After working in the Ontario Education system for over thirty years, I am now a part time instructor for an international leadership course in Ontario, Canada. I teach a principal course to visiting principals from overseas. Recently, I had the privilege of working with a group of visiting kindergarten principals from China and in addition to my lectures, I took them around to visit some schools in and around Toronto.
It was a great experience for these principals as their system in China was quite different from ours. In fact the Ontario education system is one of the best in the world as our students ranked quite high in their academic scores. I receive many questions from various educators inquiring how to help their teachers to prepare lessons for their students, especially in the elementary grades.
In many parts of the world, teachers are trained to teach a specific subject, i.e., the Math teachers would teach Math to the students, English teacher teaches English, while the music teacher would teach music and the Physical Education teacher would look after physical education etc.
In Canada, an elementary school teacher is considered a generalist who teaches everything to his/ her student. Each grade of students has a core teacher who is like the mother hen being responsible for the students' well being all the time academically, socially and physically.
For instance, a kindergarten teacher named Ms. A would have a class between 15-20 students and Ms A will be responsible for her students. She / he has to know all the time where her students are and what they are doing. She/ he is responsible for these students' academic progress as well as safety ( everyone in the school is responsible for student safety). But the classroom core teacher especially knows his/ her class of students really well and helps the students to develop as a whole person. ( I strongly recommend this same approach as the classroom/ core teachers develop close relationships with the students in their classes and take responsibilities
for the safety of the students.)
Teacher's Role -This teacher is also responsible for planning programs, lessons, activities and delivering them effectively to the students on a daily basis. In Ontario, we have curriculum material for all the subjects we teach in our schools from K-12. Parents and educators and anyone who is interested can access these documents online from the government websites.
Teachers are expected to read and know the curriculum of the grades that they are teaching. These curriculum guidelines list the expectations of what the students should be able to do at the end of a specific grade level and are quite board in nature. Therefore, according to the needs and background of the students, teachers are allowed a lot of freedom to develop their lesson plans and activities to meet the students' needs from these broad guideline.
Reporting to Parents - Teachers are expected to report to parents of the students' progress 2-3x a year and have regular communication with them when they have concerns about their students.
Textbooks - We generally do not have a set of well defined textbooks from which teachers must use to teach the students particularly in the kindergarten grades.Teachers can either download learning activities from the internet, or they design them according to the topic which they are teaching or they can use some commercial activity books that are age, grade and content appropriate to their students.
Team Approach - If there is more than one teacher teaching the same grade, some team planning or team teaching may happen which involves the teachers to meet regularly to discuss their lesson plans. To make learning interesting and fun for students, the team of teachers who teach the same grade of students would collaborate and come up with a common theme for each month or each term and from there they plan the daily activities that would teach students the skills stated in the curriculum. I personally find this team approach much more effective for students.
R.T. Toronto
Jan. 2013
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