or her students and cultural expectations and awareness are crucial. As an example, I remember vividly when I went as a teenager to stay with a family in New York City that my parents had met and who had a teenaged girl my age. They asked me we lived in igloos in the winter time. These were people living in Brooklyn, NY in the early '60s. What did they know about Canada, but I knew that the comment was ignorant. If I had been a student, my relationship with that adult would never have been the same. I would not have been likely to follow that leader. In the former, it is self-evident to many that if we don't have relationships with our students, how can we help them when they are having trouble. Students are individuals and even more today, we know that acquiring knowledge, mastering skills and adopting values that we attempt to pass on will none of them happen if we don't know our students as individuals. How can we reach out to them? How can we help them if we don't know where their pitfalls are or what makes them tick as humans. Similarly, online it is even more important to use strategies that will shed light on the student behind the camera or the text posted online. I used to encourage my students to write a paragraph about themselves as a way of introduction, asking them to tell me and their fellow students what they think we should know about them. Students in general are very open. We need to capitalize on that openness right away to sense who they are and how we can find that hook that will enable us to play the pied piper, to lead them in the direction we want them to go. Pronounce their names the right way, purposefully, as a show of respect. Ask them what they want you to call them, whether a formal name or a nickname and so forth. Whatever you do, you should look for things on a regular basis that helps you to check in with them, and to watch them carefully enough so you recognize the signs of boredom, happiness, frustration, sadness and so forth. Whatever you do, try to KNOW them and respond to that knowledge all the time. It makes you focus on the relationships.
Thursday, 3 December 2020
Creating Anything Has to be Part of Any Program
Creating Anything Has to be Part of Any Program
Almost every day, there is an article in the printed press or a video item in the broadcast press expressing dissatisfaction with online learning. While almost 60 % of parents support continuing some form of online learning beyond the end of the. pandemic, there is not much understanding of how online learning occurs. Whether students are in front of a classroom teacher in a real classroom or in front of a screen at home, the one thing that has to take place in both cases is a challenge to students to be creative, to create. It is a misconception to believe that that cannot happen online. It is all about promoting problem solving of one kind or another and then challenging students to be creative in the way in which they communicate their ideas and thoughts. Probably it doesn't really matter what students are creating as long as they are. When I was in the classroom, I always did a novel studies with my students, but not in the traditional sense. Several years running, my entire reading program was comprised of a compulsory one book a month read with choices of follow up activities to demonstrate what the reader had gotten out of the book that they read. They could not, my students, use the same challenge twice. So, for instance, they could only do one book cover, which they INVENTED not copied of the book they read and the cover had to indicate something about the book they had read and they had to be able to explain that to me. They were encouraged to create plays or write poetry or do three dimensional dioramas or bulletin boards or newspaper articles or the traditional book review for a children's magazine and so forth. These activities involved choice by the students so they had to decide what they were going to do. Then they had their choices of materials, subject matter, media, done singly or with partners. When my students reflect on what they liked about my classrooms, it is always the chance to be creative and to invent. Why is this so important though, you might ask. Well, if you can name me one invention that is now part of our daily lives or was and has been overtaken by something else, you will be hard pressed to figure out how it came to be without someone seeing an opportunity to create something. There was an article just today about a young athlete who had become partially paralyzed through a sporting accident and now he is inventing ways for disabled people to get around and not just travel from place to place but to play as well. Every invention begins with someone with enough confidence to think of something new that didn't exist before. That's why creativity is so important in the classroom. Unless we empower our students to think out of the box and make up things, they will become stifled and lose that creativity. It is like priming the pump to extract water. It has to be primed and pumped before the water flows evenly. Creating has to be part of any program, it has to be key to an individualized learning journey.
Tuesday, 24 November 2020
Cultivating a Persona Online
Cultivating a Persona Online
A great deal has been made of the time teachers are spending online these days because they are teaching online, a very unfamiliar task for so many of them. They are complaining about burn-out and how they can't effective as classroom teachers. I can understand their difficulties under the circumstances and how they did not ask for this to happen, but I thought it might be worthwhile to explore some of my own experiences and perhaps come up with some conclusions going forward. My earliest experiences in a discussion group were before the creation of java scripting. It goes back to my first online Talmud class. I stumbled upon the link to the class and signed up for it. I remember I was still working on an early Pentium ,maybe 365, computer. The class required each participant to post a picture of themselves. Every time anyone posted a comment or a question, their picture appeared before their post. I know it sounds almost self-explanatory, but when you are carrying on interactions online with a stranger, it helps to be able to see that person in your mind's eye. We are visual creatures and we respond to visual stimuli. The same thing pertains to carrying on a relationship with someone strange. If you think about it, in the old days, when we had penpals, you always wanted to see pictures of this person so you could imagine them in your mind's eye sitting and talking to you. That experience taught me an important lesson about interactions online. WE all want to "see" the other person. The second thing I remember is that I began to understand, by the way the others wrote, something about their personality and how they think. I don't think that I am so insightful but I could read into their words online something about their voice, their approach to things. I found that that knowledge and introspection continued into my years as an instructor in computer courses. I always insisted that my course included some online discussions and I knew what. my students were feeling and saying as they wrote. We all relay more than just plain ideas when we speak, face-to-face. The third lesson is akin to what I am referring to above. Each of us are people first and when we are learning, even in an online course, our lives are more than just that one series of interactions. I began. to relay little things about myself and I know here, some are going to say they don't want their students to know anything about themselves. BUT.....we are people first and my students felt closer to me because I shared a part of my life, my experiences, my feelings. I became REAL to them. Just think about all the reactions in the press to the death of movie stars and rock stars. They have become real people to all of us because they have shared something of themselves. It enabled us to relate to them as people. Finally, I found that these other little strategies helped me deal with the minutiae of the tasks at hand. I was able to consider more realistically those who were being genuine and thoughtful in their postings and those who were not. It took time to cultivate those relationships, but the reality of working online became more natural and more interactive and actually, believe it or not, took me less and less time because I was able to relate to my students as people and if I knew a whack of them had the same issues, I could respond to that rather than one on one. It is not easy, I know that. But you have to cultivate the relationship up front and the more time you spend up front to prime the pump the easier and less time consuming it becomes down the road. It does get easier and less time consuming and more meaningful.
