Learning from Each Other — Destreaming Across Ontario: Waterloo District School Board
In a recent post “Pathway to De-streaming: Levelling the Stacked Deck Requires Hard Work and Proper Support,” Tianna Thompson highlights the shortfalls the Ontario government’s structural and financial support for destreaming arguing it will result in “inconsistent outcomes across the province” (Thompson, 2022).
In their blog, Thompson calls for:
- “Smaller class sizes to support students with more personalized learning needs;
- “Equipping teachers and administrators with the correct tools and professional development to support student needs;
- And, a provincial task force to “inform the design, implementation and monitoring of de-streaming across the province” (Thompson, 2022).
My observation of destreaming this year confirms Thompson’s concerns. Without small class sizes, adequate tools, guided professional development, and a task force to support with design, implementation and monitoring, many schools and boards have been plugging holes rather than cultivating relationships and learning communities to innovate and troubleshoot.
Thompson provides one example of this in the TDSB, which reduced class sizes without additional funding by reallocating resources from Student Success. Other boards and schools are mitigating challenges in a similar vein, some removing students who are struggling in a de-streamed class and placing them in student success classes, others reallocating guidance sections to teaching sections to mitigate the number of students requiring additional support.
While these strategies are salvaging credits, they are not addressing the problem — the lack of funding and guidance for rollout. We need to cultivate relationships and learning communities to innovate and troubleshoot, despite lack of provincial support.
The following is an example of one board’s innovation, and will be the first of a series that highlights best practices across Ontario.
The Waterloo District School Board
I have been following Lisa Hicknell & Jillian Waters’ Bitesized Learning on Twitter for some time now and I am always amazed at their insight, innovation and their willingness to share resources and best practices. As Consultants in the Teaching and Learning division of their board, they have been working alongside many others in the implementation of destreaming beginning with the launch of MTH1W in the WRDSB.
I log onto the GMeet and Jill is already there. She is sitting in what looks like a large, bright classroom. She smiles warmly. Lisa joins a moment later. They exchange informal hellos — clearly in-sync, a ritual that has developed over frequent daily interactions.
I thank them for taking the time to meet before launching into a flurry of questions and challenges I have observed this year including large class sizes, cognitive overload of teachers & teacher-buy in, lack of time for PD, concerns around MLLs transitioning into de-streamed classrooms without additional support or scaffolding in the form of sheltered or L classes.
They are unphased — it is obvious they have heard these concerns before and they reassure me they have also experienced challenges and they begin to share their approach and process for mitigating challenging circumstances.
“One thing our board did was create 5 itinerant math teacher-coach positions to support teaching MTH1W. The itinerant teachers each taught 2 sections of MTH1W (one per semester). They used their section to model instructional strategies and techniques, and allocated the rest of their time to support other MTH1W classes” (personal correspondence with Lisa Hicknell and Jillian Waters, Bitesized Learning, June 2, 2022).
I think about this model & how it enables coaching to be rooted in first-hand experience and responsive to context.
Lisa echoes this thought, and explains that the itinerant teachers were able to invite other MTH educators into their classrooms to model thinking classroom approaches and strategies that provide access to a wide continuum of math learners. These visits also allowed teachers to notice the itinerants instructional moves and identify where they’d like to make some shifts of their own.
“The idea for the itinerant model came from a stakeholders group that met regularly to discuss de-streaming implementation. This group included teachers, department heads, Superintendents, the central team and principals”, explains Jill.
Many of these stakeholders, as well as Board Trustees, were also invited to observe Itinerant classrooms to witness first hand the impact the role was having on the system.
In reflecting on impact, Lisa shares that there have been conversations around revisiting what success means and moving away from a reliance on big data. Inviting stakeholders into classrooms to speak with teachers and students allowed them to gather the type of quantitative data that really matters. It humanizes the process.
Jill and Lisa are referring to Street Data: A Next-Generation Model for Equity, Pedagogy, and School Transformation (2021) and have used the principles from the book to inform the rollout and gather feedback from the process. Street Data cautions against current fixations on “big data” in favour of “rebuild[ing] the system from the student up — with classrooms, schools and systems built around students’ brilliance, cultural wealth and intellectual potential” (Street Data).
By creating itinerant teaching/coaching positions, the WDSB has been able to gather real-time feedback from students and teachers in classrooms instead of from achievement data and integrate ongoing feedback into responsive planning.
