Post COVID Educational Recovery

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

The re-opening of schools and the provision of online learning amidst COVID-19 has been – let’s say – uneven. Well, yes, it has not even been that good and, yes, almost everyone knows that. British Columbia’s Premier has acknowledged that in the mandate letter to his newly appointed Minister of Education.

In his mandate letter, the Premier establishes his expectation that over the course of the Government’s mandate he expects the Minister to make progress in supporting COVID-19 recovery “by fast-tracking improvements to online and remote learning, including investing in more computers and tablets, more training for teachers and support staff, and new ways to improve social e-learning to promote group interactions between students and teachers.”

I expect that premiers across the country are saying pretty much the same thing to their ministers of education: “Fix online learning.” There is little doubt in my mind that there will be improvements made to online learning, including improvements to e-learning that promote social interaction between students and teachers and among students.

Such improvements will be time-consuming and costly, especially if they are pursued by each province and territory on its own. Yet, I expect each province will attempt to “go it alone.” I also expect that the Government of Canada will remain aloof from such efforts, though it should not and need not. The Government of Canada should be using its leadership role and its spending power to assist provinces that are willing to cooperate in developing a pan-Canadian approach to online learning.

By this point some readers are saying, “can’t be done. There’s no way that the Government of Canada can engage with the provinces and territories to improve online learning or do anything else in education. That’s the domain of the individual provinces.”

It is true that the provinces have the jurisdiction to make laws in relation to education, but there is nothing in the Constitution Act that prevents the Canadian government from using its leadership role and spending powers to work with the provinces on something such as the improvement of online learning.

In fact, when the Government of Canada has wanted to influence public schooling, it ­has not been shy from doing so. In fact, the Government of Canada has supported or undertaken many initiatives in the realm of public schooling.  For example, the Government of Canada provides funding for PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) and, based on agreements with the provinces and territories, it also provides financial support for minority language education and second-language instruction.

The COVID-19 recovery in education and the improvement of online learning will take longer and be more costly if the provinces “go it alone” without the benefit of the leadership and financial resources that the government of Canada can mobilize. The federal government could help to coordinate the work of the provinces and the various federal departments and agencies that engage with public schools and provide leadership and funding to public elementary and secondary schooling in this domain.

I am mindful of the sensitivity about the role of education in nation-building – a topic that is extremely sensitive for the province of Quebec. But if the provinces retain their jurisdiction in education and can establish the limits to their cooperation, I do not think the relationship I am describing would intrude on provincial autonomy.

The establishment of a pan-Canadian online learning infrastructure and the development of courseware for mathematics and science should pose no threat to provincial autonomy. Cooperative work in languages, literature, social studies could take place among a coalition of willing provinces. Quebec could provide substantial leadership in French-language education across Canada which would strengthen French language and culture throughout the country.

Cooperation would be voluntary and would extend only so far as any jurisdiction is prepared to go. What I am describing is cooperative federalism, the provinces, territories and federal government working together to achieve common goals.

Resources are scarce. Planning for a post-COVID educational recovery that includes improved online learning is an opportunity that should not be overlooked . . . but I fear it will be.

 

Best wishes for the holiday season and the New Year - Charles

Institutional Racism and Inequality in Canadian Schools: Part 3 of 3

 

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

I wrote a blog last year about discrimination in education that reported the results of a study that a colleague and I undertook to see if British Columbia student teachers discriminated against Aboriginal learners. We found that pre-service teachers led to believe that students were Aboriginal were more likely to place them in a remedial program, even though their performance was identical to students whom they were led to believe were not Aboriginal.

 Another colleague studied the factors associated with school completion for children and youth with behaviour disorders and mental illness in BC. She found that “students of Aboriginal ancestry were grossly overrepresented among students with behaviour disorders and mental illnesses and at a significant disadvantage with respect to high school completion in comparison to all other peers.” When I say our assumptions are baked into the system, I mean they are habitual and often codified in the policies and procedures we follow. This is what the colleague wrote about the implications of her findings:

The designation of special education categories for distinguishing students with moderate to severe behaviour disorders and mental illnesses has not resulted in supporting this population of students with intervention strategies leading to successful high school completion. Current definitions for students with behaviour disorders and mental illness in the Special Education Services: Manual of Policies, Procedures and Guidelines (Ministry of Education, 2016) are subjective, putting heavy emphasis on the attitudes and opinions of schools and school districts to determine the status of the students. The vague definitions and subsequent inconsistent identification is problematic and does little to determine if the services are focused on the appropriate students (p. 234-235).

Schools separate students into courses or programs according to their perceived ability or interest levels. Students are often encouraged to “choose” a pathway the school thinks will produce successful outcomes for the student. This separation (called tracking or streaming in different places) often finds students over- or under-represented in a stream or track in relation to their overall proportion in the student population. Black students in Toronto streamed into courses below their levels of performance prompted the Ontario Minister of Education to refer to streaming as a "systemic, racist, discriminatory" practice and announce that grade 9 streaming will be eliminated by the 2021-2022 school year in Ontario.

Streaming and tracking occur whenever there are alternatives that appear to be the same but are actually not. Two or three different mathematics courses at the same grade level may not be called streaming, but the separation often provides opportunities to some that are denied to others. The nomenclature used to refer to Ontario’s grade nine mathematics tells the story. One pathway is academic mathematics, a requirement for entrance to most universities; the other is applied mathematics, an alternative to the more rigorous academic pathway. 

A factor associate with lower graduation rates is student mobility. Students who change schools are at greater risk of not graduating. Schools do not adapt well to students who enter school once the academic year has begun. It is not that schools are unwelcoming to the individual. They usually are. The problem is integrating the newcomer into an existing instructional program. Albeit unintentional, this impediment to learning most often affects students from low income families among which racialized and Indigenous Canadians are over represented.  

Could institutional racism be one of the reasons that the teaching force does not reflect the demographic variety in the population? It might be difficult for individuals who have seen the subtle and not so subtle racism in the system to work within that system, even if they believed that being part of the system would help to change it.  Harold Johnson, author of Peace and Good Order: The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada, was recently asked why, after serving as an Indigenous defense lawyer and prosecutor in Saskatchewan, he believes that having more Indigenous lawyers will not lead to better justice or outcomes for Indigenous offenders and victims. To which he responded:

To get through that education, you have to allow yourself to be colonized. You have to become one of them. And once you become one of them, then you’re outside of your own community. If you believe in that system, then you’re put outside. You’re going to struggle to connect again.