Tuesday, 17 November 2020
Changing Nature of Pupil / Teacher Contact & Burnout
Changing Nature of Pupil / Teacher Contact & Burnout
These days, there have been so many different ways in which the issue of teacher burnout has been covered in the professional and popular press. It was written in the cards that the opening and closing of schools, the sometimes online and sometimes in person nature of instruction, the need for hand washing and social distancing and mask wearing would all become burdens to be borne by the professional educators in our society. That alone is enough for some teachers to complain about burn-out. However, what no one was bargaining on and few knew to expect was the issue of time on task per student in the act of teaching either online or in the classroom. The old industrial model of students all being in one class and benefitting from lessons delivered by the teacher at the front cut down on the amount of time each single teacher needed to spend on instruction. A professional educator would then spend the rest of the time helping those who needed it the most and leaving the best students to do what they had to do without much intervention. Now, however, the whole idea of age mates being in one classroom and benefitting from whole class instruction has gone out the window. I just read a brief note about the problem of the numbers of students who are out of step with the assumed ability and knowledge level of any particular class or grade. That is further proof that what is required today is individualized teaching. This is only compounded by the need to be online where time-on-task is only increased for the teacher. When I've talked about this with others, I have commiserated but pointed out that I knew exactly what all this teaching online was going to demand of my colleagues. I used to drive to Toronto to teach my students at Niagara and then teach and work with them on their skills and knowledge then drive all the way home (a total trip time there and back of almost 5 hours) and only then go online and answer e-mails from my students and read their postings online in the various discussion threads that I had created. Of course, I didn't need to do that much work. I didn't need to make my students do anything online. No one else did. But I told my students that during the lifetime of their career, they were going to need to be able to teach online and that they had better have some idea of what it was all about. I hope that they think of me now when they are working online and realizing that I was wise, yes very wise, to make sure they knew what to do. Most of my students would be fewer than 12 years into their careers, assuming that they got jobs. So now, many of them are having to work online with their students, just as I told them they would have to. This significantly increases their workload but it also makes the learning process, the pupil-teacher ratio of time on task better for learning. I feel badly for those who were not prepared for what they were going to have to do, but the future is now and it is best these teachers either learn how to do what they have to do for the benefit of their students or they just leave the profession. It does get easier and now they can visit with their students individually or coach them online instead of everything having to be written so the teaching / learning interactions will only be more productive. Welcome to the real reformation of education in the 21st Century.
Thursday, 12 November 2020
Proper Supervision Is the Key
Don't let this graphic illustration deceive you into believing that I am going to advocate for walking around watching the students in a class or kitchen like a hawk or a spy. In fact, I believe it ought to be the exact opposite. From the earliest days when I had students in my library computer lab, I did not believe I had to be watching them like that. I first of all let my students know that I trusted them. But then I never left the room and I would walk around behind them so I could look over their shoulders and help them if I saw that they were having a problem. Too many teachers position their computers so that the faces of students can be seen but not the screens. I always made sure that I could see the screens and that others could see the screens of each other as well. That way I was more likely to ensure that my students were on task. Now, we move to the requirement, indeed, the need for students to go online from home because they cannot sit in their classrooms due to the pandemic. Here again, the first rule of thumb ought to be that you convey to your children that you trust them. You have to make sure that they have a plan of action as to what they are doing online and that they know how to proceed. But after that, you only need to supervise, pop up beside them periodically to check up. If your students do not know when to expect you, and that you expect them to stay on task, then they will be more likely to do just that. You put into practice the idea that you are their guide not the side and while you are waiting for a need for help to be expressed, you are. nearby and know what they should be doing and what progress on a task might look like. Now there is one other issue to deal with that goes along with this. If your students are collaborating, you want to be sure that they are sending and receiving levitate, task-oriented messages. When we went to server-based networks, all with access to the Internet, the students were assigned email addresses that were corporate, with their names included in the address. That way, we knew they were more likely to correspond legitimately. No nicknames or personal choices were allowed either. It is a professional approach to learning FOR THEM in that way. Too many parents don't necessarily check on the email addresses their kids are using and don't check to see what email messages they are accessing. If they are doing things properly, you are able to spot problems immediately. These are just some of the ways you can assure yourself that your kids are working properly and you can rest knowing that they are more likely to avoid problems. The key is dialogue and working with them but from a position of trust.
That Sounds Too Easy
That Sounds Too Easy
I've just come home from a walk in the neighbourhood, which is our custom since the beginning of the pandemic. I won't even write about how much I crave getting back into a pool which was always my primary source of exercise for years. The day will come when we can get back in but that's not going to help my aching bones these days. While I walk, I have CNN on in my ear from my iPhone. I happened to hear the airing of this commercial which really can be taken completely the wrong way. I know that the United States is a capitalist society, which is entirely fine. I also know that suckers are born all the time. This commercial is aimed at just those kinds of suckers. It promises almost instant solutions for children who are not learning how to read and instant relief to parents struggling with the frustrations of their children who are caught in that spiral of struggling to read and emotional crests up and down because of that struggle. The commercial really does make it sound too good to be true, because it is. As a lifelong educator, I know that there are many children who struggle to read for a variety of reasons. One of course is motivation which won't change because of a visit to a reading clinic. Children have to want to learn how to read and want to be lifelong readers but they get that desire by watching those around them and being encouraged. Then they keep to learn and desire goes a long way to overcoming some problems. But then there are all kinds of other problems that cannot be solved just be one consultation or visit to a clinic. Some children have perceptual problems, whether sight or hearing, that make it harder for them to pick up sounds and apply then properly. Some children have perceptual problems that form disconnects in their brains with signals that are sensory which become mixed up. Things like ADHD or Dyslexia can accentuate problems like that. Then their are a whole host of problems that stem from language learning. Children from different cultures who are presented with material to read that they have no context for and than makes it that much harder to understand what is being read. I could go on with a very long list of factors that make learning to read difficult. But many parents are not aware or sophisticated enough to be able to think about these things. All they know is that there is problem. The advertisement I listened to was exceptionally deceptive and misleading. I pity the poor parent who approaches this company or website and pays for a visit in the hope that one or two visits will solve all their problems, only to learn that they are in for hour after hour of tutoring to correct issues that most frequently the schools are better equipped to help students and their parents solve.
