Friday, May 3, 1996
LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY OF MANITOBA
Friday, May 3, 1996
The House met at 9 a.m.
ORDERS OF THE DAY
(Continued)
COMMITTEE OF SUPPLY
(Concurrent Sections)
EDUCATION AND TRAINING
Mr. Deputy Chairperson (Ben Sveinson): Good morning. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. The committee will be resuming consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Education and Training. When the committee met yesterday afternoon, it had been considering item 2.(c)(1) on page 35. Shall the item pass?
The honourable minister, to finish her answer.
Hon. Linda McIntosh (Minister of Education and Training): I do not think I had started it.
Mr. Deputy Chairperson: No. Well, please start and finish your answer.
Mrs. McIntosh: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
When we broke yesterday, the member for Wolseley (Ms. Friesen) had asked some questions which I indicated I would start today with by answering. She had some questions about the English language arts exam. As an indication for some of the response, I would indicate to the committee that upon completion of the marking of the English language arts exam, markers were asked to complete an exit questionnaire. There were about 136 markers and group leaders who completed the exit-slip questionnaire which was designed by department personnel.
The questionnaire asked for comments on the examination instrument, on the training and marking process, on the role of departmental personnel and on the facilities. In addition to that, respondents were invited to make general comments and to provide suggestions for future large-scale English language arts assessment projects.
A large majority of the team leaders and the markers commented favourably on the exam instrument, on the fairness of the instrument for students and on the value of the marking experience. One message permeated the responses, and that was that the marker training process and the marking experience was viewed as a most valuable professional development experience.
A quote that was made by many was, and I am quoting: The best P.D. I have ever had.
In addition, the majority of respondents commented positively on the excellent organization of this vast project, and the term “excellent” was the term that was applied.
Several respondents commented favourably on the exam and the exam process but expressed their concerns as to how the results would be used. Respondents were asked to comment on the exam instrument used in the categories: fairness, process component, demand component and reading test. The overriding response of those completing the response form was that the exam instrument was well thought out and very fair. That was in 83 of the responses.
A response from several was that the exam was fair to all, yet offered a challenge to AP and IB. Many recognized the difficulty of designing an instrument suitable for such a wide range of abilities, and many expressed the view that the instrument was, in quotes again: as fair as it could possibly be.
The process-writing component received the most detailed comments. The reading-for-process writing booklet, Awareness, received accolades from the vast majority of respondents for its variety in both difficulty and subject matter. The repeated comment was, materials were challenging and fair.
Some expressed concerns, however, regarding the length of the reading booklet and thought that the purpose of the reading-for-process writing could have been accomplished with fewer selections.
The most frequent concern was that students had to refer directly to only one reading selection from the reading-for-process writing awareness booklet. The concern here was this dictate will convey to students and teachers that the readings do not have to be read entirely in order to successfully complete the process-writing component.
Many commented that the demand writing was interesting and provocative. This component of the exam, however, did receive some criticism. In general, respondents applauded the choice of readings that proceeded this writing assignment and were the basis for reading questions. The fairness of this component of the exam and the variety of the reading passages were applauded by the majority of those responding to the questionnaire. Many commented specifically on the three levels of reading questions--literal, interpretative and critical reflective--as a fair approach. Thirty-three said that their students found the passages interesting and challenging and that students enjoyed reading the selections in the collection. Three respondents recommended that the reading component be completed prior to the process writing and, therefore, marked earlier.
One hundred and four, which was an overwhelming number of those responding to the questionnaire, stated that the marking training ranged from very good to excellent. The expression and the feeling, “I felt confident when I began marking” and “This was a P.D. experience I would not have missed” was expressed by many. Group leaders, 28, responded that not only had they enjoyed their roles, but they felt well trained and well prepared.
Concerns centred around exemplar choices and rational and last minute and/or midstream changes to the reading answer key. A solution for the problems regarding exemplar selection and reliability papers was suggested by several, and that was that a small number of group leaders be brought in early to select exemplar and reliability papers and to have time to develop detailed rationale to support their selections.
Fifty markers and group leaders reported that they found the marking scheme very good to excellent, and 12 group leaders commented on the improvement on this schema from the November model. Many respondents said that they will use this schema in their classrooms and several suggested that posters be prepared for classroom display. The laminated card, the short form, appeared to be the one most appreciated.