There are numerous structural and operational practices that fail to consider the demographic diversity of the students enrolled in Canadian schools. Many of those structures and practices arose during a period of colonial settlement. Slavery was an approved practice and the extermination and mistreatment of Indigenous people were accepted when colonial institutions, like public schools, were developing.

It took until the late 1960s for Canada to begin to talk about racism. It revised its overtly racist immigration policies and strengthened human rights and anti-discrimination legislation. But the justification for its revision of immigration policy was often discussed in terms of the advantages that diversity would bring to Canada’s economy. Few were willing to speak about racism and consider how it was embedded in all institutions.

Social segregation sometimes occurs without intention. In the return to school this fall, an Ontario school board decided to distribute students to online classes alphabetically. By doing that students were inadvertently grouped by their ethno-linguistic backgrounds. It was some time before the school board learned that it had formed groupings that did not reflect the racially diverse nature of its district. A spokesperson for the board acknowledged the concerns parents had expressed about the groupings but said that reorganizing the classes “would have delayed the start of the school year.” The decision of the board to keep the alphabetical groupings leaves the impression that bureaucratic expediency takes precedence over ensuring diversity.

Canadian society is increasingly willing, even if reluctantly, to talk about racism and consider its impact on its institutions and its population. That is a good thing. But willingness to talk about racism and consider its impact on Canadian education is only a first step in addressing the institutional racism and inequities that are perpetuated.

Institutional Racism and Inequality in Canadian Schools: Part 2 of 3

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

We speak about whether children are “ready for school.” This often means that we expect children entering school to know their colours, letters, and numbers, and can arrange objects in a prescribed order. These abilities are the foundation for much of what they will learn in school. We expect that most children entering school will be school-ready and assume that the children who are not manifest deficiencies that will need to be addressed. We often assume that children from specific sub-groups in the population are less likely to be school ready.

We could consider entry to school from another perspective. We should ask: are schools ready for the range of children for whom they will be responsible? Other related questions are: what strengths do children entering school possess upon which the school can build? How might we recognize and validate the knowledge that students do bring to school?

I do not dispute the desirability of children learning their colours, letters, and numbers and being able to arrange objects in a prescribed order. But, taking the perspective of school readiness, we should plan that some children will not have learned those skills prior to coming to school, but also expect that those children almost certainly will know and be able to do things that other children do not know and cannot do.

Recognizing and validating a broader range of knowledge does several important things. It says that what you know and can do is important here. You should be proud of what you know and can do. As almost every teacher knows, children who believe they are successful are more persistent learners because they recognize that they have already learned things of value. Students’ expectations about their own success also influence learning. Having been successful learning in the past engenders confidence in learning things that are new to them.

The children who are ready for school in the conventional sense will learn that the knowledge they posses is not the only knowledge. They will see that there is a broad range of knowledge recognized and valued by the institution. True education is leading people (or learners) out from what they know to master things they do not know.. Those children will be less likely to stigmatize children who do not have the same skills at school-entry because the institution values the knowledge that all their peers bring to school.

Now, here is the tricky part. Schools cannot be content to simply recognize and validate the knowledge some children have and continue to prize the knowledge children who are ready for school possess. There is no question that those skills are important, but they are not the only valuable skills. The following anecdote illustrates the impact of false assumptions and one of the many skills people have that are not recognized in school.

On a trip with my spouse and friends, I was persuaded to go white-water rafting, an activity I would normally avoid. We assembled at the designated place and a young woman asked us to sign a release. After we read and signed the forms, she introduced herself as our guide. I did not expect that, imagining she would pass us along to her father. We boarded the raft. She gave a safety briefing and asked, “any questions?” I said, “this is my first time white-water rafting” and asked, “how old are you?” “16,” she replied, “but don’t worry I have been guiding since I was 12. I’ve made hundreds, maybe thousands of runs with newbies, and have never lost one.” At the time I was focused on my survival, but, in retrospect, was embarrassed about the assumptions I made about white-water rafting with a 16-year-old female. Moreover, it is illustrative of knowledge that people possess that is not typically recognized and valued in school.

Assumptions like mine are baked into the structure and practices of our schools, and into the perceptions about the students and families they are supposed to serve. The assumptions we teachers make influence how we teach and, in turn, the performance and the assessment of performance of the students for whom we are responsible.

Institutional Racism and Inequality in Canadian Schools: Part 1 of 3

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Trustees in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) voted unanimously to make completion of an Ethnic Studies class a high school graduation requirement by the 2023-2024 school year. In addition to the course requirement, the motion approved by the School District made the Superintendent of Schools responsible for ensuring support for educators to integrate Ethnic Studies into the Pre-K to Grade 8 curriculum. 

The decision will affect many students.  LAUSD, the second largest school district in the United States, serves more than 600,000 students, about the same number of students as attend public schools in British Columbia or maybe a few more.

The trustee who introduced the motion said “. . . recent protests calling for equality across the nation have shown us the value in education in dismantling institutionalized racism and inequity.” She also said, “The majority of the students we serve in L.A. Unified are Black and Latino, and it’s important for them to learn about their history and see themselves reflected in our curricula.”

There is much to applaud in the decision of LAUSD. Infusing the curriculum with what LAUSD calls ethnic studies will ensure that the subject matter becomes part of the course of study rather than an add-on. In assigning responsibility to the Superintendent for ensuring teachers have the needed support sends a signal. Educators need assistance in learning how to teach about the history and contributions of the groups who have suffered from institutionalized racism and inequity. It is one thing to include a body of material in the curriculum, but something entirely different when it comes to teaching about it without perpetuating racist stereotypes and stigmatizing the people whose history and accomplishments are being taught.

One could ask why a special motion is necessary to ensure the inclusion of this material? Why is it not already part of the curriculum being taught today? The answer is racism, the institutional exclusion, marginalization, and denigration of the groups whose history and contributions are now to be included.