Thursday, 29 October 2020
Thoughts About Kindergarten
Thoughts About Kindergarten
I read parts of an article this week about the problems being experienced with online Kindergarten and how to help teachers deal with that particular age group. As you can see from the picture above, Kindergarten is all about active learning. It is all about helping the young people explore their environment and learn how to function in a classroom of others like them. In one of the books I've read over the years, an expression used to describe teachers engaged in teaching in their closed classrooms was that they were like kindergarteners engaged in parallel play. When kids enter school, they are very much centred on playing with themselves and kindergarten is all about getting them to learn to engage with each other and become ready for the years of schooling to come. So how does that translate into online learning when schools are forced to stay close because of the pandemic? It occurred to me that what ought to be taking place is not interacting with the students but interacting with their parents and giving them tips on how to help begin the important school journey confronting their young ones. I thought that the teacher could have a blog where he or she posts ideas on how to keep the kindergartener engaged and what a typical kindergartener should be able to do and how to engage them in rudimentary math and language learning. It might also mean a lot of emails back and forth and sharing of resources. One has to assume that if they are that young, the parents or a parent is at home with the student or maybe even a grandparent and dealing with that age group as students rather than offspring is very complicated but so crucial to future development. As I am writing this, school boards ought to have professionals online all day who are there to consult with parents not with students. So many questions arise that require professional knowledge, no matter what the age. We have, forever, taught teachers-in-training that the parents are our partners in the educational process. But when you read articles about online learning, it is all about the kids. Of course it is hard, very hard, but that is because making the leap from parent to teacher is not easy and parents need coaching really no matter what the age of the child. Communicating with parents on a regular basis would also send a signal to ther parents that they are not alone, that a professional educator is available to consult with when a parent is not sure how to proceed. Having been a consultant myself, I don't see that that would be so difficult to transition to. It is not that much different from helping teachers know what to do than helping parents know what to do and sharing that information with teachers. I sometimes get there feeling that not enough educators are thinking outside the box. Since it looks like we are going to have our ups and downs, lockdowns and opening ups, for a least another six months, school boards need to think out of the box lest we lose a whole year of schooling for our kids. We are already seeing the strains on that now.
Sunday, 25 October 2020
Change is NOT an Option Today
Change is NOT an Option Today
Now that schools are returning to some variation of in-person learning when and where possible, but others are no able to even begin to think about starting again, so many are talking about the almost compulsive necessity to make changes to how we teach and how students learn. The idea of a school where students came every day of the week for so many hours and worked through levels of subjects and were off for two months of the year in the summer was an invention of the late 19th century. It was perceived that too many young people on the streets working for peanuts or just getting into problems was a danger sign for society. So, schools evolved to what they were at the end of the last century, more or less. They stayed that way for the rest of the 20th Century. At the end of the century, though, a revolution occurred - the technology revolution. From not long after my entry into the profession until the end of it, Information and Computer Technologies, soon to be called there digital revolution, began to creep into classrooms all over the world. The longer they hung around and the more central they became to the education of our young people, the more it was realized that they were going to make it necessary to change not only the physical but the pedagogical background of every classroom. Now that the pandemic has required teachers in every part of the globe to extend the reach of their classrooms into the house of their students and now that the parents of those same students are realizing that they have a role to play in ensuring their children have access to technological tools and to the resources that make online learning possible. It is not going to be an easy or a cheap process and where we end up and how soon we do is not written in the cards. But make no mistakes. The revolution in how technology dominates learning in the third decade of the 21st Century will have as an unintended consequence the way in which education in total is handled. We know so much more about what effective teaching is and how deep learning occurs. We know precisely how technology can assist that learning. What needs to be top of mind is that good education is collaborative learning and there has to be an effective and skilled guide on the side to help students reach their potential. It has be seen as no different than how we teach and perfect top athletes and what it takes to be good at any skill. Talent for sure, skill for sure, but effective coaching as well to bring out the best in each and every young person who reaches for that brass ring, for the podium, for the gold medallions.
Evaluation Versus Assessment
Evaluation Versus Assessment
Another question that is crucial to understanding the changes in education today is the concept of Assessment versus Evaluation. Assessment is a process and evaluation is an act. Assessment is ongoing and evaluation is a picture of a snapshot in time. In any classroom, a good classroom teacher is assessing his or her students and their work and progress all the time, We are assessing for growth and growth is ongoing or it should be. We have a variety of different ways of making assessment of student growth. These include observations, asking questions, looking at work in progress, testing knowledge gained, asking for performances of some kind to demonstrate new knowledge and so forth. WE need to be keeping records on each student, as an individual, and not as a member of a class. This is different from Evaluation. WE have an obligation to report to parents about how their child is doing and doing this reporting periodically. It has to be periodic because some weeks can go by when the student is working very well and then something can happen at home or with a friend or within the child and so progress slows or stops completely. Students need to know what we will be saying to parents because they want to know what is being said about them. But there should be no surprises for students when it comes time to report to parents because if we gave beeb properly assessing students, we have been talking to them about progress, questioning ups and downs and making judgements about their strengths and weaknesses. I remember a particular year teaching a group of student with more than one or two who believed they were much smarter and better than I was judging them to be. They wanted to do next to nothing and be rewarded for that lack of effort. I was trying to rectify that belief. I had to fail a student in a particular subject because he had done almost nothing. The father came in and all but accused me of not treating his son fairly. I had to explain what was going on and then I had student work based upon the same assignment and shared that with the father so that he could see what his son had NOT done compared to what another boy of equal opportunity HAD done. Having been able to show the father what his son was trying to get away with for finished work made ALL the difference in the world. So evaluation is what we communicate to parents about their children on their report cards or on a phone call or at a parent-teacher interview. If we are going to be fair to the students, we need to have enough meaningful data to support our analysis and value judgements. We need to ensure teachers and parents understand that there is a difference between Assessment and Evaluation and we need to work at gathering enough evidence so that we have data to support our prognostications.
The Changing Nature of Assessment
The Changing Nature of Assessment
When I first started school, I can remember the report cards that came home with a bunch of letter grades and a small square with comments from the teacher and the competition was on to see how many A's a person got. I used to get a fair number of A's but my handwriting was always atrocious and my grade in Physical Education left a great deal to be desired. By the time I was ready to be a teacher, things hadn't changed much. I remember distinctly making a table using my class list and having a column for each assignment and what mark the students received whether it was on a small quiz or a major assignment and then adding up all the marks, even if it was out of 425 and figuring out the percentage out of 100 and THEN transforming that to a letter grade with a plus or a minus for some wiggle room. What a crock of shit. Even then, I realized that that was not the best way to assessment students. Now we have come a long way in the almost fifty years since I first worked in a classroom. We now know so much more about what assessment is and what it is not and why we do it. We know that we assess for growth......how much or how little did a student grow in knowledge, skills and affect as a result of a period of time spent on a particular subject.? Is there a difference between demonstration of knowledge,skills, and affect while working away and what a whole term of work is like. We ask questions about strengths, weaknesses and next steps. Are there reasons why students do better in one term and worse in another term? I write about this today because there has been so much discussion and introspection about the ground lost by students due to the pandemic. So many teachers and jurisdictions are worrying about the loss of time in school and how to gain ground as a result. What the pandemic is drawing attention to is the huge disparities between students and how to program so that every child makes progress. Like curriculum, the new methods of assessment draw attention to the fact that it has to be all about individual differences between students. If we focus on formative assessment for each child than we can focus on what they are making ground on and what they are lagging behind on. We can set goals for learning for each student separately and the job of the classroom teacher becomes helping each child progress to the best of their ability. Two students in Grade 6 can have missed the exact same amount of time, but one child, upon return, can be much further behind because no two. learners are the same. I have to try and take each student where they are at and move them forward. If we focus on the need to find strengths and weaknesses in each student, then we can plot next steps much easier. If you think about my old ways of assessing, it is much harder to make it realistic when I have some standard of achievement that I measure everyone in my class against. It penalizes one group of students and rewards other groups of students and education shouldn't be about that, at all.