Fifty reported they found the key to be very good; an equal number reported concerns and frustrations. Problems with the key centred on the bulkiness of the instrument and issues such as the use of half marks and the awkwardness of mark recording. Reliability reviews both at home tables and by random grouping or tumbling were considered an important and integral part of the process by over 100 markers. While the tumbling process was initially considered upsetting and by some disruptive and threatening, all but a very few in the final analysis reported that they came at the end to value the experience and to see it as an important part of the reliability process. So an opinion there changed as the process went on.
In summing up the use of reliability reviews, one respondent expressed the thoughts of many in the comment: we fought, we argued, we grew, the best P.D. in years. The response from respondents was overwhelmingly in favour of the small group with trained leaders format for facilitating the marking process. Seventy-five people described their group leader as wonderful and only three responded that they thought the small-group model was unnecessary. Eighty commented on the camaraderie and support that developed within the group and several expressed interest in staying together in June. Only two advocated that the groups be reorganized for each segment of the exam. Many markers admitted they were tired at the end, but most of them said that all that was possible had been done to ensure their “creature comforts” and to encourage them to take breaks.
Twenty-six group leaders responded that they felt well trained and that they had thoroughly enjoyed the process and enjoyed working with their group. Several commented that they appreciated being involved from the beginning in order to make them really feel part of the team.
The departmental team was commended, applauded and congratulated by virtually all respondents. Accolades were given for organization, quote: However did you do this; it worked smoothly and efficiently. Professionalism, quote: the highest compliment I can give. Energy, quote: You must have been all exhausted, but you never let it show--and cheerfulness, quote: How did you keep on smiling?
Most also reported that the ongoing reminders to take breaks and the, quote: great care and concern you showed us--relieved stress and contributed to this being, quote: the best experience that I have had ever working for the department, and, quote: the best professional development possible.
* (0910)
Many respondents commented favourably on Fort Garry Place as a marking facility. In particular they commented on the spaciousness of the room in which they were housed, the indoor parking facilities, the lunch facilities and the general pleasant working environment.
The greatest concerns expressed were that the room was too brightly lit and too cold at times, lacking in air movement and that the smoking facilities should not have been located en route to the dining room. Most considered that they were fed well, good food, but a considerable number, 23, requested that in the future meals be lighter with soup and sandwiches on alternate days, and that snacks consist more of fresh fruits.
Most markers reported appreciation that everything had been done to keep them comfortable. While many commented there was just too much paper--is that my time up? Oh. I am not quite through but I will just conclude this last sentence, so--
Mr. Deputy Chairperson: It is okay. The member for Wolseley says you can finish that up.
Mrs. McIntosh: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to continue a little bit beyond the time. I do not have much left, but it keeps all the thoughts together here. So thanks to the member for Wolseley.
While many commented that there was just too much paper and expressed concerns regarding recycling, most admitted that they had no suggestions to put forward on eliminating the amount of paper involved in all aspects of the process.
Quote: This has been fabulous and we are all the better teachers because of it. The department has made an impact on the classroom.
Another quote: It is encouraging to see that teachers from across the province are doing largely the same thing, and do have similar views on the education process.
Quote: My students will write in June. This experience has alleviated many of my concerns.
We received this kind of feedback with a tremendous number of compliments and also some very helpful suggestions for improvement, and constructive critique on things that were seen as hindrances to the process and could help make it even better. But in addition to this kind of feedback, I indicate to the member that we have also asked a number of Senior ELA teachers and divisional consultants to review the criticisms of the examination. They also provided us with their expert opinions which will work to help guide our work along with the valuable contributions of all our teacher partners.
(Mr. McAlpine, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)
All of the information that has been received, including that used during the pilot phase, which was a very rigorous process to examine the design structure, content, and mechanics of the exam, are used with the teacher development teams to improve our work. Our interest is to design the best possible test instruments so that students will benefit and so that teachers will learn and be able to apply learnings to the classroom and so that parents will have one more reliable piece of information to inform them about the process of their children.
