Noticing Differences Between Teaching Reading and Teaching Children to Read

 

The holidays are almost here - the perfect opportunity 

to indulge in loving to read!

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In 2019 - 2020, every blog entry I wrote was about teaching children to read - exploring all the nuances related to reading and supporting children learning to read at home.  

These days I am exploring the personalization of learning in schools, based on 32 years of teaching children to learn to read.

When we teach reading, we use a series of lesson plans to teach specific skills and knowledge to children who are learning to read. In a perfect situation, every child would absorb those lessons, apply them and learn to read. Realistically, some children do learn to read by being taught arbitrary lessons - often these are children who have experiences with reading already and have previously at least begun to love reading.

When we teach children to read, we discover what they already know, where any learning misconceptions, delays or gaps in understanding exist, and then figure out how to best support and advance their understanding of reading until each child becomes a reader.

The real understanding of learning to read lies in the very succinct phrase coined by author Dav Pilkey at the beginning of this entry - 'reading is about love, not levels'. It is when a child learns to love reading, builds fluency and seeks out words to entertain, inform, find solace, laugh, cry, question, confirm, predict, clarify and explore, that a child becomes a true reader. Knowing patterns of letters, combinations and predictable arrangements generates a knowledge and awareness of reading but it does not necessarily create a reader.

Over the holidays, families have time and opportunity to foster a love of reading without the usual competing demands of extracurricular events and school.  Sharing stories, laughing, questioning, exploring, crying together over the adventures wrapped inside the words of beautiful texts offers tremendous opportunities for families to build traditions around communal experiences with texts.

My wish for every child this holiday season is that they fall in love with reading in every form - with being read to in person, listening to stories, reading stories together, reading stories independently, getting to know the genres of texts and choosing a favourite, identifying and finding favourite authors, illustrators, titles.  

That children will have conversations within families about favourite stories, stories they want to read, stories they want to write, to give, to share with each other.

This is what it means to teach a child to learn to love reading!

Wishing everyone a safe, happy and relaxing holiday celebrating special moments together this winter break!

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School 

The Unexpected Journey as Children Learn to Read

     

"Just finished reading 'Ramona Forever' with my daughter. 

When I closed the book, she took it and held it against her heart

 and I thought, 'what a wonderful thing to 

write stories for young people!"  - Kenneth Oppel (author)

"Children learn to read at different speeds and ages. Don't suppose

those kids who read early love literature and those who learn 

later do not. 

If your child is slow to reading text, then read, read, read

to them yourself. Give them stories and audiobooks and plays

and poetry too!" - Heather O'Neill (author)

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Teaching children to learn to read has always been an unexpected journey - every child I have given birth to, all my grandchildren (including Capri who is only 2 months old and is pictured above trying to turn the page of a book I was reading to her), and every learner I have encountered in 32 years of teaching reading with children of all ages, have each travelled the 'learning to read' road with their own idiosyncrasies, ups and downs.

As we enter another era of 'here is how children learn to read' with all the discussions emerging around 'The Science of Reading', including additional funding to help 'fill in the learning gaps from pandemic learning disruptions', I want to clearly state I have yet to find any road map, any set of instructions or directions for learning to read that have worked the same way for any two children. 

Whether we share common resources, funding, lesson plans, books or programs, every child will experience learning to read in their own way and with their own particular set of successes, hiccups and challenges and each one will bring their own background experiences, their histories of reading within their families, their personal cognitive strengths and challenges, their personal preferences and their own stories and understandings of stories to their experiences with reading. We can standardize the practices, the assessments, the expectations. 

We just can't standardize the children. 

Thankfully!!

It's not that we have to re-invent the teaching wheel for every child - it's just that we need to have a wide repertoire of approaches, strategies, techniques, resources, materials and ideas accessible within teachers as we sit with each child and try to make sense of what they already know about reading, what is working for them already and where their challenges lie. And then we need to travel their journeys with them respectfully, thoughtfully and with the greatest of joy as we accompany them on their particular learning-to-read adventure :)

At EHS, we do this every day and we always have - we have long been invested in the belief that learning to read is different for every child even as we know the foundations of fostering a love of reading are most often grounded in shared experiences with reading. 

Children learn to love books through listening to stories and sharing their ideas about stories together. Knowledge is socially constructed through shared experiences, questions and investigations - we learn to read and to love to read simultaneously. These shared experiences are the cornerstone of all our learning at EHS. 

These are just the first steps, however, in supporting our learners in their own learning to read adventures. Most of the time, as I move in and out of classrooms during our whole school literacy blocks, children are working in pairs or small groups with teachers, staff and volunteers focused on various aspects of learning to read and write.

 Learning to manipulate letters to create words and craft sentences. 

Exploring elements of genres that begin with the fundamentals of stories - characters, settings, events, beginnings and endings. 

Differentiating fiction from non-fiction. 

Making personal choices about which stories they love to read most - and who their favourite authors are. 