There is one place I disagree with Kelly Gonez, the trustee who introduced the motion. Part of her argument was that it was important for students to learn about their history and see themselves in the curricula because Black and Latino students comprised a majority of the students in the district. I disagree. Even if there were no Latino or Black students in the district, it would be important to include knowledge of the history and contributions of Latinos and Blacks. The knowledge is important not because of their physical presence but because excluding it makes students less well educated and more likely to perpetuate institutional racism and inequality.

I raise this California initiative in my blog, which is principally about Canada, because the curricula in Canadian school jurisdictions largely ignores the history and contributions of Indigenous people and their systematic mistreatment by settlers. When Indigenous people and people of colour are included in the curriculum, they are represented in a superficial way that stereotypes them and makes them seem foreign or exotic. The exclusion and misrepresentation are manifestations of the institutional racism that pervades Canadian education.

I think referring to “ethnic studies” is also a manifestation of unconscious institutional racism. Gonez and her colleagues want to draw attention to groups that have been excluded – particularly Latino and Black Americans. But the term ethnic has negative connotation. At worst it is often taken to mean racial, tribal, or folkloric. At best, it is taken to mean cultural.

Using the term ethnic, as Gonez does, unintentionally implies that there are traits or cultural practices that are the essence of the people to whom the term is applied. This inadvertently ignores the diversity among the individuals who may choose to identify with the group to which reference is being made.

Speaking about curricular inclusion requires serious, continuing, and difficult conversations that are just getting started in the Canadian context. But eliminating institutionalized racism does not begin and end with curricular inclusion. There are other features of the system that need to be addressed. From school entry to graduation, there are structures, practices, and assumptions that need examination and change. 

British Columbia’s educational advantage is eroding

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

During the summer I was interviewed by an international panel that was studying British Columbia’s education system. The panel was trying to determine if high performing jurisdictions such as British Columbia shared common characteristics that helped to account for that high performance.

There were two major questions to which the panel sought answers. The first question was: why has British Columbia performed at a high level internationally and how did the province accomplish this?

I divided my answer into two categories: social factors and education system factors. I chose those categories because most of the differences in student achievement can be attributed to social factors. About 70% of the difference in student performance is affected by social factors and about 30% to education-system factors.

On the social side, I said that, in comparison with most countries, Canada exhibits high social equity. For example, there is less income inequality in Canada than in the United States. Canada has roughly 70% of the income inequality of the US. Or to state it another way, inequality in the US is about 30% greater than in Canada.

Although there are persistent inequalities between men and women, there is greater social equity for Canadian women than in many other countries. At the negative extreme, in some countries females are denied education and have very restricted opportunities.

Selective immigration is a factor in social equity. In polite discussion, people say that Canada skims the cream from other countries, accepting migrants with significant educational, social, cultural, and economic capital. A more pejorative description for Canada’s immigration policy is “asset stripping.”

Canada possesses a social safety net that helps to reduce more radical inequalities. Our health system is one example of the services provided to Canadians that in other countries is much more restricted. Parenting leave, employment insurance, and old age security are others.

Another social equity factor is a balance between individual and group rights. Over time, Canada has developed what I describe as a social justice infrastructure that has contributed to social equity. While it is by no means perfect, that infrastructure includes human rights legislation, immigration reform and control, employment equity, anti-racism and multicultural initiatives, and acknowledgement of the mistreatment of Japanese, Chinese, and, more recently, Indigenous Canadians.

The second set of factors that has helped students in British Columbia to achieve comparatively high levels of performance in education can be attributed to the education system. Before describing the features of the system that have made a significant contribution, I should point out that I am taking the long view because I think that there have been challenges to those features in the past decade or so. To put it bluntly, many of the factors that contributed to high performance in the past have been eroded or eliminated.

For much of BC’s history the education system has benefitted from a strong ministry of education staffed by individuals with knowledge of teaching and learning. That pattern has been less true for the past two decades and much of the expectation of leadership has been devolved to the district level. However, capacity at the school district level is not uniform across the 60 public school boards in British Columbia. In the absence of a strong Ministry capable of providing expert guidance, some districts, and the students for whom they are responsible, suffer.

British Columbia once had a strong, detailed curriculum and curriculum support upon which teachers could depend. A common curriculum and common, provincially approved resources provided a foundation for teaching. Recent revisions to the curriculum, with its emphasis on big ideas and the diminution of subject-specific knowledge, provide less support for teachers.

About twenty years ago, the Ministry produced performance standards for numeracy, literacy, and social responsibility. Those performance standards set out grade-level expectations for student performance and, most important, gathered, and published samples of student work that fell below, met, or exceeded the standards. This was enormously useful to teachers because it helped guide professional judgment about grade-level expectations and provided them with example that they could use with students and parents to talk about the standards.

Another of the factors that contributed to student performance was formal, provincial assessments. The assessments were typically administered at the senior secondary level to ensure common outcomes, certify that achievement standards had been met, and determine eligibility for provincial scholarships. The scores on those tests were factored into the student’s final grade by weighting the provincial examination score and the score assigned by the teacher based on the teacher’s classroom assessments. Those provincial assessments are largely no longer administered.

BC once employed school accreditation, a practice that sought to encourage the members of a school to engage in self-study, to set goals for improvement and the means for achieving them, and to monitor progress toward the goals established over time. Although there was provision for external evaluation, the primary benefit of school accreditation was the self-study component.

School accreditation sought to inculcate among educators an ethic of self-regulation rather than externally imposed regulation. But, teachers’ union opposition to school accreditation diminished its potential as a means of collective self-study and self-improvement and reinforced the impression that teachers are disinterested – if not opposed – to improvement. BC no longer uses school accreditation.

A strength of the BC system is its comparatively well-educated and well-prepared cadre of teachers. The post-war improvement in teacher education helped to improve student performance but that trend has stalled in the past 30 or so years. There are many things that a teacher must know and be able to do to promote student success. They need subject-specific pedagogical knowledge, the ability to manage the classroom and student behaviour, and contextual awareness and understanding of their students. The amount of time devoted to preparation in these areas has eroded in the past 30 years.