We are committed to an inclusive approach in the development and implementation of curriculum and programs, and we also are committed to the integration of aboriginal perspectives in the revised and new curricula. The Native Education Directorate participates on all divisional management and cross-functional committees. Aboriginal staff from Program Development and Program Implementation participate on the committees as appropriate.
Every department-led committee has aboriginal representation or aboriginal input, if representation is not available, into its proceedings, as of April 30, 1996, so that is a very recent inclusion. It has always been there, but we now have that as a statement.
During the development cycle of the ELA exam for 1996, we were not able to secure a field aboriginal representative because the nominations from the superintendents did not include the representation that we were seeking, so we are taking a more aggressive role in ensuring that representation. The following committees, for the member's interest, now have aboriginal representation. I will just indicate those. There is a very long list and I do not want to take a lot of time, but I will sort of hop-skip through them to give an indication or--
Ms. Jean Friesen (Wolseley) Do you want to table it tomorrow; or, if it is not in table form, table it another time?
Mrs. McIntosh: Okay, we could do that and that might save us some time. I will table a clean copy of the committees; right now I have scribbling all over it, so it is not presentable. But I will table them. I will just indicate that they are department-led and -initiated committees, committees where department staff are members, committees where department staff have been invited to participate as associate members or personal guests, and government-led committees. There is about a page of committees listed. I will table a clean copy later today.
Students received the readings for the exam for over the weekend. I think the member is familiar with the process there. No questions were attached to this set of information. The process of reading, understanding and being critically reflective were individual activities that a student could engage in, as well as discussions with friends, family, extended family.
The member had expressed some concern yesterday about some students perhaps disadvantaged or advantaged, depending on the perspective, but the member was worried that some might be disadvantaged in not having access, say, to the Internet if some other student did and therefore having access to a wider variety of research capabilities, or know people with views and so on on the readings that they might be able to tap if others could not.
I think the concern that some students could be disadvantaged could be seen as a difficulty, but, given the evenness of the marks across the province, it did not seem to result in a pattern of lower marks. Now, whether there might have been some marks that would have been higher is hard to determine, and I think that is something that is very difficult to control if we really want to have the ability to read and ponder and further investigate or consider what is being read.
Once our system of student numbers is in place and the standards testing program is fully implemented, we will be in a position to better monitor the types of concerns raised by the member with respect to achievement demonstrated through the provincial testing program as well as the local school assessment programs.
So we have heard the concern that she raised and have noted it for any kind of monitoring that we might be able to put in place.
It is important to emphasize the shared responsibility of student assessment. The school has a very important responsibility to provide students and parents with information about student performance. We support the use of varied instruments and methods to gather this information, but we also believe there is tremendous value in a provincial testing program that is curriculum congruent, contributing information to the teacher, to the student and to the parent.
So we have a very strong commitment to involvement of the community and to the issues related to bias and inclusion concerns that she identified yesterday, and we appreciate that those are very fair and legitimate concerns to raise and ones which we are conscious of and consider important.
I can share just one more example of this by sharing a letter that was received by the department just yesterday and then I will conclude with thanks to the member for extending my time to answer. This is a letter that was sent to us by Wayne Helgason. She may know Wayne. I am sure most of us know Wayne because he has been so active and helpful in terms of the aboriginal community in Manitoba and been very active as well on the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg. This letter is written to us in his capacity as executive director of the Social Planning Council.
* (0920)
It says, members of the Social Planning Council's multicultural working group appreciated the opportunity to hear from the Excellence For All committee and to present their views at a round table discussion at the Social Planning Council on April 11, 1996. There was a fair exchange of information and ideas at the meeting, with several suggestions put forward by our working group members to ensure commitment and implementation to diversity, antibias education, aboriginal perspectives and gender fairness in the curriculum in teaching and in behaviour in schools. Committee members were open in questioning, explored ideas further and took notes. We understand that the feedback from our meeting, along with that from others, will be considered in the development of the final document and look forward to reviewing the final document. We believe that the department is showing leadership in this area. The issue for us is clarity of directions and expectations of schools, particularly with regard to implementation. He then goes on to indicate that they wish to continue and dialogue, be involved in discussion and to be kept apprised of progress and further opportunities for dialogue.
I just read that into the record as an indication of the type of interaction that we are having with various sectors of society in trying to ensure that the work we do is reflective of the real world in which people live and that we are doing everything we can to take into account views and opinions and perspectives from various groups that might help us prepare curriculum that is well balanced.