Recognizing the importance of writers as well as illustrators. 

Learning to modulate their voices to capture the energy, emotions, excitement of the texts they are reading. 

Listening to stories, telling stories, predicting what will happen next. 

Asking questions, finding their own answers in the text and then asking more that remain unanswered but provoke deeper thinking. 

These are just some of the experiences children invest themselves in as they wander along the various paths of learning to read. 

And, when they falter or hit a rut with learning to read, their teachers are there to offer other ideas, experiences, nudges towards considering different ways to understanding reading. 

If every child learned to truly become a reader because they knew their alphabet, understood all the grapho-phonemic relationships and could apply them to texts effortlessly, teachers and parents could teach predictably and be comfortable with the knowledge we were all doing 'the right thing'.  The problem is that it hasn't quite worked out that way in the past 50 - 100 years of knowing how to teach these specific skills. 

We've had to learn to improvise, and adjust and let kids take the lead in learning as they share with us what makes sense to them and what doesn't.  Sometimes it takes a lot of teacher observations and listening to figure out exactly where the disconnect exists for kids when they are faltering along their particular reading journey. Sometimes they just need some more 'growing' and 'maturing' time than others in their age or grade group. Sometimes there are significant learning issues that require considerable modifications - including use of technology - to foster new understandings. 

Almost always, it takes more time to become a proficient reader than the child, the teacher or the parent would really like...and keeping the faith that learning to read eventually does happen is a strategy requiring attention itself :)

Almost always, by this time of the school year, I am working with learners who appear to be off-course a bit on their learning journey.  I usually work with them independently, for about 20 minutes, 2 - 4 times per week.

 I begin by re-visiting the paths I know they have already travelled - building the alphabet in order, identifying sounds, noticing vowels and consonants. We are re-visiting practices of noticing and discrimination - what have we noticed or not noticed along the way of learning to read? What sounds are most familiar and which ones still surprise us (the soft sound of /g/ is often a surprise!) and what things have they been taught that didn't yet 'stick' - just because we have been taught something does not mean we have internalized it yet. 

Yet. A most powerful word to be sure!

There are a couple of things I have learned as I coach these young readers that may be of interest to parents:

• when children learn to 'sing' the ABC song, they often say /lmnop/ as if it were just one sound - slow this section of the song down from the earliest experiences with the song and clearly articulate /l/, /m/, /n/, /o/, /p/.  This is a frequent pothole on the journey to learning to read - in order to appreciate letters and sounds and manipulate them in text effectively, we need to clearly hear and recognize each discrete letter

• when young learners create a physical alphabet string from magnetic letters or scrabble tiles (my favourite literacy manipulative!), they are also visually recognizing and discriminating letters from each other and tying those letters to sounds - a key aspect of developing reliable familiarity with graphemes and phonemes and their relationships

• there have always been 26 letters in the alphabet, from which literally hundreds of thousands of words and sentences are formed - the greater the familiarity of children with physically moving those 26 letters around in their fingers as young learners, the greater the chance they will be able to make sense of how letters group together to make words in somewhat predictable ways - physically play with letters lots - continuing with this practice even after children know them well :)

"We all learn from someone else.  

We're all taught. 

We are never alone as long as we can find

 beauty and truth in the amazing, 

astonishing combination of only twenty-six letters." 

- Sarah ban Breathnach (author) 

Helping children appreciate the significance and beauty of the alphabet is a key part of my work with learners every day and our explorations often (not always) offer new paths for entering the world of reading. 

 

In the next couple of blog entries, I will explore some other alternative strategies for encouraging new readers who are encountering roadblocks on their journey to be avid, skilled and successful readers.  

And I will continue to read aloud whenever possible - including with baby Capri - to foster an enduring appreciation and enjoyment of stories on her journey towards a joyful reading life!

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School 

 

What Do We Mean When We Say Students Are Engaged in Learning?

        

                                   

"The epitome of student engagement is when

           students experience what is known in psychological 

research as flow: 

“joy, creativity, the process of total involvement with life.” 

-   (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, 2008)

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Teachers know the most exhilarating learning times with students are when they are both challenged and capable of engaging in a task that commands their attention due to curiosity, interesting content or physical engagement - those are the most engaging times for teachers as well! 

It is a challenge in classroom management to keep students sitting in place for extended periods of time completing written work - this has long been a traditional expectation in classrooms, and our experiences at EHS with cohorting classes through all of the 2020-21 school year reminded us all just how difficult it is to sustain this kind of 'learning' for any length of time - personally, it gave me a whole new appreciation for the souls who taught me as a small child - ADD active in a time when this was not something that mattered in schools at all!

The idea of 'productive struggle' is an underlying premise to teaching students of any age - if, as teachers, we are able to create structures for students to actively discover new or deeper understanding rather than simply providing information passively for students through direct instruction, they are more likely to want to engage in thinking and problem solving to discover something new on their own or in collaboration with peers.  And it is the wanting to engage in thinking and problem solving that leads to the best learning.