“The central team designed a board-wide survey for MTH1W students to learn from students’ perceptions about math and their experiences of learning math in the classroom. This approach helps to inform PD and support for students. The important data here is on students’ experiences of learning math, and less on traditional measures of achievement such as grades or EQAO scores” (Hicknell & Waters, June 2, 2022).
These practices situate student experience at the center of the rollout and foster responsiveness and collaboration among teachers.
I bring up the challenge of PD in the time of COVID for teachers.
“How do you create receptivity and time for collaboration for teachers teaching destreamed courses?”
“There were voluntary opportunities for staff to participate in PD after school or during the summer. We hosted a voluntary learning series for MTH teachers last year and another for Science this year. Additionally, we hosted a Summer Math institute in August as well. To further support the implementation of MTH 1W, we had a summer writing team that created resources. These resources have been used throughout the year by teachers at many sites,” responds Jill.
Teachers are often provided with release time during the school year (paid for by boards) to learn and collaborate, but this presents a number of administrative challenge as teachers are then absent from their classes (which means students are often missing important instruction/support and consistency), administrators have to find supply teachers to cover release time (which has been a huge challenge this year with COVID — many school boards are hiring emergency EAs and teachers who are not qualified), and teachers have been reluctant to commit to release days as they have to prepare additional lessons for their classes when they are already beyond overwhelmed.
“It’s important to also note that the Summer Math Institute was open to all teachers and focused on cultivating teaching practices and instructional routines that are conducive to the destreamed classroom. We didn’t tell teachers what to teach, instead, we had Peter Lildijahl run sessions on his Building Thinking Classrooms to support teachers to learn routines that support the process. Additionally, many WRDSB educators ran sessions. ”
After the GMeet with Jill and Lisa, I begin to think about how the WDSB’s rollout for MTH1W has, despite funding constraints and lack of provincial guidance, has created the groundwork for de-streaming success:
They have structured coaching positions so they are rooted in a de-streamed classroom to provide a space for modelling, collaboration and responsiveness to emergent issues — facilitating a feedback process of “data from the ground-up.”
They have created a stakeholder committee including board trustees, superintendents, de-streaming leads, and others, and invited all stakeholders to observe itinerant teachers’ classrooms. This has allowed for decision-making to be based on observations of student experience and emergent issues — this feedback loop is student-centered & responsive.
They have orchestrated inclusive board-wide summer PD that incentivizes teachers through pay, and that focuses on developing instructional moves and thinking routines rather than lesson creation — moving away from a PD experience that is prescriptive to descriptive & focuses on collaboration and co-learning.
I think about how we might apply some of these learnings to other destreamed contexts, and begin to reflect more on thinking routines as our destreamed planning committee is set to meet again this week.
Destreamed Planning: Cross-Curricular Thinking Routines for the De-Streamed Classroom
Project Zero defines “Thinking routines” as learned systems and sequences that help us to interpret and process the world around us. Using thinking routines cultivate “thinking dispositions” which are key to for activating learning across contexts. In practice, thinking routines are “short, engaging patterns of intellectual behaviour that are highly transferable across contexts…designed to be easy to use, easy to remember, easy to transfer and to be vividly effective when used on a wide variety of topics” (“Thinking Dispositions”, Project Zero).
Project Zero notes that, “[when] thinking routines are used frequently in instruction, across subject and topics, students will learn to use these routines as a matter of course. In other words, they will develop the habit of engaging in the patterns of thinking the routines promote “(Project Zero).
Currently, de-streamed planning are meeting by discipline, but I wonder about shifting to an interdisciplinary model and moving from“lesson creation” to developing a interdisciplinary toolbox of “thinking routines.”
Developing an interdisciplinary “thinking routines toolbox” will engage teachers in a cross-curricular exploration of thinking routines & to share best practices.
A thinking routine toolbox is also descriptive rather than prescriptive — it can provide schools, departments and teachers with autonomy as to which routines might work for a specific context, lesson or topic (see poster below for some cooperative learning routines).
Schools, departments, or classrooms could determine which thinking routines to focus on depending on site-specific issues, and also take a scaffolded approach to how they want to roll them out to limit teacher and student overwhelm. For example, a site with many MLLs could choose to experiment with two or three routines that embed specific literacy instruction and scaffolding and try them across different grade 9 de-streamed courses.
Instead of students spending brain power deciphering different instructions and routines for each class, students would be exposed to the same (or similar) routines across classes, making content easier to access.
Without adequate financial and structural support from the Ford government for de-streaming, it is imperative to engage in collaborative work across boards to determine best practices for design and rollout. I am optimistic that if we continue to work together and learn from each other, we can create a context where destreaming is successful.