I will stop there and, again, my thanks for the extended time and if the member needs extended time for questioning, we will grant it in reverse.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I hope not, but I had asked a lot of diverse questions at the end and so it was useful to have it all put in one context. I am also glad to have the summaries of the evaluation of the markers put on the public record as well. I understood the minister to say that the next stage of that is really speaking to the senior English language arts teachers, speaking perhaps to superintendents and sort of another phase of consultation, and I assume that a similar kind of process will be done at the end of the June exams.
So what I am looking for is really a public discussion of that or a public availability of some of that material. Is the department intending to do that? Has it thought of a format or some way of getting that information back to the public?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the feedback we get comes more through an internal process rather than full-scale public hearings, et cetera. We meet with the various groups. They, in turn, bring us the views of their particular organization or interest group, if it is not a formal organization. So the feedback we have been obtaining has come through a more informal internal way. There is a lot of public input but not through the format of a public-hearing type
structure. It is more of, if we meet with superintendents, for example, they will provide us with feedback from the superintendents' association as to how they feel, and so on--that type of information flow.
Ms. Friesen: What I was really thinking of was a report on the process. The minister has put on record some of the things that were said by the teachers, and what I was looking for was something that says to the public: Here is what we intended to do; here is what the exam looked like; here is how it was marked; here is our evaluation upon that marking; here is our consultation with superintendents; here is what we learned.
Mrs. McIntosh: This is a good suggestion. It is not something we have done in quite the way the member describes, but it is something I will review with the implementation committee on educational change because it may be possible to issue some sort of information report or some vehicle along that line that would be of assistance or add further awareness of the process. So we are open to improvements in the process. This being a new initiative, there are ideas being put forward from various people, in this instance here from the opposition, that are ones that we will follow up with to take a look at. I will discuss that with the implementation committee and see if they have further ideas and thoughts as to how we might be able to do something along that line, either that specific suggestion or one that would accomplish the same goal. So we will take a look at it. Thank you.
Ms. Friesen: The minister had, in the House, offered to arrange a meeting for me with some of the teachers who had marked this. Would that be possible?
Mrs. McIntosh: We recall the statement from yesterday, and we will be very pleased to contact some of the teachers. The only thing we have to do is get their permission. We are reasonably confident there would be a fair number that would say, sure, we would love to talk about the experience. The reason we need to contact them and get their permission is that when they came on to write, there was a confidentiality form that they signed that said that we would not release their names without their permission because they are marking and all of the concerns that might come about anything in the marking process, but it is our strong feeling and impression that it would not be a problem. So what we will do is we will contact teachers and see if they would like to share their experience, thoughts and opinions, and we are quite confident that we will be able to find a number for the member to talk to. We would be pleased to do that. I think that might be a very worthwhile endeavour for us. So give us a couple of days to effect the permission and the release and we will be pleased to follow through on that for the member.
Ms. Friesen: It might be even more appropriate after the second exam. So it is not something I am looking for immediately but something perhaps toward the fall, if that is possible.
Mrs. McIntosh: That is helpful to us in terms of giving us a little more time because we are sort of crushed right now with our time constraints, but we will try to set it up so that you do not have to wait for June unless you would like to, but we will try to get somebody or a few people available for you before then, as soon as we can.
Ms. Friesen: There was another kind of evaluation or monitoring at this point that I was talking about, and that was the responses of schools to the amount of time that had been taken out of classroom teaching for the exam, and whether the government was in fact monitoring that through consultations with teachers and with parents and principals and superintendents. I wondered also whether the points that I had raised about the monitoring of the impact of this upon students who are relatively new to English as a Second Language could take place. Does the department actually collect that information in ways that will enable it to measure that impact on those students?