Productive struggle relies on a challenge (like a rigorous academic task) as well as a skill (such as categorizing, creating, sorting, inventing something new, finding the 'best way' to resolve a problem) coming together actively where learners are able to be actively involved by assuming a particular role or responsibility in the learning activity.

Engaging in this productive struggle causes children to think just beyond what they are capable of and encouraging them to try something a little more challenging is how learners further develop their skills and strategies and improve their overall understanding and achievement. Vygotsky, a reknowned 2oth century child psychologist, labelled this process the 'zone of proximal development' where children can learn tasks slightly more challenging than what they are capable of in the company of peers or teachers who can coach and support their growth in learning and understanding (Walker, 2010).

When we are developing tasks for learners, the idea of engagement is usually front of mind since we know this typically provides the best possible opportunities for student growth and improvements in achievement.  There are many considerations that impact the development of engaging tasks, but five key elements of learning tasks are relatively easy to identify:

1) Collaborative tasks - we know knowledge is constructed socially as children try out new thinking and ideas that either gets confirmed or changed as they explore with others

2) students are assigned - or choose - to take on roles and responsibilities  - when children feel they can take responsibility for something successfully, they are more likely to want to participate - we activate the 'curiosity' parts of the brain and they feel like they have efficacy

3) clear learning targets - making the purposes of the learning tasks clear so learners know what they need to be able to demonstrate by the end of the lesson, and having targets broken down in specific success points along the way will help students understand and appreciate when they have been successful

4)   adjusting the task as needed to keep students engaged - sometimes what we think will work well with students just doesn't - the task might be too challenging or too easy - so teachers monitor and change frequently, making small adjustments (0r large!) as needed to sustain student interest, engagement and subsequent success

5) always be ready to present a bigger challenge - this is the answer to the 'I'm done, Teacher' situation that seems to happen frequently in classrooms every day - teachers are ready with the 'what's next' expansion of the first task so when students are feeling like they have solved whatever task they have undertaken, there is a 'what's next' piece ready to go when some students are ready to move on to the next steps

Students engaged in learning looks like active, collaborative students exhibiting their curiosity, inventiveness, creativity and applying skills to achieve a clear learning target while investing their energy into trying to solve a problem, create a new project, write a description or story, read an interesting yet challenging story.  We use the principles of design thinking often in our classroom tasks so children are well aware they can make mistakes and learn from them - mistakes do not mean they are 'wrong' but that there is another opportunity to try again in a different way. Every task is achievable in some way.

Learning through engagement becomes deeper, more authentic and interesting and grows from a perspective of curiosity so that children can experience the joy of thinking and doing beyond what they thought previously they could do. This is where best possible learning happens for all our learners and it is the goal of every teacher, every day, in every learning task designed for our learners. 

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"Both flow and productive struggle make clear why student engagement is important in the classroom. When students experience the joy of accomplishing a worthy academic challenge, they are motivated to work harder. As students continue to work harder, they build persistence, critical reasoning, and the ability to apply their learning. "    - Michael Toth (2021) 

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School 

Playing Safe Again - Re-Socializing Our Children's Pandemic Experiences

 

“Play and socialization are the ‘work’ of early childhood,” Dr. Wojciechowski says.

 “During this period, children are learning how to navigate social scenarios, 

such as when and how to join in with others, taking turns, conversation skills, 

emotion regulation, frustration tolerance, emotional expression and more.

 These lessons seem simple, but they are foundational to healthy social development." 

- Dr. Jennifer Wojciechowski

This is the third year our learners have experienced the pandemic interrupting what we used to think of as 'normal living': 

• Spring 2020 - all school-age children moved to virtual learning for the last 3.5 months of the school year, playgrounds were closed and everyone was required to work and learn from home
• Fall 2020 - in-person learning resumed with children very tightly cohorted into single classroom groups for the entire school day - for the entire 202-21 school year, students could see each other from a distance but they were not allowed to intermingle under any circumstances - not on the playground, the playing fields, the gym, or in music; there were occasional interruptions to in-person learning - twice the entire province was moved to virtual learning for brief periods of up to 4 weeks; other interruptions occurred because students were exposed to positive cases in their cohorted classrooms 
• Fall 2021 - in-person learning resumes amidst a very significant 'fourth wave' of infections; we continue to wear masks and distance, students continue to be cohorted although not quite as tightly - they are able to mix and mingle outside and are cohorted in team classroom pairs

Everyone is talking about academic gaps and how will we catch them up?  

From an educator's perspective, this is something we know how to address, supporting students in their learning from where they currently are to where they need to be. There are no magic strategies for filling in gaps, it's more a matter of ensuring they have the supported, direct teaching needed to continue growing in their learning. We can do this with additional support, allowing for greater time on task, offering short bursts of targeted instruction exactly when and where they need it. 