Thursday, 1 October 2020
To Step Up or Not to Step Up
To Step Up or Not to Step Up
So first there was an email from the federation, the Ontario Teachers' Federation, asking for retired teachers to volunteer to help boards meet the commitment to provide teachers to teach online. The Federation made it clear that they were looking for anyone practically who was willing to step up to the plate. Then, today in the papers, there were articles about the search for teachers to meet the demands required by the pandemic and the number os kids learning online. I felt badly in a way because I have the skills needed and required. No too ways about it. A huge part of name loved the classroom and loves the idea of working with kids online. But, then I started to think about it and realized that I am already, believe it or not, 20 years beyond retirement age of all the classroom teachers. No doubt there are lots of teachers around who are way younger than me. But the big issue is not age but willingness. I have spent a lifetime giving of myself to various things and always putting my own interests on the back burner. I spent so much time in front of students and working online with students, that I didn't read, I didn't watch movies, I didn't exercise, and so forth. I ran from one activity to another and denied myself rest and relaxation. I just don't want to do that any more. I haver t o fight with myself continuously and remind myself that it is not being selfish to want to NOT work even part time. I would rather work on my interests and write my next book and sell my current book than parcel out time to work in front of students. I'd love to be a consultant and help others in developing and refining the skills necessary to be successful, but there again I would have to divide myself into little pieces. So, in the end, I just said no to myself. I am watching from the sidelines to be sure, but not interested in getting my toes dirty in the water. I have to constantly remind myself that I am entitled, because there is more than a little bit of guilt involved in what I am doing. But in my old age, I want to have fun and leave myself open to new experiences and nothing more. So I wish the boards good luck and watch with interest.
Wednesday, 23 September 2020
Digging Into the Headlines
Digging Into the Headlines
I was going to write about something completely different today when I noticed the headlines for one of the professional journals I still get messages from. I won't say which one in case that gets me into trouble. Suffice it to say though that it is aimed at administration types who work in the field of public education. What set me thinking was a series of headlines indicating how far the struggle between public versus private education has evolved in the United States. From its earliest beginnings, public education was conceived as a way to have an impact on the way in which young people saw their country and were prepared to take advantage of all that it had to offer. Going back to the earliest days of the previous century, after laws were enacted to keep young people out of harm's way in factories all over the industrialized world, public schools were designed to take those now liberated young people and teach them how to read and write and thereby become productive members of society. It was a way to structure their world so that they were disciplined as well as educated. It worked very well for many of us who are now aging baby boomers. The generation after us benefitted from the idea that curriculum could be redesigned and expanded so that the better students would be kept productive while the average student in a desk could still evolve and learn. But there was never any idea that something aside from public education was necessary. In Canada, where we benefitted from both Catholic and Protestant schools, there were the two complimentary systems and they eventually came to be seen as entitled to the exact same proportion of public taxpayers monies. Private schools were left for those wealthy enough to provide their children with essentially the same curriculum stemming from the same consensus about pedagogy. Then, in the United States, where free enterprise and capitalism have developed powerful roots, the private school system expanded to something called charter schools. Anyone who wanted to could start their own school and enlist students to pay for it. Now, that charter school network has expanded to such an extent and the Conservative movement in the U. S, underpinning free enterprise and capitalism is demanding a share of the public monies devoted to education just like they have in the health system. The problem with that bifurcation is that now the public system is where all those who are disadvantaged are sending their kids. Now, in the U. S. you have all these middle and upper class kids benefitting from all the finest tools and technology while the public school system is being drained and underfunded. This is furthering the divide between haves and have nots, rich and poor, educated and non-educated, urban poor and rural poor and so forth. The unity of purpose displayed in the U.S. for the whole of the 20th Century, that which made it great and powerful and a beacon for democracy is now being undermined so that capitalism can thrive and it's working, according to the headlines I read this morning. However, I don't think many people realize just how this trend is detracting from the unity in the country. Sadly, the United States in loosing its stature and its power because a few have ensured that capitalism and freedom are being taken to the extreme. Only one more reason to hope for a political change because, like so much else, the Dems seem to be working against this trend while the G. O. P. trying to further the divide. One can only hope that this does not infect the rest of the democracies because a proud public education system for all is one of its pillars and no one really wants to live in a world bereft of democracy.
Friday, 18 September 2020
Louder Than Words
Louder Than Words
For weeks, there has been this ongoing discussion about what might happen when schools convene for the fall. The whole of the debate has centered around safety for the students and how well prepared the schools would be for the onslaught. As expected there have been more than a few problems and a whack of school boards have had to deal with closures. The public is going to complain about the schools because it wants to be able to lay the blame at someone's doorstep. But the problem begins and ends with the governments who have not done enough to ensure that there was the ability to conduct rapid testing and determine whether a school was safe or not. Whether we are talking about elementary or secondary schools, post secondary or not, when a problem arises, there is not the really necessary ability to test all the individuals involved and determine who has the infection and who doesn't. I know that everyone is well-intentioned, at least here in Canada. Everyone wants to do the best they can to ensure schools stay open and every school board has the ability to determine who needs to be isolated and who doesn't. Teacher do what they always do and try their best for their students. But far too many jurisdictions have not done what they need to do to ensure that there are plenty of tests available and the turn around time is sufficient so that maybe schools can stay open but the sick students and their families can be isolated and quarantined. No one lays out all the eventualities and deals with every single one so that every step is covered. Then you read that school boards are holding back starting because they need more teachers to cover the online classes which have only grown in size because of the fear of leaving students in schools in real time, given how many students have been found to be contaminated, putting it bluntly. Then you have all those university students who are not obeying the requirements mainly because they are coming from families that are more likely to deny that there is a problem or are unable to discipline their kids. What this pandemic is revealing is just how poorly we were prepared as a society to deal with a crisis like this. The headline of one article in HaAretz, the Israeli left-leaning newspaper pointed out that Israeli society was able to get behind and unite in the face of danger from war but where they have to depend upon each other, nothing is possible, or working the way it should. Until we learn as a society and as a group of nations that we are in this together, and the solution depends upon all of use, nothing is going to change. Sadly;y too many people think of it as them against the world and we need to see it is US against the virus, against a warming climate and so forth.