* (0930)
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, this is something that has been a matter of concern and discussion, and it is a particular concern for language arts because it is a longer exam and so on. We did a survey of the larger senior high schools in the province. Over 90 percent of the teachers involved in marking the first semester examinations were not required to be teaching in their schools at that time. For those people it was not a problem, and, in fact, most schools plan a five or six day break for examinations and administration at this time. But it is still a concern where teachers have to be taken out and a substitute in. It is ameliorated somewhat by the fact that having a substitute in under these circumstances is a little different than having to call a substitute at the last minute because you have taken ill or have some other problem that prevents you from getting to school without advance notice. There is opportunity in this particular circumstance for some planning to occur between the regular classroom teacher and the substitute in preparation for the teacher being out of the classroom. Nonetheless, we know that the regular classroom teacher will have a more intimate knowledge of the students, simply because of the amount of time they have spent together, than a substitute could be able to acquire. We are discussing this.
I keep referring to the implementation committee, but what these Estimates are making me aware of is how valuable that group has become in my life. I did not realize the full extent of it until I was forced to pause and consider how many things I am taking to them or they are bringing to me for discussion. So my appreciation for them has been heightened by the awareness I am getting here.
This was one that both the members of the committee and the minister wanted to talk about. All of the things surrounding marking are on the agenda at our implementation committee meetings.
(Mr. Deputy Chairperson in the Chair)
The teachers and superintendents who were the ones arranging for free time and substitutes, et cetera, have views and opinions on this that we will be going through to see if there is anything that could be done to alleviate any concerns that might be there surrounding the fact that, in many cases, substitutes have to be taken into the school while the teachers are freed to mark.
We are also examining, just as a matter of interest on this whole business of marking, as we analyze the results here and talk to people about their experience, the central provincial marking versus local regional marking, and so we will be looking to see, because some people have said--well, a lot of people, not some, have said the regional marking would be so much more convenient, and we know, of course, that it would be. What we need to find some comfort around is whether or not regional marking versus central marking would show a variation. Other provinces that have done both seem to be showing a variation of greater proportion between regions when it is regional marking than through central marking. But we are going to be taking a look at that in our analysis of this first round. Also, coupled with that then, of course, not just based upon where it was marked, but, on a whole range of items, the reliability and the validity of the testing and the marking.
So I am saying to the member that we know there have been concerns expressed about substitutes. We know that they are not in every school, but we know that the concerns that have been expressed have some merit in them. So we are looking to see what we can do, if anything.
We are preparing a paper for next year, for next year's options, to see if we can make the writing and marking more manageable. For June of '96 in this upcoming examination, we have made some changes to streamline the training and marking process.
I think when we get through all the examination of concerns, the things that went well, the things that did not go well, we may find that we really cannot do anything about having substitutes come in when the teachers go out to mark, that there may not be any better marking times that we can arrange. If that proves to be the case, my own personal feeling is that we still have to have the teachers marking; that they need to be language arts teachers. While the downside would be not having the regular classroom teacher in the room for a period of time while they are marking, that would have to be accepted as one of the things about the ability to have an assessment done that is one of those grin-and-bear-it things.
I say that knowing that we are trying to work on addressing the concern, but believing that the process of marking and whom we get to mark and how it is marked are fundamentally of higher importance than a lost day with the regular teacher when the opportunity for a well-prepared and prepared-in-advance substitute could be there.
So we are confident that parents, students and teachers in the whole, see these exams as beneficial and that they are a major part of the cycle of teaching, assessing and reporting just as professional development days might be or in-service days.
* (0940)
Ms. Friesen: Could the minister tell us approximately what proportion of the markers were not current classroom teachers? There were, for example, I know some retired teachers that the minister had hoped to involve. Some people also suggested to me that there were student teachers involved. So could the minister perhaps give us--is there any kind of summary analysis of who was involved?
Mrs. McIntosh: We had 75 percent--these are approximate figures but they are accurate. It is just that I do not have the decimal points or anything--but 75 percent of the language arts teachers marking the exams were current language arts teachers. There were no student teachers marking. The remaining 25 percent of teachers marking the exams were retired teachers who had retired within the last two years so they were still current in that sense. They were language arts teachers who had retired who were no more than two years away from the classroom.
Also, in that group we had current substitute teachers who had been trained--well, all of the markers of course were trained but of that 25 percent those who are currently hired as substitute teachers were language arts people also trained, as were the current and retired teachers. So that was the breakdown, 75-25, but no student teachers involved in the marking process.
