The Alberta Teachers’ Association

What can we learn from our past successes?

“Something is working around here; we just have to figure out what it is.”
–Steven Pinker

The Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) is internationally recognized as a forward-thinking teacher organization committed to educational development and research. Part of the ATA’s reputation draws from collaborations with leading education experts and policy analysts. These activities include extensive research in school improvement, leadership and educational change. The Association’s long-standing relationship with researchers in Alberta universities and with the national educational research community has built the ATA’s ability to advance evidence-informed policy that will enhance teaching practice and student learning. In the past two years, one critical element of this work has included international partnerships and collaboration with leading jurisdictions such as Finland and Singapore.   

The research network the ATA works within offers an important opportunity to take a broad critical view of the challenges and opportunities ahead with respect to the curriculum redesign work initiated in Alberta. With this in mind, I invited renowned researchers and leaders who have worked with the Association in the past and who are familiar with Alberta’s public education system to answer two questions about the fundamental redesign of curriculum in the province. The thoughtful and at times provocative responses from Florence Glanfield, Andy Hargreaves, Ben Levin, Jim Parsons, Dennis Shirley, Dennis Sumara and Ed Wittchen invite educators to consider the complexities of redesigning curriculum in the years ahead.

Questions on the redesign of alberta’s curriculum

In your experience, what has been one of the greatest success stories in curriculum reform/renewal in Alberta or Canada? What was done and why did it succeed?

What lessons exist for us as we redesign Alberta’s K–12 program of study?

Florence Glanfield

Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta

Success is when teachers work together

In my experience as an educator, the most successful curriculum implementation has occurred when teachers together wrestle with the content and process the ideas stated within the curriculum.

I’ll share two experiences from my beginning years as a teacher. I began teaching in January 1982 and was assigned Mathematics 30 in the fall of 1983, which meant my students would write the “reintroduced” Mathematics 30 diploma exam in January 1984. All the math teachers in my department studied the implications for students to write the exam and what it meant for us to teach reintroduced content. We reviewed the program of studies and the diploma examination specifications. We discussed and debated our interpretations of the mathematical content and expectations of students. We talked about how we could teach the content and the different ways to ask students to complete mathematical tasks. Through discussion, I learned how my colleagues understood mathematical ideas differently than I, and I learned about the different ways my colleagues taught and assessed. These conversations didn’t occur only in the first year of implementation but continued as we examined lessons and assessment strategies and what they meant to teach Math 30.

The second experience was in the mid-1990s, when mathematical processes were introduced. One of those processes was communication. Four experienced math teachers from different schools met to discuss how to encourage high school students to communicate about mathematical ideas. We examined curriculum documents, and discussed and debated the ways in which we each interpreted the idea of communication in a math class. We also discussed teachers’ interpretation and students’ engagement in communication with, and about, mathematics. We met regularly over six months to talk about our practices and to generate ideas for our classes. We shared our emerging understandings of what communication meant for us as we implemented the new curriculum. Those understandings were based upon our classroom experiences.

Teaching is an interpretive act. A teacher is responsible for interpreting government, school district and school policies and daily interpretations of classroom observations and learning about students. It’s within the classroom that a curriculum is lived. The lived curriculum is the interaction among the following: the ways in which a teacher interprets policies, the activities chosen to engage students, the policies and practices of the school and the experiences of the students. Successful curriculum implementation occurs when teachers have time to understand their own interpretations of policies and have opportunities to test their interpretations within the classroom. Curriculum implementation is an ongoing act of interpretation.

Ben Levin

Professor and Canada Research Chair in Education Leadership and Policy, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

The results could be great

High-quality curriculum is important to the success of any education system. However, curriculum is just a starting point for excellence. We know from years of research that curriculum documents alone do not lead to significant change in teaching and learning practices in schools. For curriculum to have its full effect there must be significant effort to work with teachers and principals (and parents and students) to achieve a broad understanding of what is in the curriculum and what it means for daily work in schools. 

New curricula require teachers’ skills and understandings—for example, new thinking on various subjects and how to teach them. Sometimes new curricula are written by experts whose command of a subject is beyond what classroom teachers (who have so many other demands on their time and energy) are likely to have or to acquire. Sometimes each new curriculum is great, but the net effect is to overwhelm teachers, especially in elementary schools, where there are more new content and new methods than anyone could possibly assimilate.

