School’s Almost Over for Summer, But These Courses Will Entice Teachers to Hit the Books

The school year is over for children. For many teachers, however, summer is an excellent period to delve into deeper professional learning that is difficult to fit in during the year.

Instead of relaxing on the beach, some teachers are spending their time thinking about the impact of AI on education or delving into different approaches to teaching literacy.

Teachers tell us about three courses taking place this summer that cover these topics and aim to expand the content of teachers’ toolboxes.

AI 101 for Teachers

Elizabeth Saville spends a lot of time at schools advising students during their internships. She keeps hearing one topic among teachers: how do we deal with artificial intelligence?

The lecturer and PhD candidate at UBC Okanagan has seen a range of responses, from teachers declaring that AI is “useless to me in the classroom” to others asking, “How can we support students if we don’t know how to use it ourselves?”

That’s why she created a new asynchronous online course, similar to an AI 101 for teachers. “We need to help teachers develop these AI literacy skills so that they can help their students develop those AI literacy skills,” she said from the UBC Okanagan campus in Kelowna, BC.

Saville designed AI for Educators: Transforming Teaching and Learning to give participants a good understanding of generative AI and explore how it can be a tool for planning and instruction, and to highlight important ethical and privacy issues that teachers should be aware of.

AI isn’t going away and students are using ChatGPT whether it’s allowed or not, she noted. She said it is important to teach young people about the ethics of using this new tool and the critical thinking needed to analyze what emerges.

“Students don’t just know how to think critically. Students don’t necessarily know how to identify bias,” Saville said, noting that care is needed in this area.

“This isn’t just some Wild West, ‘take it to the classroom and do with it what you want’ [situation]… My course involves looking critically at the tool itself and trying to figure out what are the limitations of that tool and how can it be used for good? How can it be used for evil?”

A different approach to teaching children to read

In Ontario, Additional Qualifications (AQ) are courses that teachers take to delve deeper into a particular field or specialty.

At Trent University, there is a lot of interest in the school’s Reading AQ courses in Peterborough, Ontario, which revolve around reviewing Ontario’s revamped language arts curriculum and discussing the Science of Reading – a collection of research into how children learn to read that attracts people from fields such as linguistics, psychology and neuroscience.

Teachers, vice-principals, principals and even the occasional principal have signed up, eager for updates on teaching the youngest students to read.

The latest volley is in the protracted Reading Wars has made the transition to “balanced literacy,” a philosophy popular since the 1990s that relies on using clues to decipher words, such as guessing by the first letter, looking at accompanying pictures, or reasoning out what is is logical in the sentence.

Instead, the current focus has shifted to “structured literacy,” a phonics-first approach that teaches young people the building blocks of words — the rules of how letters or letter clusters sound, for example, and how they string together — in a systematic, sequential way.

In recent years, Alberta, New Brunswick and Ontario have seen the milestone Ontario Human Rights Commission Investigation into the Right to Read — have all revamped their language curriculum with the phonics-based approach, with dozens of teachers looking for guidance in revamping their teaching methods.

“Some people will come in and say specifically, ‘What is phonics?’ They don’t know. There’s also another language introduced into the curriculum that they’re not familiar with. They don’t even know where to start,” explains Trudy Elmhirst, director of AQ and accreditation at Trent’s School of Education.

“That’s where our experts, our teachers, can help them understand that.”

Teachers may find it difficult to fully incorporate curriculum updates during the school year, but in the summer “they can take the classroom out of the picture and commit 100 percent to the course. They can commit to participating in the discussions, doing the work, all reading content and getting the most out of it,” Elmhirst said.

Literacy Learning Through an Indigenous Lens

As a child, Trudy Cardinal loved the Little House on the Prairie books. However, as she delved deeper into her love of literature during her studies, she realized that her childhood favorite—as well as parts of her education—”ran up against the stories I lived in as an indigenous person.”

Soon after, another revelation came: the literacy classes she had started teaching at the University of Alberta lacked the fun and joy she remembered from her years as an elementary school teacher.

So the Métis-Cree educator began designing a new course to address both realizations and “bring life” to her literacy education, said Cardinal, now an associate professor of elementary education.

WATCH | Summer course explores literacy education from indigenous contexts:

As the kids head to summer vacation, some teachers are preparing to hit the books

For most children, summer means school is out. This gives some teachers time to acquire new skills, such as weaving Indigenous perspectives into their teacher toolbox.

Honoring Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being, and Doing in Literacy Learning is part of an Indigenous Education Certificate Program at the Edmonton school. Introduced after Alberta Teaching quality standard to include foundational knowledge about First Nations, Métis and Inuitthe class has attracted indigenous and non-indigenous teachers, from both elementary and secondary levels, as well as graduate students interested in education.

Cardinal wants participants to gain a broader perspective on literacy education, as well as practical tools and ideas for their classrooms. For example, a final assignment requires teachers to reimagine a previous lesson, project, or professional development workshop.

“We want them to not just let what they’ve learned sink in, but actually put it into practice,” Cardinal said. “So that these things that are mandated by the government of Alberta, by their school districts and by their principals, become more of a project that they’re passionate about.”

It was important for Cardinal to be there in person. He believes that directly experiencing and going through a process leads to deeper understanding.

“There is an embodied way of knowing and being and doing that you feel when you’re sitting at a table together discussing something, when you’re sharing markers and crayons with someone, when you’re helping each other learn beading techniques, when you’re sitting outside on that same land that you’re talking about, sharing stories about who you are and what you hope for the next generations,” she said.

“We wanted [teachers] to feel it with their whole being, rather than just thinking about it and reading about it.”

Summer learning can be a transformative experience, according to Andrea Coull, an instructor at Edmonton University who took Cardinal’s course last year. She called it a ‘life-changing’ course.

This summer, the Métis teacher looks forward to further studies in Michif through the U of A’s Revitalization of Indigenous Languages ​​program.

It’s been 30 years since Coull first went to teacher training college and “things have changed since then, so I think it’s so important that we [teachers] “Keep learning,” she said.

“It just allows us to rekindle that home fire within us… and then be excited to share those new things in our classrooms.”