Ms. Friesen: This is an area of assessment and evaluation generally, and I am wondering what this section of the department is doing, what is visible, what could be tabled, to encourage other forms of assessment? I am thinking now throughout the school system not just in connection with Grade 12 or English language arts. But one of the fundamentals, I think, is that a variety of forms of assessment be involved. So what is this section of the department doing in areas other than the formalized standard provincial testing?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I am going to provide for the member the student assessment handbook. I do not know if she has had an opportunity to see this one before. We put it out in 1995, but it is a fairly recent book, and primarily, it is a resource for developing Seniors 3 and 4 divisional examinations. However, in it, it does have a lot of references to ongoing student assessment, which I think is what the member is getting at. It has assessing student achievement, types of student evaluation, planning student evaluation, et cetera and evaluation through teacher-made tests. Again that is back to a test but it is a deviation from the departmental examining. I do not want to just table it or give it to her but that might be of some interest to her.
We have in the department in the assessment branch, of course, a major portion of their work spent on developing assessment tests and evaluation and so on. The branch does do other things. They will, for example, and again I am still talking testing but not departmental testing. Many divisions, as the member is aware, have divisional exams and upon request the department is available to assist divisions with the development of those, or suggestions and ideas concerning those. In the document that I have handed the member, she will see several items in there, ones that could be of assistance to divisions in that.
In the subsequent curriculum implementation documents there will be additional suggestions for assessment. We have always indicated and firmly believe that there are many ways of knowing about a student's achievement. The provincial standards testing is one of many ways of assessing students in terms of diagnostic information, in terms of identifying areas where there are strengths and areas where there are weaknesses. We have been encouraging schools to implement other ways of knowing about a child and the child's progress, and that again is the partnership that I talked about earlier. We have over time in the education system, and I am speaking generically now, known that good teachers instinctively, without direction from anybody at any level, on a daily basis are always testing, reflecting and assessing.
* (0950)
Those parts of teaching are seen as so integral to the whole process of teaching that right from the university where people are taught to be teachers through to professional development activities or performance evaluations where they occur, that is always one of the areas that is looked at in the teacher as part of the ability to teach: How well are they able to assess on a daily basis the progress made that day so that the next day's work could be planned appropriately in presenting a lesson? At the end of the lesson, has the teacher ascertained in a variety of ways, and there are many, whether or not that knowledge has been absorbed and understood? For the next day, does the teacher have to come back and review some aspect of it, or is the teacher confident that the knowledge has been known and absorbed well enough that she or he can proceed to the next level of teaching, confident that there is a good base?
So those are daily,ongoing aspects of teaching that we need to be conscious of in Faculty of Education training, evaluation of the teachers and basic lesson plans. As the teacher's lesson plans are reviewed and examined, they always need to have a component in them that will give the teacher some reassurance that the student is ready to move on. So that is an individual thing. It is extremely pertinent to the question. It is vital; it is a key ingredient of teaching. I mention it only because it is so basic a truth that it is often overlooked. It is often taken for granted and not indicated as a valid assessment technique, and in reality it is the most valid one of all.
But there are some assessment processes that can be done on a provincial level, so I will go back to that. I just wanted to deviate to indicate our stressing here in the department of the knowledge of that other fact that I just mentioned. There are some that could be done at a provincial level, I mean, provincial standards test being the one that you wanted to know alternatives to, and the projects, portfolios--the Chamber of Commerce, for example, working with one of the school divisions, has helped to develop an Employability Skills Portfolio that the department worked with and endorsed, and that is a very strong assessment tool, as it turns out, much stronger, in fact, than I had realized, in terms of meeting and talking to the students who developed their own Employability Skills Portfolio because it does much more than simply look at employability skills.
As they develop their portfolio, students become aware themselves of their strengths and weaknesses, and that has proved to point out to some of the individual students some remarkable observations about themselves. I had one student indicate to me that she had no idea the variety of skills that she had identified from some of her extracurricular things that she had never thought of as skills. Once she identified them as being bona fide skills, she then began to consciously use them in a variety of ways, and it was intriguing to see that happen. It is the old--I do not know if the member ever experienced this, but I, at one time in my life, had people say to me, do you work or are you just a housewife? I was very incensed. I said, yes, but then you break through that. You consciously start to identify, well, what do I do in this other role that seems to be negated as a nothing role; you start to identify the skills and then say, I can do all these things, and I am going to use them consciously in other aspects in my life and not have them relegated as insignificant.
