1. AIM – French programs (Possibly using this to teach Callan French at home and gain experience using it that I could put on my resume)

2. Intensive French programs versus Immersion programs

Teacher Inquiry Defined_dana_ch_1Mr. Greaves gave us a tour of the Aberdeen Hall campus today. We are having to adjust what would normally be planned for school visits because of the current Teacher job action that is happening in BC. All of these factor happening together is having a pretty profound effect on my teaching philosophy and who I am as a teacher. I realized how much I really value the public school system and how much I want to work towards improving it. It has also made me realize how politicized education is. Everything about education is politicized. Jane Squair asked Mr. Greaves today if they had a trades program at their university and he said no (almost with a laugh). Why? Because it is a university preparatory school and it is very elitist. Parents who send their kids to this school can afford to to so and as Mr. Greaves said “they are looking for a more liberal arts education… trades is not their focus… parents who send their kids to this school want their kids to enter a profession”. I don’t like the fact that the parents of these kids are choosing to separate their kids from other kids. I feel that separating well-off kids from the majority of kids is not good for society as a whole. I firmly believe that all canadian children should go through public schools and that public schools should be held to a higher standard than they are now. Why does Christy Clark, the premier of our province choose to send her son to a private school? Does she not believe that he will receive a good education in the public system? I am not going to argue that the facility (Aberdeen campus) was beautiful and has a lot of good things going for it, but why can’t our government make this kind of education possible for all BC students with more funding and smaller class sizes?

Teacher Inquiry:
At the same time that I am thinking about my visit today to Aberdeen Hall, I am reading about teacher inquiry and it got me thinking about something that Mr. Greaves said today about his pet peeve, new teachers who ask him about professional development opportunities. He said that he thinks that new teachers have just spent 5 years or more essentially in professional development after they leave university to find jobs. He said that he doesn’t think that they need more professional development, they need teacher experience. They also need to ask about opportunities to work with other teachers, to have other teachers observe them teach and give them feedback. It seems to me that experience matters a lot more to Mr. Greaves (and probably other school principals looking to hire new teachers). I think that this relates to the article that I am presently reading about teacher inquiry because Mr. Greaves said that he has teachers at his school lead their own professional development and track it themselves through their own inquiry and I agree with this:

“As a teacher-inquirer in charge of your own learning, you become part of a larger struggle in education – the struggle to better understand, inform, shape, reshape, and reform standard school practice (Cochran-Smith, 1991). Teacher inquiry differs from traditional professional development for teachers, which has typically focussed on the knowledge of an outside “expert” being shared with a group of teachers. This traditional model of professional growth, usually delivered as part of traditional staff development, may appear an efficient method of disseminating information, but often does not result in real and meaningful change in the classroom.”

I think this is exactly what Mr. Greaves was getting at, and I completely agree. I think that he is ahead of the traditional model of professional development. Instead of focussing on Professional Development days for his teachers, he has someone who meets with each teacher once every 2 months, he said, to talk about their professional development inquiry process.

“Inquiry ultimately emerges as action and results in change.”