Riverview High teacher part of global conversation on bringing change into classrooms
Depending on what time of day you’re reading this, Armand Doucet is either teaching history to students at Riverview High School, prepping for the Spanish-language launch of his first book or shuttling his kids between activities. That’s a lot for most of us but for Armand that’s just a typical Thursday.
Over the past few years Armand has built an international following for his thoughts on how to integrate new teaching methods such as design thinking and personalized learning into a typical classroom.
This month saw the release of his second book, Teaching Life: Our Calling, Our Choices, Our Challenges (Routledge), which combines his personal experiences as a teacher in New Brunswick with research and interviews with high-performing teachers and education experts from around the world.
Thanks to a recommendation from our mutual friend David Alston, I’ve been along for the ride, helping Armand craft his story as his editor on both his books.
Teaching Life is part of Routledge’s Leading Change Series, which is edited by education heavyweights Andy Hargreaves (Boston College/University of Ottawa) and Pak Tee Ng (National Institute of Education, Singapore) and features other books by world-leading education researchers such as Dennis Shirley, Michael Fullan, Karen Edge, Pasi Sahlberg and Alma Harris.
These are the experts Armand himself has turned to over the years, reading their books, watching their videos and listening to them at conferences as he has gone about building and improving his professional practice, just like hundreds of other New Brunswick teachers.
But as Andy Hargreaves told Armand and I last fall, what was missing from the global conversation was a book that critically analyzed the pedagogical research from the perspective of a practitioner. What Andy wanted was to hear a teacher’s voice.
And so Armand has delivered.
“The past decade has been peppered with new education models, pedagogies, policies and assessments — all emanating from the top without much regard for how it will impact teachers in the classroom. Often these changes are introduced with little to no engagement with individual teachers, who are frustrated at the lack of consensus on how to progress. This is what we talk about in our staff rooms,” he writes.
“We do not want to read another study or attend another policy seminar that speaks of change as something that awaits us somewhere in the future, or which will be delivered by a distant government directive. We are no longer content to make incremental adjustments that leave the backbone of the system untouched. We are impatient with procrastination, lamenting that the day is fast approaching when superficial efforts will be insufficient to maintain pace with the needs of society. This is what I and my colleagues around the world experience in our classrooms: well-intentioned policy and curriculum changes driven from the top with no rationalization or explanation for our classrooms.”
Armand journey from Riverview High School to international stages began back in 2014 when he did something quite remarkable. That year a parent nominated him for what was then a fairly new international award, the Varkey Foundation’s $1-million Global Teacher Prize. He didn’t make the Top 50 shortlist but Armand was curious. Drawing on his background in sales and marketing, Armand tapped into his personal and local business networks and raised enough money to enable him to fly out to Dubai in March 2015 to attend the Global Skills and Education Forum, the Varkey Foundation’s annual conference.
“ At the Forum I met and spoke with government officials, wealthy philanthropists and people from international NGOs (non-governmental organizations) interested in systems change. It was quite a rush and I decided I wanted to be a part of this global conversation,” writes Armand in Teaching Life.
He’s been going back to the Forum ever since, making the Global Teacher Prize Top 50 shortlist in 2017, which brought him into a global community of educators doing amazing things all over the world. From that experience Armand and five of his Top 50 colleagues — Jelmer Evers (the Netherlands), Elisa Guerra (Mexico), Nadia Lopez (New York, USA), Michael Soskil (Pennsylvania, USA) and Koen Timmers (Belgium) — to co-author Teaching in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Standing at the Precipice, a reflection of the conversations they were having with our peers.
That book has become an international hit and is heading into its second printing. Its success led Routledge to ask Armand to write his own book.
“I have been lucky enough over the last few years to be part of various global teacher networks, which has given me the opportunity to grow and to speak with researchers, business leaders, politicians and community leaders who are invested in finding a way forward. It has enabled me to reflect on the meaning of education to me,” writes Armand.
“I know my professional experiences are not the norm and I find this deeply troubling. My experiences should not be the exception; they should be the norm. I firmly believe that teachers can and should spearhead change in our education systems but they cannot do this working in isolation. They must be encouraged and trained in how to share, collaborate, lead and communicate as master teachers networking with others in order to scale best practices and models in their classrooms, schools and districts.
“This book examines how to do that in service to driving global change, from the classroom up.”
Lisa Hrabluk is a writer and owner of Wicked Ideas Media. Find me on Wicked Ideas’ Facebook page or on my personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts.
School Works is a solutions journalism project and partnership between Wicked Ideas and the New Brunswick Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (EECD).