The concerns I have are far more focused on the socialization cracks and gaps that have begun to surface in our children's play, sense of fair play, capacities for solving interpersonal problems and resolving conflicts that begin small but have the capacity to quickly escalate if not resolved. These are the side effects of pandemic cohorting and tight management that have become the most prevalent and obvious as this third year of COVID-19 impact has unfolded.

Recently, we surveyed our grade 4 students - those who have experienced school as an 'expected experience' for the longest period of time across our school's population. We were surprised to find a significant number of these children no longer feel they 'belong' to a school community but rather they just attend school. This caught us off-guard a bit - we have worked hard through the entire history (6 years) that our school has been open to foster a sense of community through many different avenues - primarily using peace education as our sign post. Through our monthly peace assemblies, our Peace Ambassadors Leadership Program, several different community-based peaceful initiatives, our Coulee School initiatives, Wonder Time experiences and other whole-school initiatives, creating a sense of belonging to a community of caring learners has been a priority for us. To see this virtually disappear from our students' experiences of school was an abrupt call for change.

We know this third year of pandemic influences has changed the ways we foster community in the building - we tend to do this with a far greater focus on shared virtual experiences now, and with a focus on the small classes or shared classes together rather than as a whole school community. Even when we engage in a whole school activity - such as our field trip to Glenbow Ranch Park on September 20/21 - we participated while still tightly cohorted in our class groupings. We have loosened our recess and lunch break restrictions somewhat so there are grade groups together; there are, however, no times when children can just be themselves anywhere inside or outside the school without cohorting restrictions. 

This level of control has a protective capacity for holding potential COVID-19 contact in abeyance - it also, unfortunately, does not allow for children to interact as freely or as often as one might expect or wish to have happen. And, consequently, our children are not practicing the interactive skills and strategies with each other in novel situations that they typically would in a regular school year kind of setting. 

This is not a permanent loss of knowing how to make friends, resolve small conflicts or be comfortable in a different social situation. It does, however, require some attention and support to nudge our students back into their more expected norms of behaviour when relating with each other - how to respect each other's space, listen before speaking, offer suggestions rather than ultimatums, be kind first, notice and suggest sharing, negotiate rules and expectations of play rather than announce them, etc.

Navigating childhood social situations has never been an easy task - children are in their formative stages with scant background experiences to fall back on when things don't go exactly according to their internal plans. We know, however, that equipping them with some easy, go-to strategies for sustaining positive play can make a huge difference in the way the flow of their learning days go - they no longer need to worry about what will happen at recess, who they will play with, will they get chosen to play on a team.

Teaching in what we hope are the waning days of the pandemic is a complex task on the best of days. We are focusing some of our energy into fostering positive play experiences with our students despite the pandemic restrictions - we believe strongly our students just need some gentle nudging back to their previous experiences and mindsets to re-capture the safe, family feeling our school grounds once experienced most of the time. We are beginning with noticing our own feelings, our own expectations and our own responses to situations. As we work through identifying our inappropriate and appropriate responses, we are confident our children will regain their sense of safety and belonging within our school setting. As Dr. Wojciechowski noted at the beginning of this post, emotional regulation, frustration tolerance and conversation skills are all about healthy social development. While our wings have been clipped somewhat (so to speak) as a result of the pandemic, they have not been removed and we are confident our children will soon be demonstrating more appropriate behaviours and attitudes as they learn to play safely, communicate positively and feel safe in our school community - feeling all the components of belonging. 

We are working on a Safe Play Project that is multi-faceted and we are confident will re-build, foster and re-kindle our memories and strategies of building peaceful communities together despite a pandemic that has worked to drive us apart from each other.  We can do this together!

Lorraine Kinsman

Principal, Eric Harvie School  

The Times of Our Lives...

 

"If I don’t belong, I don’t see why what I do or how I am will influence and impact others. 

So, I don’t really have an incentive to care...You can’t ask people to have a sense of mutuality 

and agency and to build the communities in human-centered schools if they don’t 

have the sense of belonging, the sense of relating, or the sense of being part of 

something bigger than themselves." 

- Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen, 

The Future of Smart: How Our Education System Needs to Change 

to Help All Young People Thrive 

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As our school grapples with building community and a sense of belonging in these days of 'fourth wave COVID-19 infections' that continue to restrict and limit possibilities for learning in a community, there are so many questions and concerns that are bubbling up almost every single day - worries about student achievement and learning after three years of pandemic impact, as well as worries about health and safety in these last few weeks before childhood vaccines are approved and available for 5-12 year olds.  If does feel like it is impossible to make decisions about anything that will last longer than a few days before something causes yet another change to process, product or organization. 