Thursday, 10 September 2020
More Than Just Teachers Retiring
More Than Just Teachers Retiring
The last couple of days, I've had an eye-opening revelation. I have long understood and predicted that a large number of teachers would retire from the profession or retire to seek their fortunes elsewhere as a result of the pandemic and the circumstances facing them in classrooms this fall. But I had not thought about the problems that would affect princiapals and administrators up the chain of command. But the last couple of days, there have been a number of articles in different places reporting on principals of schools or superintendents of education directors of school boards indicating that they were leaving. It is one thing to lose teachers but something else entirely when one location loses its leadership. The assumption is that it is the leadership who that is going to help schools get through. I completely overlooked that the pressure on them would be immense. One has to wonder how a director of education can find the strength of character to stand up to the powers that be and demand more money for all the things that his or her district require to facilitate students entering schools and staying safe given the problems with dealing with the pandemic. If anything, I would have to imagine that the pressure on upper and lower management is far greater than that on the teachers in their classrooms. If I was a teacher, I would do what I have to do to do the best by my students. ButI would be leaving all the major decisions to those above me in the chain. But now, those above on the chain are under often superhuman challenges. Safety issues, ventilation questions, staffing calculations, money for all the ppe and sanitizer stuff and how to staff a school so that the teachers don't feel overwhelmed by the numbers and the parents believe that their kids are safe. I would imagine that in many school districts, it is a total fiasco trying to deal with all the challenges. The question though becomes how to the politicians pulling the strings answer the calls from their hired help, so to speak, to make what they want happen. in the United States, on top of all the questions, you have the struggle over public versus private school funding and you have a recipe for total disaster. Th equation will be, what will things look like a year from now? Who will be left to pick up all the pieces. I worry about my young friends in classrooms today. A part of me wishes I could just roll up my sleeves and get to work to help out.
Wednesday, 2 September 2020
Assessment is Key!
Assessment is Key!
Let's assume that you are a grade school teacher just beginning the school year and you now have 15 or 20 or more children sitting in front of you in the second week of school. You have had an opportunity to familiarize yourself with them and they with you. You come to realize that more than a small handful of the students did next to nothing during the months that schools were closed and another group of students who were taught extremely well by their parents and are waiting to continue their progress. You have spent sleepless nights all week-end trying to decide where you would start to teach such a disparate group of students. So let me tell you that I had a Grade 6 class once where the tested reading ability of my students went from barely Grades 2 (the days before so much testing and I. E. P.'s) to Grade 12. That's right. I had students at every level of reading ability and it was NOT a small class and I had to some how teach them all. So what did I do? Those were the days when I was still developing as a professional, but I remember one of the things I did with them was read books aloud. I remember reading them The Yearling by Marjorie Kennan Rawlings and they loved it so much that you could hear a pin drop the last day of the book and they clapped when I finished. But think of all the things you could do with small groups of students around that book. I read the book because it was a Newberry Award winning book, so the good readers could pick other books nominated in more recent years and then write or deliver book reports on their reading and compare the books in terms of why they might have won awards like The Yearling. You could have some of the poorer readers find the movie of the book and watch it and then pretend that they were interviewing the lead actors and actresses and make a video of their interviews, skills that most kids have now because of TikTok. You could have some of the kids doing a report on raising horses, and another on the differences between living in the city and living in the country. Those are just for starters. Then, another thing I did the year was do a unit on banking and each child had an imaginary bank account and they did jobs around the classroom and got paid for their services and the money deposited to their accounts. Then they formed themselves into groups and they used their money to organize booths for a fun-fair which we ran in the spring and each group ran their booths like businesses and had to report on profit and loss after the event. At Hallowe'en, they made stuffed dummies using clothes they brought from home and stuffed with paper and then the dummies were all over the school. We even had a picture in the local paper with the kids grouped around their dummies out in the front of the school. They were so realistic, the principal was heard saying Excuse Me one time he walked in front of one of the dummies and then he had a great laugh over what he had done. My point with all of this is that there are hard and soft skills that we teach in school and although kids come from different environments and might have different learning abilities, there are things they ALL love to do and can enjoy that brings them to the plate where learning takes place and skills are developed. Don't see the next weeks as challenges that you cannot overcome but rather opportunities to explore new ways of learning and extending the abilities of your students, regardless of how they spent the last six months. Soon enough, they'll all be sailing and making great progress.
Saturday, 29 August 2020
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
I went on Friday for my regular massage, a luxury that I have afforded myself for years now, made especially easy because my benefits package pays for a large part of the cost. My masseur and I have been friends now for a long time. He's young enough to be my son and we have often very frank conversations, sometimes very personal and other times very intellectual. This week's visit began with the normal family questions and when I asked about the kids and getting ready for school, I opened up a very touchy subject. He knows that I am a former teacher and also a former teacher of teachers. He has never had anything but the greatest respect for me as a professional and so when he started to lambast the teachers in the province I was taken aback. He has heard in the media how the government has taken to suggesting that teachers don't want to caught in the middle of getting the children in our province back to school safely. Teachers are pushing for all the things that the science, the medical profession and their own senses of safety for their students would make necessary. The law finds that teachers are supposed to act in loco parentis, as if they were parents of the children in their care and every suit filed against teachers by parents deals with whether that principle was at play and by how much So now along comes the pandemic and they are being asked to pretend as if that doesn't matter and they are being viewed as front line workers who just have to do what they are told. Everything they are taught about teaching and learning and managing classrooms is now up for grabs. Then, in addition to having to ignore much of the pedagogy, they are also being told that they are essential workers and so cannot go on strike or make demands. Their jobs are on the line. However, now their health and the health of their own families is also on the line and that helps to explain why at least 20% of the teaching force is not planning on returning in the fall. They do not want to be the middle man and in the end they have to do what is best for them. Nothing is coming out of the mouths of the politicians to assure teachers and to suggest that their voices count. Our premier just talks about teachers make sacrifices just like everyone else. No one understands really what it is like to have the faith and the futures of a class of students on the line in front of you. It is all well and good to think you can just pull strings from the sidelines, but in the end, teachers are parents too and they will act in loco parentis as they see fit and believe is right. This is one helluva mess we are in and the end result will be changes in the structure and nature of public education. FOR SURE!
