Alberta's curriculum implementation gets a failing grade

The headline-grabbing controversies over the Silk Road, Mart Kenney and the elimination of dinosaurs may have subsided, but teachers’ professional concerns about Alberta’s new curriculum have not yet been resolved. The government’s recent decision to proceed with the implementation of even more curriculum, despite the concerns of teachers, should worry all Albertans.

Alberta’s K–3 teachers have been working with the new math, English language arts and literature (ELAL) and physical education and wellness (PEW) curricula for six months. Unlike the government, the Alberta Teachers’ Association has been listening to these teachers, and their message is clear—this curriculum is failing.

Teachers report that the rollout of the new curriculum has been rushed, resources are scant, content is poorly sequenced and outcomes are overloaded. As a result, students are struggling.

The math curriculum is the main source of concern. In a recent survey of our members, 62 per cent of K–3 teachers said they were dissatisfied with the new curriculum, and only 26 per cent reported being satisfied with it. The feedback is equally bad for the PEW curriculum and only slightly better for the ELAL curriculum.

“The new curriculum will leave huge gaps in students’ learning in math,” reported one teacher. “The content is very difficult, and everything from a grade above has now been moved to a grade below, so there will be huge gaps and a lot of stress and no increased improvement in math.”

Teachers feel overwhelmed and unsupported by the government. Furthermore, although their concerns are professionally well founded and rooted in what’s best for their students, they feel ignored despite the government’s insistence that it is listening.

Teachers’ anxiety about the state of curriculum implementation has been compounded now that the government has announced additional implementation in Grades 4–6 and the addition of new curriculum in science, French and French immersion language arts. These new subjects have been piloted for only a few months, in a very small number of classrooms. The feedback we have received on this pilot tells us that more work needs to be done before the curriculum is ready to be used with your children.

This is too much, all at once. Ultimately, the prospect of yet another hasty curriculum implementation will be too much for students and teachers. In the face of inadequate funding supports and the largest class sizes in the nation, our teachers need time to help students with their mental health and pandemic-exacerbated learning gaps. The last thing we need is another unsupported curriculum to implement.

I would prefer to avoid hyperbole, but this really is a recipe for disaster, and those most affected by it will be our students.

There is a way forward, however, when it comes to curriculum development and implementation:

1. Pause implementation for now. Allow K–3 teachers more time to refine the ELAL and math curricula before introducing more subjects or more grades to this chaotic mix.

2. Listen to teachers who are currently teaching the curriculum. Use clear and transparent processes to gather their comprehensive feedback.

3. Bring teachers back to the table for curriculum writing. Create working groups of active K–3 teachers to review their colleagues’ feedback and revise the curriculum documents.

4. Provide more time and professional learning opportunities to better support teachers through implementation.

5. Work with school boards and publishers to develop an array of classroom-ready resources that support student learning and are available to all teachers.

6. Build a better plan for how teachers will be fully engaged and supported as curriculum development and implementation are expanded to other grades and subjects. Before 2010, curriculum development and implementation went on in this province without significant fanfare or concern. Long-standing processes were used again and again with various subjects and grade levels to ensure success. It worked well. We do not need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to re-embrace the principles and processes that work.

This chaos began when the government tried to do things so dramatically different. The first step was pushing teachers out of the room because it was felt that their input wasn’t needed.

It’s clear now that teacher input was not only needed but essential for implementation to be successful. Without it, we must give this curriculum implementation a failing grade.

Jason Schilling is the president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association and a teacher from southern Alberta.