In most cases, school systems underestimate how much effort is involved in shifting teaching and learning across thousands of classrooms. A few documents and a few days of inservice are insufficient. Unless curriculum fits with teachers’ sense of what is possible (and desirable) and is integrated with practices such as assessment and evaluation, it’s unlikely to have the desired outcome. 

Alberta has a longstanding commitment to high-quality public education and benefits from a highly skilled teaching force with good leadership. If those strengths are coupled with a real effort to work with teachers on new curricula, the results could be great for everyone.

Jim Parsons

Professor, Department of Secondary Education, University of Alberta

Toward teacher professionalization

I’ve been fortunate to work for almost 40 years in curriculum and instruction in Alberta. In that time, Alberta decentralized curriculum, then recentralized it again, moved from “text as resource” to “teacher as resource,” and from keeping children quiet to actively engaging them.

My research placed me in schools. From that perspective, I believe the greatest success in Alberta curriculum has been the growing professionalization of the province’s teachers—I include school principals within this group. Specifically, my research suggests that teacher collaboration and empowerment are energized by engaging teachers in shared school leadership and site-based action research. These two activities help teachers work toward improving children’s learning.

Shared school leadership and site-based action research are an indication of trust in teachers by school principals who recognize the power of engaging teacher peers in instructional leadership and by provincial educational partners who, in 1999, founded the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI), a district-based longitudinal research program unlike any in the world. I hope that Alberta’s current funding shrinkage will not squeeze the life from the advances made in these two areas.

A caution for continued educational reform

I was excited when Alberta Education Action Agenda 2011–14 listed “Goal One: Success for every student.” Setting such a goal is good, but the path to it is unclear, and we haven’t begun the dialogue and evaluative curricular audits needed to understand what this goal means to Alberta’s children. Currently, not every student succeeds; therefore, we must work for student achievement or risk eroding our chances for success. As Alberta’s educational partners move toward Goal One, I have faith that the deep and difficult conversations we must engage in will occur, and that partnerships will not fracture.

Our recent successes suggest that we should continue to trust teachers, and focus on understanding and undertaking sound educational research and on what has worked well— empowered teacher collaboration and shared educational partnerships.

One final caution: we mustn’t lose the advances Alberta has made with respect to the emergence of women in leadership positions, which is a concomitant benefit of AISI. Throughout Alberta, women have emerged by their own merit as school leaders. I fear that the loss of women in leadership positions that could come with the shrinkage of educational funding will be the single greatest problem Alberta must overcome in the future.

Andy Hargreaves and Dennis Shirley

Andy Hargreaves is the Thomas More Brennan Chair in Education at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College. Dennis Shirley is a professor at Boston College. They co-authored The Global Fourth Way: The Quest for Educational Excellence (2012).

In general, when it comes to curriculum reform, the grandiosity of the design is usually inversely related to the possibility of bringing it to life in practice. In Ontario, in the early 1990s, a broad design for general and inspiring outcomes wasn’t matched by any systemwide strategy to develop teachers’ ability to interpret and implement the outcomes. By the late 1990s, a bullwhip effect of overreaction led to thousands of standards (sometimes in the same class in the same year) that turned teaching into a box-ticking checklist. This is where the United States is headed with its Common Core (“The Common Core State Standards provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn, so teachers and parents know what they need to do to help them,” www.corestandards.org.) Standardization threatens to marginalize learning and teaching that were creative and artistic, critical. Ironically, these are precisely the skills now most needed in the dynamic knowledge economies that are spreading rapidly around the world.

What did we learn?

We studied the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) and were impressed by the high quality of the province’s teachers. AISI provided an exciting network in which educators developed curricula based on students’ needs and interests. Worldwide, such networks are increasingly rare even though they are badly needed in this age of increased standardization and centralization. Unfortunately, Alberta lacks the political leadership to appreciate how essential such networks are. If learning is going to be more personalized, then curriculum and pedagogy have to be more personalized for teachers, too. We need to commit to personalization for all that connects the curriculum to learning for life, not customization that gives students flexible access to overly prescribed content.

Dennis Sumara

Professor and Dean, Faculty of Education, University of Calgary

Putting innovation back in the hands of teachers and communities

I’d argue that the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI) created conditions for a fundamental ethos shift in Alberta’s schools. Originally intended to support individual school-based research-informed and research-active projects that had the potential to improve student learning, AISI, in effect, put innovation back in the hands of teachers and communities. 