Wednesday, 19 August 2020
The Battle Rages On
The Battle Rages On
It is hard not to think of what is happening today in all the media as a battle over the future of public education. Yesterday's Globe & Mail (Toronto) had a headline screaming out that Premier Doug Ford thinks that the teacher unions are being inflexible. President Donald Trump stamps his feet and yells just to open the schools. High schools open only to be closed again, universities and colleges open and to be closed again. Teachers have been polled and administrations in various states are informing the reading public that it cannot guarantee enough teachers in classrooms to cover the student body and that is without accounting for increased teacher needs due to lowering class sizes. Public health agencies are pointing out the the physical structures of too many schools just are not equipped with the proper ventilation equipment to facilitate proper air circulation. No one though starts from the assumption that classrooms have to be envisaged from scratch. Parents and administrators think of school and classrooms through their own experiences from, sometimes decades ago. In order to move forward safely, everything has to be put on the table. There just is no way around that. WE have to think about students and their needs in order to move forward safely. We have to think about where students are coming from and where they go when they go home. Administration and government has to realize schools are filled not just by students but by a myriad of adults who help keep kids in school and learning. WE have to remember that public health issues have to be paramount. If any child, sadly, had to deal with special needs due to medical issues........wheelchairs, special hearing accommodations, drugs for diseases, and so forth, the path is set as to how schools have to be run to deal with those kinds of things. Now, it is EVERY child that needs special things. Every school needs special things. Every teacher has his or her own needs. Teachers have not been trained to be very flexible either. Having taught so many of them, it is amazing how many come with preconceived notions of what they are entitled to and who has to deliver on those entitlements. Sadly, everyone involved will have to give up on some things in order to get through this. But, we have to remember, school by school, that we are families in those buildings and good schools see their teachers, their parents AND their students as ONE community and so we have to deal with that one community in the same way. Sadly the bottom line is that if we don't....people are going to get very sick in some cases and more than a few are going to die and NO ONE wants that on his or her shoulders. So.....we better all cool it. If our goal is the good of the kids, then we need to remember this one fact. Children do not fare well at all when the adults in their world are fighting. Children, to learn properly, need safe and calm environments, no matter all the other extraneous issues in their lives.
Tuesday, 11 August 2020
Back to the Real Basics
Back to the Real Basics
In some quarters suggesting we go back to the basics in school refers to the basics of reading and arithmetic. In the minds of many, that is where we should begin. I want to focus less on the what but the where of that expression. Our academic idea of what education is or what teaching and learning is and where it all began is the Socratic Method. Socrates, the Greek, sat with his groups of students and expounded on topics as diverse as knowledge was in the ancient world. But he posed questions of his students and allowed them to think about ways to answering them. He used, what today we refer to, as the problem based method. He presented students with a challenge and then gave them time to work on a way to meet that challenge. No way was the wrong way and no specific end was ever defined. It was all about the journey, hence the Socratic method. It seems to me that, today, that is what we need to turn to, to make advances not just in releasing ourselves from the grips of the pandemic, but helping our students get ahead. Young minds don't think in terms of subjects, ever, but rather in terms of concepts, or ideas. They work to refine those ideas and put facts together to get a clearer idea of what those concepts are all about. We talk about the scaffolding of conceptual development and that is a life long journey. Let's use the best example from our lives today.....the concept of Democracy. At a young age, students think of democracy in one way, but that way changes as they age and have experience of the world. However, the point is ....the goal is....to have them have a reason to expand their idea of democracy and too understand through their readings and their problem solving that there are many aspects to democracy and they need to understand as many of them as possible. That is what literacy really is in today's world. Our goal ought to be to facilitate the ongoing conceptual development of our students in whatever areas they are interested in. One boy might be interested in hockey but another one in rowing or javelin. We need to accept, like Socrates, that one size does not fit all and the learning journey is what is important, not the end, because the most important concepts have no finality, no real end, they just keep expanding. So, in our classrooms, we need to structure them in such a way that students find challenges that enable them to grow, in one way or another, without feeling excessively frustrated or out in left field. We need to go back to the basics, but not just for the sons and daughters of the wealthy and powerful but for everyone. Every child is capable of learning and every child WANTS to learn. WE just need to provide the right stimuli for that to happen. We need to find the right problems to solve so that they grow in their ability to relate what they learn from their daily living.
Wednesday, 5 August 2020
Public Versus Private
Public Versus Private
This morning, the news channels were filled with items concerning the struggle over getting back children into school safely. The pressure was increased by having a clip from the Secretary-General of the United Nations who pointed out the stakes for children over getting them back into classrooms. WE are a long way from the early 20th century when public education was not considered a right but a goal for all societies. In order to understand the struggle taking place right now, one must remember that there was a time when the vast majority of young children went from the bosom of the family to the workplace. It was only at the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th that it was recognized that child labour was abhorrent and it was far better to have all children in school learning how to read and write and become productive citizens of democracies. AS the concept of democracy spread around the world, the idea of universal education spread as well, even to societies that did not think democracy a good idea. EVERY country instituted a system of public education that was good for all students to Grade 8 and for most to Grade 12. High School was not seen as absolutely necessary in some societies at first, but over time, free education for all children came to be accepted as the norm. In most countries, education was controlled by the central government. There are VERY few jurisdictions where education is not centrally controlled. But that is the reason why there are so many problems now, as we attempt to navigate students back into school following the end of or rather the control of the pandemic. in countries like Canada and the United States, Education is not overseen by the federal government but rather by the province in Canada or the state in America. That means that it is up to the states of provinces to ensure education happens. IN both Canada and the United States, taxes are levied by the federal government and given to the state governments for, among other things, education. Here though is where NOW the U. S. and Canada part ways. Canada sees the need for masks and social distancing and works centrally to ensure that the populace is protected and the pandemic is dealt with properly. WE all know what that has meant south of our border. But few realize that the struggle between States Rights and Federal responsibilities has meant that education has fallen between the cracks. Until the Federal government realizes that progress in so many ways depends upon all students having access to the same resources and all students learning in the same way and working on the same skills, progress as a country will be jeopardized. Sadly, that might never happen and so the United States will sink lower and lower on the list of developed countries and Canada will look better and better.
