WHY NOT REWRITE CURRICULUM IN SMALL, MANAGEABLE CHUNKS?

The biggest problem with Alberta's draft K-6 school curriculum?

It's not what you think it is. It's not the raging controversy over what we should teach kids in social studies, or even in math.

Instead, our fundamental problem is our over-ambitious, all-or-nothing approach.

Three successive Alberta governments having tried to rewrite the entire curriculum all at once.

Ed Stelmach and Alison Redford's Progressive Conservatives and Rachel Notley's New Democrats both tried and both failed. Now Jason Kenney's United Conservatives appear to be on the same path.

This approach is doomed to failure. If there's any major controversy around any one part of a new proposed curriculum, it ends up stalling, then derailing desperately needed fixes in other areas, such as in computer science.

For two decades leading Alberta computer scientists have pushed hard for better computer science education in our schools, especially in the earliest grades.

“This is foundational knowledge that our children need to be successful in the future, and that's why it's being integrated (into K-12 schools) across the globe,” said University of Alberta professor Cathy Adams.

In 2018, Adams and her group pushed for and got computer science concepts into the NDP'S K-6 draft curriculum.

But that NDP curriculum process crashed over controversies around math and social studies education. The UCP vowed to axe the entire NDP curriculum and did so.

Adams and her group were frustrated, knowing that Alberta students were already falling behind other students around the world.

“It's a tragedy for our children,” Adams said.

“This is such an important moment but we still haven't made it out of the gate.”

The computer scientists next went to work with the UCP.

It's now putting forward a K-6 program for computer science similar to what the NDP had.

But the NDP vows to axe the entire UCP curriculum, mainly over the controversial social studies curriculum.

Curriculum writing doesn't have to be this way. In fact, it never used to be this way.

Twenty years ago, when Alberta was still a world leading school jurisdiction in science and language (where we still do well) but also in math (where we have cratered), governments used to rewrite the curriculum one or two subject areas at a time. About once every decade or so, each major subject area was updated.

But in 2010, that all changed. A group of university professors and education consultants gained a huge amount of influence with Stelmach's government.

They pushed the idea of transforming Alberta's education system all at once.

The plan was to institute an educational model based on discovery learning, where students learn through discovery and experience, generally by working at their own pace as they engage in project and group work, with teachers acting not as instructors but as guides.

“We're transforming education,” the government said in its public relations campaign for this shift. “We're changing the way we think. Because everything is changing. So we're changing everything.”

Whatever the merit of this school of education, it certainly didn't lack for grandiose ambition. To be fair, inquiry-based learning is an established and often successful style of learning, especially when it's used with mature students who already have a large base of foundational knowledge. But there's no evidence that the discovery approach is an effective way to teach arithmetic to young children.

In the face of deep public distress about Alberta's crashing math results and distrust over the direction of its curriculum transformation, the Stelmach/ Redford era reforms stalled.

But the ambitious approach to rewriting the curriculum all at once lived on with the NDP, then the UCP.

What to do?

When any future government gets to work on the grades 7 to 12 curriculum, how about again rolling out the subject areas one or two at a time, not all at once?

As for this K-6 curriculum, the proposed changes in social studies evidently need a lot of work. Why not put those on the back burner? All of our school boards can then run pilot projects this fall in math, computer science and literacy skills.

I note the Kenney government is already saying that school boards don't have to run pilot projects on each part of the curriculum.

In the legislature this week, the UCP Children's Services Minister Rebecca Schulz said, “School divisions can opt to pilot all or some of the draft curriculum subjects. For example, they could pilot math or just language arts.”

Here we have a reasonable way forward.

Given the desperate need to fix math education and jumpstart computer science in K-6, it would be irresponsible not to proceed.