A factor in British Columbia’s success relative to other countries is that, for the most part, the learning environments across BC schools are similar in the way that they influence student performance in core subjects. In technical terms, the proportion of between-school difference on PISA is around one-tenth of the OECD average. Provincial, rather than local, funding of education and an allocation model that considers cost differences among school boards are two factors that help to produce similarity in learning environments.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that British Columbia is fortunate that these conditions are present to a greater degree in BC than jurisdictions where these two factors are less well developed. However, as other jurisdictions improve, British Columbia’s status among school jurisdictions will diminish.

Yet, I am not particularly concerned with British Columbia’s performance in comparison to other countries or provinces. Schooling is not a horse race. I am concerned about British Columbia’s performance in the future in comparison to its current performance. The future I  foresee is not so rosy: the diminution of a common curriculum (big ideas without underlying consideration of the evidence in support of them are like headlines without the story); the fragmentation of prior knowledge; and a decline in conceptual and procedural knowledge that PSE and employers ‘count’ upon when a student earns high school graduation.

I am mindful that “things are not like they used to be and never were.”  In other words, the past was not as rosy as one might infer from what I have written. There were and are significant gaps among groups of students. Several exogenous factors prevented better performance. Poverty and racism are among the most potent of those factors.

I am worried about increasing inequities. The income gap is growing, inter-group hostility appears to be on the rise, COVID-19 has revealed holes in the social safety net, but more specifically COVID-19 has also revealed inequities in educational opportunities that more advantaged parents and guardians can provide their children that less advantaged ones cannot. These are troubling developments and over the long run will likely detract from the positive record of student performance in BC.

COVID-19 magnifies long-standing tendencies

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Last week, a teacher turned broadcaster asked me if I would reflect on Failing Our Kids: How we Are Ruining Our Public Schools, a book I wrote in 2003. He was interested in the extent to which my appraisal had changed in the intervening years.

Most of what I wrote in 2003 is unfortunately applicable in 2020. COVID-19 has acted like the steroids that some body builders use, helping to define and magnify the themes and tendencies.

It would be an understatement to say that COVID-19 has sparked public – and especially parental – anxieties about public schooling. The media tap the vein of anxiety swollen by COVID and social media, far more powerful today than in 2003, have amplified those anxieties and injected significant misinformation.

Some elected representatives have traditionally manipulated public anxieties about education for political and ideological advantage. Some have misrepresented the data about the successes of public schooling as well as its shortcomings. During COVID-19, most have sought to deflect parental anxieties about the response to the pandemic to local boards of education.

A lack of provincially coordinated responses to COVID and the deflection of attention to local school boards have played into the hands of those politicians eager to abandon public schooling in favour of a market-driven private system. They would thus rid the public purse of the burden of preparing the next generation of Canadians. But even where there is no such political agenda, lack of coordination and deflection of responsibility will encourage some to abandon public schools.

Teacher unions have often exploited parental anxiety to improve their working conditions and membership by overdramatizing the impact to changes in education. Though the concerns of teacher unions about the welfare of their members is genuine, their public expression of those concerns is likely a contributing factor to parental anxiety about, and some flight from, public schools.

Canadian parents fuel anxiety about public schooling, their own and the anxieties of other parents. They hold competing and sometimes incompatible ideas and demands about public schools. This is particularly evident during COVID-19. Some parents demand that schools operate as they did prior to COVID, but with precautions to minimize the pandemic’s impact. Others demand online instruction of the same quality as can be achieved face-to-face. Others seek a blended approach, but one that is easily coordinated with parental responsibilities.

In the meantime, public schools are struggling to respond to the extraordinary demands that COVID-19 has imposed. The response has been uneven and imperfect. That should surprise no one. When we describe something like COVID-19 as novel and unprecedented, we must temper our expectations.  That is not to say that we should have no expectations, but the expectations we hold should be reasonable. So, what is reasonable?

Schools and school boards vary significantly in their capacity. They would benefit from greater coordination from provincial ministries of education. This will require more than the production of guidelines. Online learning is in most jurisdictions in a sorry state, but provincial – if not pan-Canadian – coordination and cooperation would improve its quality dramatically. Regulations about the uniform and open reporting of COVID cases by school would likely provide some comfort to the anxieties of parents.

Teacher unions and parents should try to look beyond the horizon of their own interests to work for the common good. One cannot address an extraordinary event by maintaining past practices. There will inevitably be some dislocation for everyone.

Employers and unions will need to modify, albeit temporarily, existing contracts to allow for different staff deployment. I am not suggesting abandonment of the existing contracts but some time-limited accommodations.

By way of illustration, it seems unreasonable to me to expect that teachers who are largely unfamiliar with online learning should be assigned those responsibilities. Those teachers who are conversant and comfortable with the kind of performance online learning demands should undertake the responsibility for developing units, lessons, and modules. The development of the material should be coordinated by the teacher specialists most familiar with the contents of the provincial curriculum. The material should be able to be accessed by classroom teachers from a provincial repository to fit their own timetables. They should be able to create a schedule for the students for whom they are responsible and complement the pre-recorded on-line modules with opportunities for students to demonstrate their learning and receive assistance in the form of small group, and individual, tutorials.

As I hope I have made clear, there are places where I think things need to be better coordinated. However, I think it is important for everyone to cut everyone else some slack at this difficult time.

Seeing learners in a different light

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus of Education, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 We moved to a new residence about a year ago. The walls in our previous home were primarily cloud white. The ones in our new home are three shades of blue-grey in the light to mid-grey range. When we hung the artwork from our previous home in the new one, we began to see the paintings and photographs differently. The blue-grey walls provided a different context for the art. And, because our new home has more and larger windows, we saw the art in an entirely different light, literally.

Seeing the art in a whole new light started me thinking about how the way we have ‘framed’ certain observations in education have propelled us in directions that would be different if we had framed them in a different way.

Consider the observation that some children begin school without knowing some shapes, colors, letters, and numbers, etc. There is a commonly held expectation that students without such knowledge find learning more challenging. The problem is often labeled “lack of school readiness”: that the knowledge that some children possess when entering school makes them “school ready” and other children’s lack of such knowledge prevents them from being seen as ready for school. This leads to judgments and action that are different from ones that one might make if the observation was framed differently.