Monday, 27 July 2020
Space Accommodation in Schools During the Pandemic
Space Accommodation in Schools During the Pandemic
One of the most controversial discussions these days has to be how to safely reopen schools in the fall. It is indisputable that schools need to get back so that kids can learn and be together. The pandemic shutdown has been hardest on the young because they don't understand just what has been happening and why they aren't at school. You can try to explain it to them, but that doesn't mean they can actually comprehend. In addition, any attempt to fill the gaps created by schools being closed has been obviously more than inadequate. Some kids have learned and some have thrived but lots have not made any progress at all. Kids are like pets in that they are trained to behave and to learn and to try and work towards their potential but if that process is interrupted, they lose ground. ALWAYS. So schools have to go back. But the question is how to do so safely. It seems to me that one conversation that has not taken place has been that which looks at the age of the students as a factor in how to get them back into school. If we start at the oldest kids first, and here I am referring to secondary schools, not post secondary. There it is a whole different conversation, but I am here referring only to elementary and secondary students. High school students can very easily go to school on staggered hours. They don't need baby sitters, they are independent, they ought to be learning how to be independent in their studies. They most often understand the tools of technology and what they don't understand, they can learn relatively quickly. High schools should be open as they are during examinations and students should have schedules when they can come to school to talk about assignments, to have access to resources and to their teachers who can guide them on their learning journeys. Those that need more help should be able to schedule more time. It is all about individualized learning anyways since they always pick from a broad spectrum of classes and don't ever meet as home rooms, really. Moving down in age, the same standards can be applied to Junior High School aged kids. They do have home rooms, but they don't have to meet in large groups. Their access to school and to their teachers can be staggered since they too ought to be fairly independent. They can have access online to course work and sit with instructors to get help if and when they need it. They do NOT have to be in school five or six hours a day, as long as they are required to check in daily with their teachers in some way. That leaves the youngest kids. Studies indicate that they are least likely to get the virus or to shed it if they do. they are the ones that need the most group work, the most hours in classes in front of teachers with others their own age. They should be able to fill up the school rooms and be spread out throughout the school keeping regular hours but meeting in more places than one classroom, even if that means renting space in churches and synagogues and libraries and so forth. It seems to me that it is all about maximizing the space available in public buildings so that little people can be together with their teachers. In my opinion they could do everything together like in their own little bubble. AS close as they can come to classroom environments the better off they will be. Of course, the obstacles are mostly financial, not health. The teachers need to be trained, there needs to be more of them, they need to be tested and properly equipped. It will be interesting to see just what does take place in the next few months because, in the States, it's all about the money. Where there is a will, there is a way....for sure.
Thursday, 23 July 2020
Good Online Teaching Takes Time
Good Online Teaching Takes Time
I have been teaching online for a long time. One of the things I learned right at the beginning is that to be a good online communicator, you need to invest time. In the classroom, when you stand in front of a group of students and answer questions, either the students are listening or not and you don't have to repeat the answer to the same question over and over. But when your students are engaged in a learning exercise with you as their guide on the side, you cannot shirk your duties to help them. Anyone who is a parent knows that learning takes place all day long. Children are curious and ask questions about everything, at any time. You can't be a good parent and limit the time when the questions are asked or answered. The same thing applies when you are working with students online. If they are doing an assignment when you are in the classroom, they can put their hand up or approach your desk for help or encouragement. When there is no real desk and no real classroom, they have to reach out and they can do that at any time. I often found myself glued to my desk typing half the evening away. I let my students know that I would answer their questions as frequently as I was able. They soon knew that I was true to my word and they could seek responses most of the times of the day. When you do that, you are also working one on one but with every student in the class. You can not be selective and the more you engage your students in conversations, albeit cybernetically, the more likely they are to learn from you. You have to give of yourself each time to secure a relationship with your students. One word or two word answers are not sufficient for that. Naturally, teaching online takes an enormous amount of time and so when teachers complain today about the time needed to invest in being online because students can't go to school. due to the pandemic, they have a very legitimate complaint. However, I never felt overburdened because I saw the time I spent with my students online was just the cost of doing my job. I loved the interaction with them and I loved the trust and affection they had for me because they knew that I was giving of myself. It is at that point exactly when we actually become good teachers. Good teaching and good parenting BOTH need lots of time. The trick is to learn how to draw the line in the sand so that there is time for you, the person, as well. But that's another lesson.
Wednesday, 22 July 2020
Individualized Instruction NOW More Than EVER
Individualized Instruction NOW More Than EVER
For all the years that I was in Teacher Education, I advocated as much as possible the process we call Individualized Instruction. What that means is that students in any classroom will be NOT taught by a sage on the stage to a group of empty vessels waiting to be filled up all at the same time on a manufacturing line, but by a guide on the side whose job it is is to help students learn that which they don't already know. Not every student takes the same amount of time to master the skills of arithmetic. Not everyone needs to be able to read maps to the same equal level of ability. Some kids want to learn with he Arts and others by reading and writing. We should be working to teach each student according to his ability while constantly pushing each student forward. Individualized instruction, however, requires far more time by the teacher and far more preparation and therein lies the rub. Students have had varying amounts of lesson learning and completion while at home and not in school; Some are much further ahead than others for a variety of reasons - ability, parental pushing, quietness or lack thereof at home and so forth. So, assuming every school goes back in the fall, every classroom is going to be filled with students in any particular grade, all working and understanding at various very different levels of comprehension and ability. It will not be an easy task to take 25 or 26 Grade 4 students and get them back to all doing the same thing because they all won't be able to. She will have VERY Heterogenous classroom abilities and the teacher will need to program for every ability and hope for the best. No would be the ideal time have a staff of professionals who know how to teach each child at their own level. WE have been very lax with classroom teachers . Some still have their classrooms in rows and use the same assignment and assessment strategies for everyone. Now would be the ideal time to be proficient in individualized instructon so that the children would be benefitting from working at things they truly need to be able to and at a pace not at all like any of the other students. Individualized instruction requires much knowledge of each student, patience to be able to work with students one on one and the skill set to do that with 25 students all at the same time. Now we pay for our inability to motivate everyone to be able to do the same things but each according to their own unique style. Let's see wha the fall brings an dhow often teachers cry out for adult education on learning in that way.