With that in the back of my mind, I spent some time recently considering the upcoming municipal election, the candidates that are running for the various positions - especially the school Trustee positions - and the referendum questions. I don't have any recommendations for the election, but a couple of things stood out for me - mention of traffic concerns in school zones, for example, as well as protection of wetland areas were issues that have been raised by our families and our learners over the past few years, so it is timely to see them at least surface on some election-related websites. These are issues that also impact our abilities to build community - from traffic around the school to conservation of the outdoor places where our students love to learn, creating a sense of belonging and community is never a straightforward or easy task.   

One issue that I did spend some time exploring was the question about establishing permanent daylight savings time. I had never given this much thought beyond not having to remember to either drop back or jump ahead with the clocks in my home twice a year.  As I began to read about the issue, I realized there were many different considerations - everything from circadian clocks to extended business opportunities to either increased or reduced traffic accidents, depending on which research I explored.  There was one fact that stood out for me as I tried to make sense of the issues: the fact that if the daylight savings referendum goes ahead, the sun will rise in December/January around 9:00 - 9:30 am - well after school has begun. The weeks in December when the sun currently rises at 8:20 - 8:30 am - usually just before winter break begins - are always challenging for schools as children are navigating streets and buses in the dark and safety concerns are prominent.  Extending that 'worry period' even longer than usual, and placing children in potentially greater jeopardy would not be something I would advocate. It is a consideration I had not been previously aware of before doing some rather extensive digging these past couple of weeks.  I would encourage families to do some research as well, before October 18th, into the time change question. 

As the effects of this pandemic endure, it is becoming increasingly clear humanity is shifting in its' values, relationships, perspectives and tolerances no matter where we live in the world. Nothing is the same and the possibilities - if they ever existed - of a 'somewhat return' to what used to be seem to fade more with each passing day that brings the unfolding of extremely complex issues and concerns. It appears COVID-19 is a multiple-layer, very complicated interruption with much greater long-term, continually evolving consequences than we ever imagined. In terms of schools and education, the challenges of building a vibrant, forward-thinking community of learners fully engaged in quality learning experiences have exponentially increased in complexity, even as the world continues to evolve and change with little regard for the immense pressures schools are under to both protect children's health and advance learning - two initiatives that often seem to be completely opposite in their intentions as well as their actions. 

The challenges are enormous - but I believe educators, learners, administrators are all more than up to meeting the challenges with vision, energy and innovation!

These are definitely the times of our lives - busy, demanding, constrained, unpredictable, layered with endless competing interests and shifting perspectives. As we continue our journeys with uncertainty, unpredictability and at least a little trepidation, I believe it will be imperative for us to hold relationships, belonging and community building as our guiding beacons, bringing us together in new connections and purpose.

"Up until this moment, the safest path was to give your kid what worked for you. 

I would argue that this generation of parents is probably the first one to have 

to deeply grapple with the fact that if you put your kid on the path that the

 conventional system gave most of us, it’s like walking down a

 sidewalk that’s crumbling towards you. The world is changing and 

what our children need to know and do in the world they will enter

 as young adults can’t be learned within the mainstream system of education. "

- - Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen, 

The Future of Smart: How Our Education System Needs to Change 

to Help All Young People Thrive 

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School

The Dilemmas of Pandemic Learning

        

   

"Times have changed. Our world has changed. Our jobs have changed. Just as jobs have evolved over the last 200 yers, so have the skills needed to thrive in a rapidly changing, complex world. Researchers agree that young people are going to need a wide range of skills to succeed in today's rapidly changing world - beyond just reading, writing, and arithmetic."  - People for Education 2020/21 Research Report 'The New Basics' Canada

"Future-ready students need to exercise agency, in their own education and throughout life. Agency implies a sense of responsibility to participate in the world and, in so doing, to influence people, events and circumstances for the better. Agency requires the ability to frame a guiding purpose and identify actions to achieve a goal.

"To help enable agency, educators must not only recognise learners’ individuality, but also acknowledge the wider set of relationships – with their teachers, peers, families and communities – that influence their learning. A concept underlying the learning framework is “co-agency” – the interactive, mutually supportive relationships that help learners to progress towards their valued goals. In this context, everyone should be considered a learner, not only students but also teachers, school managers, parents and communities." - OECD 2020/21 Report: The Future of Education and Skills - Education 2030

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One of the most challenging aspects of entering a third school year impacted by the pandemic is trying to stay aware of the future our students are still going to enter regardless of the implications and impact on learning that the pandemic might deposit in their lives, their feelings, their belief systems, their memories. 

It is so urgent to keep the students safe from viral transmissions - especially in this fourth wave of variants with child-age vaccines so tantalizingly imminent in our future. 

It is so urgent to remember they are learning for a lifetime, not just for this time of pandemic, and continue to lay a foundation of skills, understandings, ways of thinking that will need to serve them effectively in their very near future as well.

It is so urgent to sustain their opportunities to interact with others, to acknowledge 'their wider set of relationships' that influence their learning in so many positive ways, and open up the world for them to see, experience and learn.

It is so urgent to reduce their circle of contacts, to trace any transmissions, to isolate or quarantine, to keep them safe.