Instead of framing the problem in terms of what children lack, it could be considered as a problem with schooling. Why do schools define some knowledge as valuable and its absence as a problem? Framed in this way, one might ask: are schools ready for the range of children for whom they will be responsible? Other related questions are: what strengths do children entering school possess upon which the school can build? How might we recognize and validate the range of knowledge that students do bring to school?

I expect that a change in our frame of reference would help us to make the school environment more welcoming to Indigenous students, to children for whom English is an additional language, and to students with special needs – and their parents, too. And I expect that appreciating various types of knowledge would lead to greater success because that framing would lead us to a different course of action.

Recognizing and validating a broader range of knowledge conveys the message to learners that what they know and can do is important in school and that they can be proud of what they know and can do. This may make the transition of children from cultures where, although they do not have the expected “school readiness” skills, they possess other important skills such as listening to elders, making observations, and sharing – skills that are also important for successful learning.

As almost every teacher knows, children who believe they are successful are more persistent learners because they recognize that they have already learned things of value. Students’ expectations about their own success also influence learning. Having been successful learners in the past engenders confidence in learning things that are new to them. The children who are ready for school in the conventional sense might learn that the knowledge they possess is not the only knowledge. They might see that there is a broad range of knowledge recognized and valued by the institution.

Just as I came to have a different appreciation of our artwork when it was seen in a new context, recognizing what children know and can do at school entry might prompt us to treat them differently. Seeing and appreciating what they bring would create a more welcoming environment for them and help to increase their success.

Don't confuse devolution with democracy

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

In his Globe and Mail opinion piece, Paul W. Bennet tries to make the case that “Canada’s bureaucratic school system needs a top-to-bottom overhaul.” His argument for giving greater responsibility to local schools seems superficially attractive if one ignores that the inadequate school system response to the COVID-19 pandemic was a product of doing exactly what Bennet recommends: devolving the responsibility for responding to the pandemic to local school boards. 

Bennet claims that “the centralized and over-bureaucratic school system proved to be vulnerable and ill-equipped to respond to the massive pandemic disruption.” I, on the other hand, argue that the ill-equipped response to the pandemic was a result of the improper delegation of responsibility from provincial ministries of education  to school boards, most of which lack the capacity to respond to the demands of providing online learning that they faced in the spring and continue to face in the fall In turn, many boards delegated responsibility to individual schools.

Rather than exercise their ability to coordinate the educational response to the pandemic, provincial governments promulgated guidelines for local school boards to apply as local conditions warranted. As circumstances have shown, neither school boards, nor the schools to which they in turn delegated discretion, had the capacity to exercise that delegated authority because they lacked expertise, resources, and, of course, experience.   

I agree with Paul Bennett’s assessment of the inadequate response to the pandemic, but not his analysis of its origins. There is no evidence that, in vesting control in local schools and communities, schooling would be better – and plenty historical evidence that it would not.

Delegating authority from provincial to local authorities is a convenient reflex for many provincial authorities. Such delegation provides political cover when things go awry as they often do when the course is uncharted, and even when they do not.

Long before Confederation, Egerton Ryerson, the Methodist minister who vigorously advocated for free, universal schooling, expressed his reservations about local school authorities and argued for a strong central educational authority vested in the hands of government. Ryerson’s concern about the capacity of school boards to govern in the public interest was justified. Provincial ministries of education often found it necessary to dismiss local boards and replace them with an appointed trustee when the boards were unable or unwilling to govern in the interest of the citizens they are supposed to serve.

Local control of education has a superficial appeal to those unfamiliar with its history. Local school boards were established at a time when Catholics and Protestants were deeply fearful that, if one or the other gained control of the local school, it would be to the detriment of the group that was not in control because, at that time, school curricula were imbued with religion. The solution was the creation of small, local school boards largely separated by religion. Religious segregation sounded more benign when it was dressed up in the cloak of local democracy.

Bennet opportunistically uses the admittedly inadequate educational response to the COVID pandemic to attack the education system, implying that the quality of public education is poor because of the way the system is organized.  Though it has its shortcomings, Canadian public education is – relative to other nations – a high performer when it comes to reading, mathematics and science - the domains for which there are international comparisons.

The shortcomings of the Canadian education system are not ones that would improve by dismantling the system and “reinventing it from the schools up” by giving more responsibility to “those closest to students.” Such a change would erode one of the system’s strengths, namely that the very small differences between schools do not appreciably affect student achievement.

Canadian public education does not need institutional disaggregation. It needs greater institutional coordination in things such as online learning. Given the comparatively small curricular differences among the provinces and territories, cooperation among ministries of education should be able to produce much higher quality courseware than any that a single province could produce on its own, and at a lower cost. If anything, reform of Canadian public education should involve more, not less, cooperation and coordination.

Why the Government of Canada will NOT appoint a temporary Minister of Education during the COVID-19 epidemic

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

Adhering to the dictum “never let a good crisis go to waste,” Irvin Studin has proposed in The Globe and Mail  that Canada needs a temporary Minister of Education to address what he calls “Canada’s postquarantine education crisis.” I do not dispute that COVID-19 has produced an unprecedented crisis in education. In fact, I recently published a blog addressing the question: “Will Public Schooling Withstand the Disruptive Impact of COVID-19?” 

Studin’s opinion article begins by clarifying that lawmaking in education is the exclusive responsibility of the provinces and declaring that he is “not calling for any constitutional change whatsoever in this regard.” He makes clear that the establishment of a Federal Minister of Education would not require a constitutional change.

Although the provinces were granted the jurisdiction to make laws in relation to education, there is nothing in the Constitution Act that prevents the Canadian government from using its leadership role and spending powers to influence public schooling in Canada. Whenever the Government of Canada has wanted to influence public schooling, it ­has not been shy from doing so. In fact, the Government of Canada has supported or undertaken many initiatives in the realm of public schooling.  For example, the Government of Canada provides funding for PISA and, based on agreements with the provinces and territories, it also provides financial support for minority language education and second-language instruction.

Like Studin, I have argued that Canada must use its leadership position and its spending power to ensure that Canadian public schools remain the strong institutions they are. A federal department of education could provide leadership and funding to public elementary and secondary schooling in areas central to the interest of all Canadians and coordinate the work of the various federal departments and agencies that engage with public schools.