Successful reforms in education have usually been locally situated, led by those who are primarily responsible for the education of students and inspired by the ideas and expertise of teachers working in partnership with education researchers. As outlined in research conducted on AISI, the effort to better coordinate AISI projects through school jurisdiction centralization might not have necessarily amplified the potential of AISI (http://bit.ly/YH3Knd).

Although there were perhaps too many unsustainable projects in Cycle 1 of AISI, what I admired about the early years of AISI were the creative small projects led by teachers. Many of them were action research projects that involved university-based researchers, students and members from the community. Engaged in these forms of authentic inquiry, teachers extended their expertise and in doing so improved learning conditions for students. 

Today, there is no school in Alberta that does not explicitly value the importance of connecting educational research with practice. I believe this is in part attributable to AISI, which, in ways we still can’t fully appreciate, strengthened the important reciprocal relationships between schools, universities and community stakeholders.

A more open, less bureaucratic education system is needed

One of the biggest challenges for teachers is low student engagement. As we think about redesigning our programs of study, we should consider how we’ll create more engaging learning environments, ones emphasizing the use of productive pedagogies that we know support student engagement: inquiry-based, case-based, problem-based, community-based and place-based.

We should encourage and support locally developed, small-scale curriculum and pedagogical innovation over large-scale, overly prescriptive programs of study. This means that provincial programs of study must focus on big ideas that are contextually and pedagogically appropriate. 

Parsing knowledge in any of our school-based disciplines neatly into grade levels and subject areas has never been effective. We should stop doing that. Instead, let’s bring educators and educational researchers together to think about conceptual knowledge, competencies and skills, and the range of assessments we’re trying to develop across our educational system. I’m not arguing against specialization in our school system; rather, I hope we’ll learn how to do this in ways that foster deeper learning through interdisciplinary inquiry projects.

Whatever we do over the next few years must explicitly and deliberately be systemic and sustainable. That means we need to draw on the expertise we already have in our organizations. Many examples exist of exemplary practices that embrace Alberta’s new vision for education. However, most of these aren’t always easily aligned with current programs of study or policy expectations. If we want innovation, we need to encourage innovative practice and that means encouraging diversity in our approaches.

Finally, I’d argue that we need a more open, less bureaucratic education system that empowers experts in our public education system to find creative solutions to problems and ways to capitalize on opportunities. I’m confident that encouraging and supporting a more complex, decentralized network approach to educational reform will support the changes we want in Alberta’s education system.

Ed Wittchen

Alberta teacher, principal, superintendent and consultant

What are the successes?

Reflecting on educational renewal/reforms over my 59 years of experience in Alberta schools as a student, teacher and administrator reveals a journey that started with subjects called “Enterprise” and “Arithmetic” and progressed to iPads and SmartBoards. The trail is marked with innovation, inspired leadership, and spectacular successes, as well as with colossal failures and broken promises. None stands out as clearly as a success story, though, as the Alberta Initiative for School Improvement (AISI).

AISI was designed to change school culture by drawing on educational research and proven and best practices. It was designed to do so by not only encouraging, but requiring, collaboration between teachers, administrators, parents, researchers and community. The architects of AISI knew it would be a long and continuous process involving a commitment from all participants and a continued commitment by the government to fund the process. AISI succeeded through several cycles and performed as designed until the provincial government’s funding commitment eroded and eventually disappeared.

What are the lessons?

The risk facing Alberta’s current curriculum redesign is that the process has reverted to being centrally administered. Ground-level and grassroots involvement and commitment are missing—didn’t we learn anything about the power of AISI to make a difference, especially when groups are part of the solution? Yes, we have advisory committees with stakeholder representation, but they don’t have the collaborative commitment that AISI had. AISI featured collaboration by people who knew what was needed and what the influence would be on schools and school district cultures. When the final decisions are made by bureaucrats, decisions based on a limited scope of collaboration and involvement, will they have the same effect and results? I think not.

AISI worked because teachers wanted it to work. Participants shared their dreams, successes and failures because that’s how we learn. Parents, staff, administrators and the government believed that AISI could make a difference. Will all the education stakeholders believe as passionately in the current efforts to redesign the curriculum? Will these efforts stand the test of time as AISI did?