The balancing act of these dilemmas have not diminished through the three years of learning impacted by the pandemic. We have been online, we have been in person. We have masked and cohorted and been more virtual in our teaching and learning, our celebrating and sharing, than even the most forward-thinking educator might have ever envisioned for the years 2019-2020-2021. 

We have also sought strategies to keep our learners connected with each other, to focus on the learning, to remember the pandemic will fade one day but their need for skills, understandings, relationships, innovation, communicating and especially reading, writing and mathematical thinking will only proliferate, not diminish.

Every day educators around the world - as well as in our school - face the dilemmas of pandemic learning and try to find a way to creatively, virtually, in-person, in writing, in video, in action encourage and support students advancing their learning skills, improving their understandings, developing their skills.

 We seek a balancing point, a way to honour both intimidating demands - learn and be healthy; be healthy and learn. We share this balancing act with our families every day too as they attempt to make their best decisions about keeping children safe and keeping them learning as well.

Three school years - for some of our students, their entire academic career - have been interrupted, changed, disturbed, re-written, limited or enhanced by a pandemic situation no one in the world seemed to anticipate or be prepared for - even now, well into the third year of impact. 

Yet their life stories continue, their thirst to learn, to connect, to engage in developing their own agency - their own abilities to identify purpose in life and in learning, and to know how to move forward to achieve their goals remains tantalizingly fresh and real despite the discouraging spectre of the pandemic. And, as educators and as families, we must find ways to nurture that zest for life, that love of learning even as we try to find the metaphoric 'bubble wrap' needed to keep them all healthy and safe until learning in it's truest formats are completely accessible again.

They are learning from this pandemic too - learning to be resilient and flexible, learning to care for the common good, learning healthy strategies that will continue to carry them through life long after the pandemic threat has retreated to the history books. They are learning to be responsive to the situation, to communicate as clearly as possible, that big problems have multiple layers of possible solutions. That they can be part of the solution, not just intimidated by the problem. That something as small as a mask and as easy as hand washing can be a safety precaution, just as much as a helmet or a seatbelt might be in different circumstances.

These are not easy days and they seem to be becoming more challenging as each day passes. They are not easy days for our children either - the past two years of pandemic influences have clearly shown us the emotional toll, the mental-wellbeing exhaustion, the frustration and reduced interactions with each other have a significant impact on our children. They worry, they get weary, they forget what the world was and imagining what could be becomes a much-reduced possibility as they consider possibilities within a framework that has primarily offered them restrictions for as long as they can remember. 

Yet they are our future. 

Our children will need to be the changemakers that anticipate and are better prepared for world events like a pandemic in the years to come. They will need to imagine possibilities for interrupting climate change, restoring hope and peace in a world that has been tilted for a great deal of their lives.  And we, as educators and families, must be prepared to somehow continually nudge their learning while trying to find ways to keep them physically safe.

Such are the dilemmas of the pandemic - those that lead to sleep-interrupted nights, endless discussions as we puzzle through possibilities and weigh them from both points of view - the learning lens and the safety lens, trying to make best possible learning decisions for students in a world that has not known appropriate, spontaneous learning in many, many months. 

At EHS our goal is to continue to let the children lead the way, to keep as many avenues of learning and communication and relationship open as possible with safe learning continually holding fast as our first lens of consideration. 

An impossible task in an impossible time - yet we will persevere and be patient with a world that is not as familiar, not as comfortable, not as inviting as it was just three short years ago. 

Because we know this, too, shall pass. 

And the children will grow, create, innovate and change the world for the better. These children who are learning resilience, flexibility, shifting perspectives and learning platforms while wearing masks and balancing hula hoops - they are still finding ways to laugh and share and ask questions every single day. 

Dilemmas still yield the future. And the future is always full of promise and possibility.

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal, Eric Harvie School 

Let Learning Lead the Way into the 2021-22 School Year

       

"In my language the word for education is Akinomaagewin. When you break down the word - 'aki' means earth and 'no' or 'nong' means stars or sky world. So our word for education is the study of the earth and sky world."

- Dominic H.K. Beaudry

As this new school year begins, fraught as it is with an overwhelming feeling of deja vu and great insecurities about in-person learning without the presence of vaccinations for children, it is vitally important from my perspective that we return to our centre point for schools and explore the questions that have grounded our teaching and learning every other year of my career in education:

         Why do we have schools? 

Who learns here?  

How do we learn in a way that keeps our children as safe as possible?

How do we make learning as engaging as possible?

How do we meet the learning needs of all our students?