Such a department could: sponsor research about the effectiveness of various approaches to education; develop policy papers to stimulate public debate about the directions that public schooling might take; coordinate the collection and interpretation of data pertinent to such issues and decisions; and report periodically to the Canadian people about public schools.

There are several specific areas that I think demand the attention of the government of Canada. First and most important is the education of Indigenous learners. Significant achievement gaps between identifiable groups detract from the promise of Canadian public schooling that the outcomes of schooling should not be determined by one’s background. The gap between Indigenous and non-­Indigenous students is a national disgrace that requires immediate, coordinated attention which the federal government seems reluctant to provide.

Sympathetic as I am to a federal department of education and to using the post-quarantine crises in education instrumentally to achieve such a goal, the immediate appointment of a temporary minister of education is not prudent.

The introduction of a federal department of education would be a delicate matter for any government at any time. Ensuring the provinces – and especially Quebec – that the Government of Canada would play an entirely facilitative role would be essential.

Education is, in part, about nation-building – a topic that is extremely sensitive for Quebec. Building the French Nation in Quebec is an enduring project in which Francization – the integration of immigrants to French language and culture - plays an important part.

 A temporary minister of education would not be able to earn sufficient credibility and muster the resources necessary to produce a short-term impact. The uneven response among provinces and school boards thus far is in great measure attributable to the reluctance of provinces to do more than set guidelines. If the provinces were to take a more prescriptive approach, they would “own it” when things go awry – as they inevitably will.

Much groundwork would be required were any federal government prepared to attempt to formally establish a permanent Minister (and Ministry) of Education.

How the school system can [almost] stifle a student’s initiative

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

As readers will know, many school jurisdictions closed schools and shifted to online ‘learning’ in March 2020. I put quotation marks around learning because the application and success of online learning was and continues to be – let us say – uneven.

One 17-year-old sought to repeat Grade 11 because he wanted to improve his already strong academic standing so that he may pursue a scholarship to a high ranking university, and the possibility of earning a place on an NCAA baseball team. He felt that time missed due to medical absences prior to COVID-19 and the educational situation during COVID-19 deprived him of the solid foundation for further study and the pursuit of his goals.

The counselor said that she thought that would be fine, but that she wanted to check with the school’s administration. Two weeks later, the parents received an email informing them that their son’s request to repeat grade 11 was denied. The parents sought a review of the decision by the school’s principal. The school reaffirmed its decision to deny the student the opportunity to re-enroll in grade 11.

In denying the opportunity, the parents were told their son’s grades were “good enough” and that they “will not go down” [from the 87 average he had earned based on the work he had completed prior to the shutdown]. They were also told that, if their son had been afforded the opportunity to repeat grade 11, it would be unfair to other students. When they reminded the school that he seeks admission to a highly competitive school, the school said, “we’re not in the scholarship business.”

I tried to discuss the matter with the vice-principal of the school. I made clear that I was planning to write a blog about the issue and wanted to understand the situation from the perspective of the school’s administration. I stressed that is was not my intention to name the student, the school, or the school board, and that I had the parent’s consent to discuss the matter. I said that “I would be grateful if you would confirm the school’s decision and its reasons for the decision before I write and post the blog.”

In an e-mail exchange with the vice-principal, he informed me that “the [School Board] does not share or discuss matters related to individual students, even with parent permission, for privacy reasons.  As such, I cannot provide comment.” The vice-principal is wrong. Privacy protection does not prevent a parent from authorizing someone to discuss such situations with school officials. If they could, that would prevent a parent from having the assistance of an advocate or a lawyer.

I did not correct the vice-principal. I thanked him for his reply and asked about the grounds for denying anyone under the same circumstances the opportunity to repeat. If there is policy, please refer me to that policy.

He replied by sending me a link to the board’s policy that, in essence, said the decision was subject to the exercise of the discretion of the school administration. I had already obtained the board’s policy and learned that it leaves such matters to the school’s administration.

The parents never received a written decision stating the reasons for denying the request. The reasons provided to the parents verbally seem arbitrary and unreasonable in failing to give sufficient regard to the student’s educational plans. Moreover, the failure to provide written reasons for such a decision is a breach of procedural fairness. To appeal such a decision, there needs to be a written reason explaining the grounds for denying the student the opportunity.

The decision of the school struck me as inconsistent with the mission statement in the mandate statement for the school system in British Columbia.

The purpose of the British Columbia school system is to enable learners to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy society and a prosperous and sustainable economy.

It is also inconsistent with section 1 of the School Act that defines an educational program as one “designed to enable learners to become literate, to develop their individual potential and to acquire the knowledge, skills and attitudes needed to contribute to a healthy, democratic and pluralistic society and a prosperous and sustainable economy” (emphasis supplied).

It is also at variance with the practices common in many school districts to offer specialty programs to enable students to pursue their interests and abilities, subject to the school board’s capacities and fiscal circumstances. For example, in addition to French Immersion programming and alternative schools of various kinds, there are public schools that offer programs for high performing athletics or arts students that allow those students to combine a half-day of schooling with a half day in a gymnasium or concert hall.

According to my reading of the provincial regulations and subsequent verification with the Ministry of Education, there is nothing that would prevent a student taking or seeking to repeat classes at a particular grade level as long as the student is of school age. Moreover, there is no limit to the number of credits a student can earn toward graduation. In this light, the reasons given to the parents verbally seem capricious and to my way of thinking mean-spirited.

The student was determined to repeat the grade. Undaunted by the absurdity of the school’s decision, the young man will pursue his desire to further his education at an independent (private) school even though it requires sacrifices by his family.

I was impressed by the student’s mature judgement – something I lacked at his age. I was dismayed by the decision of the school to deny him the opportunity to further his education and by the lack of procedural fairness. He has shown persistence in the face of small-mindedness. When he told me the story, he was unfailingly polite about the school’s decision and personnel, exhibiting maturity of another kind. An equally determined student whose parents did not have the ability to use part of their retirement savings for an independent school would probably have had his or her initiative stifled.

There are four take-aways for parents and educators. One is that decisions must be supported by written reasons. Without them, a parent is unable to effectively appeal under Section 11 of the BC School Act. A second is that parents are entitled to authorize others to assist them in pursuing matters of this kind. The school board has no ability to limit disclosing information if the parent consents. A third is that there is nothing in regulation or legislation that would prevent a student taking or seeking to repeat classes at a particular grade level as long as the student is of school age. Fourth, there is no limit to the number of credits a student can earn toward graduation.

