Education Minister Stephen Lecce said it is about more than just teaching students how to sign their own name.
Ontario’s new language curriculum, set to be in place for the new school year, introduces a host of changes, including a renewed focus on phonics. Many of the curriculum additions can be traced back to a report last year from the Ontario Human Rights Commission, which said the province’s public education system was failing students with reading disabilities and others by not using evidence-based approaches.
“If we want to boost reading instruction, we have to embrace some of those time-tested strategies that have worked for generations,” Lecce said.
“I think it is long overdue,” said Shelley Stagg Peterson, a curriculum, teaching and learning professor at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
“The computer will not take that over.”
“You even need more than just to buy the resources and have it on the curriculum,” Roessingh said.
“Teachers have to understand why it’s been introduced and that it’s important and why it’s important and really buy in, and then they need the support and the resources to do the job.”
The four major teachers’ unions have slammed the timing of the new language curriculum, being made available for teachers to learn for September with less than two weeks before this school year ends.
The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario has said the changes are vast and is calling for a minimum two-year implementation period.
“The province’s expectation that educators will be ready to teach the overhauled language curriculum beginning this September is absurd,” ETFO president Karen Brown wrote in a statement.
“Their rushed rollout proves just how out of touch they are with classroom and educator realities. Curriculum documents aren’t recipes. You don’t simply download them and follow the instructions, using a list of prescribed ingredients. Curriculum is complex.”
Lecce said the government signalled changes to the language curriculum last year, after the human rights commission report was published.
“If we work together as we have for the last year ... to embrace this change and to build that capacity, I’m absolutely confident that educators will be set up for success,” he said.