Last year, as the pandemic truly unfolded around us in an enormous bloom of anxiety, fear, exhaustion, questions and very few answers, we worked very hard as a staff to generate and sustain a safe learning environment that made sense to our learners as learners. We did not want the children in our school to look back on the 2020-21 school year and remember the year that:

       -  we were all forced to stay in one room

-  in one chair all year 

- the year we had to distance from each other all the time 

- the year we were always wearing masks

 - the year we didn't get to have Peace Assemblies or field trips or artists 

- the year we didn't get to swim

- the year we didn't get to have Choir

- the year we didn't get to have concerts

- the year the grade 4 kids didn't get to celebrate moving on to Middle School

So we focused on what we COULD do for learning regardless of all the other restrictions. And we were delighted with the students' great interest and investment in our Coulee School venture, as well as our grade 4 students' amazing work on our first art installation '5 Years of Learning Together' on the front of our school. 2020-21 will be, we hope, etched forever in our students' memories as the year we did Coulee School and the year we created the first 5-Year mural. In perusing our newly released 2020-21 EHS School Yearbook, it is astonishing to re-visit all the learning that did take place in our building despite quite significant restrictions - one of the many reasons I love our Yearbook:)

And now we find ourselves knocking on the door of school year 2021-22, opening the door with a fair bit of hesitation on another year of unknown and unexpected events still heavily shadowed by the pandemic. 

We learned a lot from our experiences last year - how strong we were as a learning community, how creative we could be even in the face of great adversities, how much we were willing to invest in truly caring for each other in multiple ways as we continued to build peaceful communities together. We also learned we needed each other - as humanity always does - despite our genuine fears and challenges. 

We are meeting the challenges of this new school year with a different perspective. 

We matter to each other. 

We matter - each of us.

Our school wide peace book that we have all read to inspire us to continue to invest in each other even though the messages of the world seem to cry 'distance! distance!' from every corner, is called "You Matter" by Christian Robinson.  It is helping us remember we matter to ourselves and to each other and will guide our connectedness this school year.

As will learning. 

We are working with our Artist, Rebecca Ellison, to complete two more murals for the front of the school. We are expanding our experiences in Coulee School back to Glenbow Ranch Park. We are looking forward and letting learning lead the way.  The pandemic and it's inherent restrictions will not define the learning experiences of our children as we 'study of the earth and sky world.' 

Learning will lead our way through the 2021-22 school year and we are excited to invite you to join the journey with us - virtually, in-person, in writing and in experiences!

Lorraine Kinsman

Principal 

See You in September - Part 2

 

"Students who thrived in the remote environment during the pandemic demonstrated competencies such as critical thinking, creativity, resilience, independence as learners, self-regulation, cognitive flexibility and perseverance. 

These are the attributes that are noted as critical for future employability across industries and geographies."   - (Fullan, Quinn, Drummy & Gardiner, 2020) 

In this final blog entry for the school year 2020-21, I am going to explore elements of academic achievement and school organization through the lens of pandemic implications on the experiences of children, as a strategy for considering learning in our school in the 2021-22 school year. Even as we contemplate possibilities for opening up schools again, there is an inherent layer of anxiety and concern that permeates every consideration, every plan, every decision. 

Academic Achievement 

An interesting element of cohorted and online learning has been that student achievement was impacted negatively for the most part - except for students who were already motivated to work digitally or in solitude, while students were often doing their very best, they were also very isolated and restricted in movements and conversations. Without the 'just in time' guidance of the teacher, there were significant impediments for students to demonstrate their own learning and understanding of new concepts and to receive the support needed to ensure learning was focused and on track.

Data from the Reimagining Education 2020 fall investigation into the global impact of the pandemic revealed that more than 98% of participating students indicated they preferred personalized learning opportunities with a teacher rather than automation. "Personalization is among the most effective means for accelerating academic and cognitive growth," the report noted, explaining further that "students want to be be creative and believe they learn more when they have greater voice and choice and receive personalized feedback."

As we explored the overall achievement of our students at Eric Harvie School through this pandemic year, we were intrigued by many of the findings. Overall, our students' achievement levels did not shift significantly through the 2020-21 school year, likely as a result of the stability of our in-person learning environment overall. 

Students generally achieved a similar success ratio to what we have consistently achieved in our previous four years across most curricular areas, with slight variations downward in applying new thinking in novel situations (an expected outcome of being constrained primarily to the building and to particular classrooms for much of the school year).  Areas where we really focused - like teaching writing - were where students generally demonstrated the greatest overall levels of improvement, while students demonstrated a slight deterioration in social/emotional stability as the year progressed (as expressed through our pre and post wellness school surveys). Since these levels began high (with almost 90% of students expressing feelings of safety and happiness at school in November), declining to approximately 86% in June is noteworthy but not disconcerting. 

The interesting factor for us as teachers results from the more traditional approach we had to take to classroom-based instruction this past school year. With students cohorted closely with each other and their classroom teacher, we were not able to regroup for instruction based on personalized learning needs, nor were we able to offer the same level of personalized supports such as SPARK, Calm, Zones, HeartMath, etc. that we typically offer students to help them learn to self-regulate and be prepared for learning. Children did not work as collaboratively as they usually would, were confined to specific learning spaces and unable to make use of the Learning Commons or Maker Space, for example. While, in a usual school year we would anticipate overall improvement in most curricular areas with respect to whole-school learning achievement, 2020-21 maintained the status-quo in terms of achievement levels for the most part.   