Who took citizenship out of the curriculum?

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

About a year ago I moved. In preparation for the move, I tried to sort through the accumulated material in my office only to discover that I am a hoarder. Who knew?

I discovered that I had more old textbooks than some libraries. Among them was James McCaig’s
Studies in Citizenship (1925), a book approved for student use in British Columbia according to the 1926-27 BC Programme of Studies. It turns out you can find the book and the programme of study on the internet!

McCaig’s text is divided into three parts: “The Social Life of the Community,” “The Economic Life of the Community,” and “The Rights and Duties of Citizens. The first describes the contributions of family, school, church, and government to citizenship. The second gives quite a cogent and balanced account of economics and its impact on the community. The last section has three parts: what government owes to the citizen,” “what the citizen owes to government,” and “what the citizen owes himself.”

The text is – aside from the references to “our Anglo-Saxon forefathers,” “our Dominion,” and the use of the male pronoun – quite a comprehensive account of citizenship. According to the BC Programme of Studies, “Studies in Citizenship” was intended for students in Grade VIII. In as much as many students did not transition to secondary education in the 1920s, the text was an excellent primer for someone leaving school.

The mission of BC’s schools was then and until recently to equip students with the knowledge they need to take a full and active part in the economy and society and to understand their rights and obligations as citizens.

With this in mind, I was curious to see how ‘citizenship’ and ‘democracy’ were addressed in BC’s ‘new’ curriculum. The BC Ministry of Education has made this quite easy to do – a benefit to parents and teachers alike – using the search curriculum tool. The tool allows those who are interested to search the components of the curriculum (Big Ideas, Content, and Curricular Competency) by subjects (science, social studies, mathematics, etc.) and by grade level (K-12).

I selected all grades, subjects, and curriculum categories (Big Ideas, Content, and Curricula Competency) and searched for the term citizenship. I was surprised that there were few references to the term and the most frequent among those references was to digital citizenship (taking personal responsibility and behaving ethically and cautiously when using technology).

I repeated the search substituting democracy for citizenship. Nil, nothing, zilch – not a single reference to the concept. I tried again with democratic. Two references. Both were associated with Political Studies 12, a course taken by very few students.

Rights occurs more frequently than the democracy and citizenship. A big idea from student in kindergarten is that “rights, roles, and responsibilities shape our identity and help us build healthy relationships with others.” In Grade 1, the big idea is “our rights, roles, and responsibilities are important for building strong communities.” At the Grade 2 level the big idea is “individuals have rights and responsibilities as global citizens.” Global citizens? Really? If citizenship defines the relationship between a political state and its citizens, what is global citizenship? I do not enjoy the same rights or have the same responsibilities in France or Poland as I do in Canada.

Until recently, a significant gap in education has been the attention devoted to the indigenous inhabitants of Canada. I repeated my search using the term indigenous. There were more associations with that term than with citizenship, democracy, or rights. Indigenous people are conspicuously absent in McCaig’s treatment of citizenship in 1925.

When I mentioned this to a close friend, he asked, “how are students expected to learn about the rights denied to Indigenous people by successive governments, the broken promises and neglect at the hands of settler (Canadian) governments, and the aspiration of First Nations to have government to government relations with Canada and the provinces if students do not understand the concepts of democracy, citizenship, and rights?”

“They can’t,” I replied, “because someone took citizenship out of the curriculum along with democracy and rights.”

The omission of citizenship education is not an oversight. The ‘new’ BC curriculum reflects an atomistic view of individualistic learning. The primary responsibility of schools today is to cultivate the personal capital of the learner. The impetus for learning is the individual's goals and passions rather than any collective purpose. The collective enters the framework only if the individual learner expresses an interest in others. This explains why rights appear, but responsibilities do not.

A curriculum which intends to cultivate community and individuals cognizant of their and others' places in the community must provide a common experience and require that learners engage others, including people who do not share their passions or their values. The curriculum, like our society, must require the individual to consider and negotiate the tensions between self and others, between public and private spheres, and between conflicting ideas and values.

Teacher Concerns Expose System Weakness

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

 [permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

On Thursday, September 17^th, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF) sought the assistance of the Labour Relations Board of British Columbia (LRBBC). The BCTF wanted the LRBBC’s help “in addressing the serious and growing concerns that teachers have about the working and learning conditions in the public education system during the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Central to the BCTF’s argument is the fragmented application of provincial guidelines by school boards in the province.

The BCTF asserts that its application falls within the LRBBC’s mandate under section 88 of the Labour Relations Code. That section reads:

If a difference arises during the term of a collective agreement, and in the board's opinion delay has occurred in settling it or it is a source of industrial unrest between the parties, the board may, on application by either party to the difference, or on its own motion,

(a) inquire into the difference and make recommendations for settlement, and

(b) if the difference is arbitrable, order that it be immediately submitted to a specified stage or step in the grievance procedure under the collective agreement or, whether or not the difference is arbitrable, request the minister to appoint a special officer. (Labour Relations Code [RSBC 1996] Chapter 244

I am not a lawyer with expertise in labour relations. I do not know how the LRBBC will respond, but I hope that the genuine concerns of teachers about their health and safety are addressed by the time you read this blog post.

Regardless of the outcome, the dispute itself exposes a serious weakness in what we informally describe as British Columbia’s education “system.” I place quotation marks around the word system because the issue raises an important question that all systems must face: How much and what kind of authority and responsibility should be delegated from the main body (in this case the provincial ministry of education) to regional entities (in this case school boards) and still remain a system?

The BCTF’s petition to the LRBBC argues that the provincial health and safety guidelines have been interpreted and applied inconsistently across the province, and those inconsistencies put some of their members at greater risk than others without adequate reason or justification.

A word sometimes used to describe the relationship between the Ministry of Education and school boards is co-governance. It is a relationship described in a 2018 memorandum of understanding between the British Columbia Ministry of Education and the British Columbia School Trustees Association which uses co-governance in the following manner:

The Province recognizes that BCSTA, as the representative voice for its members and Board of Education, is a key partner in developing and maintaining an effective education system, and further recognizes the legislated co-governance role of Boards of Education to determine local education priorities.