The Missing Component
The Missing Component
There is a huge debate going on right now about what school will be like in September, in the midst of a raging pandemic. Canada is very different from the United States but the issues are essentially the same thing. Schools are hotbeds of viruses and illnesses. No one has to tell a teacher that kids bring everything from home into there classroom. They might not bet sick themselves, but they can either bring an infection from home to the classroom or from the classroom and fellow students home. That is not a huge problem when everyone has colds or the flue, but it is when the infection is the measles or now, even worse, Covid - 19. Kids might not ever get as sick as the adults in their world, but that doesn't mean that they can't infect the adults they live with who might end up sick and in danger of losing their lives, as it were, with the current pandemic. So, the solution has been to commit to a full term of online learning and many school boards and universities are suggesting that there will be only online learning. Now, as a former pioneer in the use of online communications and online learning, it is one thing to believe in the potency of this method of teaching and learning, and it is another thing entirely to ready teachers to be successful at the processes. I speak from many years of experience with staff development and teaching Teacher Education, there are huge numbers of in class teachers who are afraid to using online learning or have absolutely no ability to communicate online to their students. What is not being even talked about in this push to online learning is whether or not Teachers will be able to fulfil the needs of their students. Can they learn how to effectively mount their courses online? Can they use the technology to encourage their students to complete tasks? Can they effectively communicate in real time or offline with their students so that students understand what is expected of them? There are many further major and minor questions but the whole thing adds up to a task for staff development. This, of course, opens up another can of worms. Will school boards pay for teacher time to learn the skills necessary or to learn that which they still don't know how to do? Theoretically, every teacher should be in school now, this summer, learning how to teach online and how best to encourage their students to learn online. It is much harder than one thinks and unless it is done properly, not only is there no learning, there is there acquisition of dispositions AGAINST the online learning because of the bad experiences. If I tell a group of teachers in the summer that it is not as hard as it sounds and then they run into trouble because they have not really yet mastered the skills, they will be turned off from trying again. Teachers are like that. So, unless each jurisdiction puts major bucks into professional development for the next six months and trains staff into what they need to be able to think and do, another school year will be wasted. It is as simple as that.
Tuesday, 23 June 2020
A Very Exciting Time
A Very Exciting Time
The last few days, as I have been reading about all the challenges that are confronting the business of Education in the days and weeks and months ahead of me, I have thought back to the early days of using computers in the classroom especially in the elementary schools., As I struggled to master the skills of using computers somehow in my classroom in a rooms where desks were configured in rows and there was hardly any space along the walls for anything approaching a desktop, I very quickly realized that classrooms would have to change to adapt to the technology, not the other way around. I worked with a principal who was chosen to open up the first new school being built after computers began to be used widely and she took me, among others on a tour of the shell of the building. I remember very clearly commenting on the fact that absolutely NO allowances had been made for any computers in any of the classrooms. We were on the verge of creating a board wide Wide Area Network and were already using Local Area Networks in every school, run by servers in each school. Yet, there had been absolutely no plan in the design for computers and in fact, the plugs for the rooms were all under the chalk boards which would mean the desktops would be subjected to all that chalk dust. Nothing was thought through and it hasn't changed much since then. There were other administrators in other school districts who were already designing schools for the computer age. We actually went on a tour of one in Toronto and it was miles ahead of most other schools I knew. But, from the beginning, we knew computers would only come into their own as tools of learning when we grasped how they would change our business. Now, as schools are thinking about the fall and what it will mean to be safe in the age of Covid-19, the list of accommodations goes on and on. However, for myself, what I find myself thinking about is how exciting it would be to be involved in that future planning. Everything I know to be required for those teachers and their classrooms at home and at school will need to be taught and so many educators will need to be coached on how to implement those changes. Michael Fullan, at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education has made a career out of writing about the change process in education, in schools and school boards specifically and he has known and advocated all along that the changes will require much forethought and planning and phases of implementation. Not many listened to his words of caution and now I am sure there are many who wish they had. The pandemic has been the springboard for much that has already begun to happen but fifty years from now, it will be the subject of much study on what its unintended consequences were and I guarantee, one of those consequences will be the transformation of the business of education. I would love to be studying and documenting that change.
Tuesday, 9 June 2020
Public Education in the U. S.
Public Education in the U. S.
The issue of public education and its quality never occurred to me at all until I became a consultant. Till the happened, I only needed to pay attention to my job and and little else. I never thought about issues like funding, or educational quality or effective schools, or another of the other issues that percolated below the surface in those halcyon days. However, as soon as I became a consultant I began to be caught up in academic issues that mattered to everyone, not just myself. I was always a dedicated professional and so, in my job as a consultant, I started to read everything I could get my hands on that had to do with being an effective professional helping others along the way. Even during those years, I was not that academically driven that I read any journals or books dealing with the BIG issues in education. Working towards my PhD, my Doctorate in Education made all the difference. I got to go to conferences where I listened to the problems others were confronting in their school districts or in their states or even in the countries. I enjoyed going to those conferences immensely and the participation in them opened my eyes to why there was always such a difference between what I was experiencing in Ontario, Canada and what others were experiencing, especially in the U. S.. It was only there where there were such wide discrepancies between one state and another, between one university and another, between one city and another. Dwelling on these issues, as I often did, I realized that what we had in Ontario was superior to most of what was happening in the States. I was not at all amused by the actions of the Harris government to eliminate half the boards and thrust us into a maelstrom of curricular reform but, looking back, I can suggest that maybe the end justified the means. A student can go anywhere in Ontario and be governed by the same educational standards and the same curriculum. Every teacher in Ontario has to adhere to the same Standards of Practice set by the Ontario College of Teachers. There is a system of evaluations of Colleges of Education and Boards of Education that standardize education across the province and it is a big province, bigger than most of the states in the union to our south. As the various jurisdictions deal with the effects of the shutdown due to the pandemic and the implementation of online learning to overcome social distancing, the huge chasm between what we have here and what they have south of us is only becoming more apparent. Every day there are articles I glance over that deal with the lack of preparedness for change, the inability to meet the demands of the 21st century, the lack of standards. Today, if a student moves from Colorado to Utah, he or she might as well be moving to a different country. If a student lives in Niagara Falls, NY, he or she will be confronted by a huge number of disadvantages relative to if he or she lived in Kenmore, which is a part of Buffalo. If a student goes to a charter school or a private school and not a public school, the quality of education, the funding of that education and the standards of that education can be hugely different. It is no wonder the Americans are finding it difficult to deal with racial injustices. They are often at root caused by poorer educational institutions, lack of attention to the needs of the poorer schools, and so forth. In Niagara Falls, ON, there are huge pockets of poverty, but the teachers in the schools and the monies given to the schools and the services put into those schools are the same regardless. It makes a huge difference in educational outcomes. Until such a time as these differences caused by political structure disappear, no progress will be made. The U. S. is bound as a country to fall further and further behind those countries who possess the institutional structure to bring about and control change.
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