There are many factors at play here - this was the most extraordinary year of teaching and learning any of us have ever experienced and we don't want to read too much into the data we have collected. Instead, we are going to look to the fall as a time where we will re-establish our school goals towards developing a strong learners' toolkit of skills that will support students to wonder, investigate, problem solve, pose questions, represent their thinking and work collaboratively in a peaceful community. 

We are going to focus on student learning - meeting any and all students where they are at, rather than where we might expect them to be as they enter their 'next grade level'.  With students returning to in-school learning from a variety of situations - Hub School, CBE-Learn, Home Schooling, interrupted learning due to extended isolations or quarantines and online learning, as well as possibly entering grade 1 without any Kindergarten experiences, or entering Kindergarten without preschool experiences, we fully appreciate every child is going to be coming to school with a highly varied set of previous learning experiences and levels of achievement. We will be establishing our teaching to reflect these realities.

And, our direct and simple mission for the 2021-22 school year will be to "successfully meet learners where they are and support them to achieve academic success through collaborative teaching and learning opportunities.'  These opportunities will continue to be offered through the lenses of peace education, place-based learning and design thinking, as they always have in our school.  This is not new work to us at EHS; it is more a matter of accommodating small differences to reach the highest potential of every student. 

 "Going forward the learning process must foster these competencies through authentic, relevant learning that provides voice, choice and agency to learners.  This necessitates a new role for teachers; one in which they are activators of learning; practitioners who can differentiate task, time and space to meet student needs and include them as co-designers of that learning."  - (Fullan, Quinn, Drummy & Gardiner, 2020) 

School Organization

There is no doubt the school's organization will be much different in the fall than it was this past pandemic year, and different again from how we were organized previous to the pandemic. Not only has the pandemic shaped our most recent experiences, the budget constraints have also generated a much changed landscape for our school as we anticipate returning to in-person learning in the fall of 2021.

To begin with, we no longer have a Physical Education Specialist to plan and offer our PE program with and for students. This will fall to the classroom teachers as elementary generalists. And our Music program is being re-imagined as a Fine Arts program with greater emphasis on integrating Music into the overall daily learning of every student. While our beloved Music teacher, Mrs. Coulson, will still be with us, her work with students and in classrooms will look and sound much changed from what it has in the past - we are looking forward to this exciting and energizing way of bridging learning through Music, Dram, Art, Dance across all curricular areas as it makes sense for our learners.

The school will be organized differently as well. There will be six grade 3/4 classes, all housed in one hallway (the HOPE hallway), to facilitate greater access to re-grouping and collaborative projects as we strive to personalize and meet the needs of every learner. There will be 3 team teaching teams of Grade 3/4 teachers to facilitate this work. The Grade 1/2 team will also consist of six grade 1/2 classes as well, all housed in the PEACE hallway, for the same reasons. With considerably less support staff, all extra support for learning will need to come from classroom teachers who will be working collaboratively to plan, instruct and support every learner from wherever they are in their learning journey.

We will teach curriculum of course, but most importantly, we will be teaching children through the curriculum to ensure they are able to progress and grow from wherever they are when they arrive at school in September, 2021 to the highest level of achievement they are best able to attain by June of 2022.  And our learning will be designed to support each child as much as possible with a highly reduced number of staff, understanding as we do that deep learning is what ensures children will be able to progress in life successfully.

 "Deep learning experiences are those that produce learning that sticks for life. They are both profoundly personalized and student-centered and are intrinsically motivating for students as they pursue topics that are real interest to them, have authentic meaning, and are more rigorous. These learning experiences make students want to persist and to succeed. 

This combination of autonomy, belonging and meaningful work inspires students. When students are invited to demonstrate their learning differently, and when learning environments include all students as contributors and change agents, they begin to develop a sense of efficacy. 

Relationships and engagement - the gatekeepers of learning - are emphasized in this learner-centered model. Voice, choice, and agency are central to deep learning." (Fullan, Quinn, Drummy & Gardiner, 2020) 

We are excited about the possibilities even during these times of great reduction and change. Education is a changing profession and CBE has a long history of changing successfully to meet the demands of society, of children, of families. As part of the CBE family of schools, Eric Harvie staff look forward to welcoming all our learners on September 1, 2021 for an exciting and much different year of learning experiences!  We are very proud of the work we have accomplished this school year - #CouleeSchool and our beautiful 5th anniversary Mural stand as amazing examples of what we were able to accomplish with our students even during huge pandemic constraints and we know our children will soar next year as well :)

"Education doesn't need to be reformed - it needs to be transformed. the key is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions."  - Sir Ken Robinson 

See you all in September!  Best wishes for a safe and relaxing summer!

Lorraine Kinsman, Principal

Eric Harvie School