Notwithstanding the language of co-governance, the British North America Act (1867) gave the provinces the sole authority for making laws about education. The provinces, in turn, created strong centralized departments of education to oversee school boards, themselves creations of the provincial governments.

Asserting the co-governance role of boards of education and encouraging or allowing boards to determine how a provincial guideline is implemented introduces the potential for misalignment between local application and the intended purpose of the guideline. The implication of guidelines is that they are recommendations about best or preferred practice. As is asserted by the BCTF, co-governance has compromised the implementation of the guidelines by allowing boards to exercise their delegated authority.

To delegate authority and responsibility to a subordinate unit, one must have confidence that the unit has the capacity to exercise the delegated authority and responsibility. Co-governance gives both the Ministry of Education and local school boards a shield that either can wield depending upon the situation at hand. The assumption of co-governance is also based on the notion that local authorities will know how best to apply X (whatever X might be) because they are more closely attuned to local conditions.

When school boards seek greater discretion in the allocation of funds provided by the Ministry of Education, they assert that claim of knowing local conditions best.  But, when school boards say they do not have enough resources for X (whatever X might be), the Ministry of Education says that the formula it uses for allocation funding is a distribution mechanism, not a spending mechanism. The Ministry will remind boards that they have the discretion for using the resources they receive.

Co-governance is a convenient shield, but poor policy. It is a poor policy, in part, because it is predicated on the assumption that there is sufficient capacity in all the units to which discretion has been delegated.

There are sixty school boards in British Columbia to which considerable authority and responsibility have been delegated. Previous governments have already made the judgment that in matters of teacher bargaining, individual school boards have, at best, limited capacity. Therefore, government established the British Columbia Public School Employers’ Association (BCPSEA) to bargain collectively with the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation.

For its part, the BCTF would prefer local bargaining precisely because of differences in capacity among boards. Prior to provincial bargaining, the BCTF exploited differences among boards to its advantage. The BCTF centrally managed the bargaining between BCTF locals and local school boards. It strategically selected school boards that it knew were more favorably disposed to its arguments or that lacked the capacity to resist its arguments. By establishing local agreements favourable to its interests with such boards, the BCTF successfully used those agreements as a baseline for its negotiation with other boards.

With respect to the health and safety issues about which the BCTF is now concerned, it seeks a provincial solution to the local differences. I am sympathetic to the concerns expressed by the BCTF about the health and safety of its members, and hope they are resolved quickly.

My sentiments extend beyond the immediate problem to the larger issue of delegated authority. I see the issue in the larger context of the question I raised earlier: How much and what kind of authority and responsibility should be delegated from a provincial ministry of education to school boards?

Is the capacity among all school boards sufficient to ensure that they can exercise the authority and responsibility delegated to them?

Reducing the COVID-19 Achievement Gap

 

Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 

As children and young adults return to school, parents and teachers watch with trepidation. Hoping for the best, most school boards are preparing for the worst (a return to online instruction for everyone). Many school boards have encouraged parents to choose between face-to-face and online instruction and many are offering hybrid models that combine face-to-face and online instruction in interesting ways.

There are conflicting estimates of how much learning loss occurred last Spring when most instruction occurred online. Some of the learning loss occurred because there was little instruction since many teachers concentrated on ensuring the emotional and physical safety of the students for whom they were responsible. Some of the loss occurred because, despite the instruction that occurred, students had fewer opportunities for teacher guidance in using what they were learning.

No one denies that learning loss has been significant and, now that schooling has resumed, teachers are working assiduously to address the loss. The students for whom lost learning time has been most detrimental include students for whom English is a second language, special needs learners, and low-income students.  

Medical health officers showed foresight in the Spring when they signaled that, if schools resumed in September, conditions would be different. Only a minority of students have a schedule that permits five days of uninterrupted school attendance in a classroom with all their peers. The school experience is much more fragmented and is likely to be interrupted again depending upon health conditions.

The lost learning time and the potentially fragmented conditions pose a significant challenge for teachers. But the accumulated evidence in education indicates there are several things that teachers can do that will make their work more manageable and the overall student experience more successful.

1. Avoid the temptation to assign project work. Project work requires students to work on their own over a long period of time. This requires significant motivation and self-discipline. Few parents have the time or capacity for monitoring project work.
2. Assess what students know and can do that is foundational to continued success in the subject. Ensure that students have the entry-level knowledge to proceed with the instructional material intended for students at that level.
3. Arrange instruction in small, discrete units that can be assessed for mastery. It is harder to spot the specific challenges that students are having if their performance is not assessed until the conclusion of a long instructional episode. This is true whether we are talking about a single, lengthy instructional episode or a collection of instructional episodes that have been grouped into a unit. Waiting until the end to assess makes it harder for both the teacher and students because there are more things to look for. When instruction is organized into smaller chunks, each with its own brief assessment, it is easier to spot the challenges and the students who face them.
4. Break the work into smaller bits - each with its own, focused assessment – making the teacher’s job less challenging. Focused classroom assessments are easier to construct, are easier to evaluate, and are helpful in getting a student or group of students back on track. Knowing that I have not succeeded on a specific dimension of the work and that the teacher will help me master what I have not yet learned is more encouraging than being told that I did not master the material in a larger body of work. The latter is often overwhelming.
5. Encourage and provide feedback. Feedback is important for continued success (for both the students and the teacher). From the teacher’s point of view, knowing what students know and can do helps them to plan the next steps. Knowing that students are performing in accordance with expectations for students at that grade level is reinforcing to the teacher. From the students’ point of view, knowing what one knows and can do reinforces a success ethic.
6. Provide feedback and re-instruction to individual students if only one or two students are having difficulty. When more than one or two are unable to demonstrate mastery, re-teaching the entire class is called for. When there is a growing number of students with insufficient knowledge to proceed to the next lesson or unit, the teachers job becomes much more difficult because the gaps between students grow. Large gaps, and the more of them there are compound the complexity of the teacher’s work, making a difficult job almost impossible.

Teachers who read this blog before it was posted say that this advice (which is based on the accumulated evidence about teaching and learning) applies to in-class instruction as much as it does to on-line instruction. And it does.