Many divisions are examining their local student assessment policies and practices to determine how they could be strengthened, and staff from this area, as well as from other areas of the department, have been invited to work with divisions in this regard. I mentioned the Employability Skills Portfolios because I thought it was a good example of a form of assessment. The other component of it was that it was working in conjunction with business or industry, the province, the school division and the student, his or herself, under the guidance of a teacher. I think the other forms of assessment that need to be done can often have that expanded outlook; they need not be insular. We can encourage assessments that come not just from within but from outside the system. The document A Foundation for Excellence makes reference to some of the ongoing assessments that should and could be done in the classrooms.
I will maybe stop there. I am sure there are others, they just do not come to mind right now, but I will confer with staff if there are other things I should be indicating to the member.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, yes, I had the opportunity to see the video on the Employability Skills Portfolios. I was going to ask the minister some questions about how that has been distributed, what funding the department provided for it, and is the department involved in the distribution of it or is that the other partners who are doing that.
What I was getting at with my other question was not so much the department indicating, yes, these others areas are available, but what has this section--or any other part, I guess, of the department--been doing in terms of professional development. Yes, obviously, I am thinking of portfolio development as one of the areas that is attracting a great deal of interest from the kindergarten level to the Grade 12 level. Has there been any thrust from the department to develop professional development courses, summer institutes, anything like that oriented at other forms of assessment than this most public one of the provincial exam?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I would start by saying that the one thing that we found, and I mentioned it earlier so I do not want to beat it to death by endlessly repeating it, but I will just mention it because I think it is a very pertinent answer to part of this question. Involving the teachers the way they have been involved in the development of the assessment tools and the examinations that were just written was a powerful professional development experience in and of itself. We are expecting that, as the word goes out into the field, we will have more applications for this. Being involved in developing the assessment tools is a very high consciousness-raising experience, and the word “powerful,” I think, is not an understatement in terms of usage here as a professional development experience. As well, the regional orientation sessions for kindergarten to Grade 4 mathematics included and contained assessment information, training, et cetera, as part of the regional orientation for the K to 12 mathematics. The curricula being developed, the new curricula will be including the assessment information and assessment guidance right in the curriculum.
The Program Development Branch is assigned the task of supporting teachers and schools in the whole area of multifaceted assessment and evaluation, and it is done by the inclusion of assessment and evaluation information in all curricula, as I indicated just a moment ago, and the standards section of all curricula in the Frameworks document presents a number of suggestions on multifaceted assessment. So the guidance is given right as the material to be taught is put forward for teachers, and I think those are some of the direct ways the province is involved in ensuring that the assessment tools are built right into the curricula and that orientations are provided as each new curriculum is brought forward to ensure that there is an expert there with them as they go through that. So, when they embark upon the teaching, they will have that built in as part of the ongoing daily teaching mechanisms, back to what I had said in my earlier response about that daily ongoing step-by-step assessment being so critical and vital to the ultimate success of a student's progress.
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Ms. Friesen: The English language arts tests that we have just had are the first ones of a particular type, and so we really do not have the basis of comparison, the historical evidence that would give us some indication of really what we have learned. So I am wondering what the department has done in terms of comparing it to other forms of exams in English language arts that there have been--the Canada-wide ones, the standard achievement tests--that have been there over the last, I think it is probably at least 10 years now, but certainly I think the last English language one at more or less the senior high level was about two or three years ago. So what has the department learned from this exam? I know the comparisons will not be exact, but what do we know that we did not know before?
Mrs. McIntosh: I just wanted to indicate, before I go into this answer, just a very quick final thought on the previous question, and that is that staff has indicated that they do have requests either by individual schools or by divisions for a staff in the Assessment and Evaluation Unit to go out and conduct sessions, workshops or seminars on assessment for P.D. days or things of that nature. They always do that and are always pleased to be asked to do that. So while that is not something that is initiated here in the department, it is a response mechanism that we have that is triggered by request and that, I am informed, schools and school divisions will often ask for a seminar or something of that nature. We always go.
In regard to the questions that she has just asked, in terms of comparisons there are some things that we cannot compare and they are sort of the obvious things. With this new type of examination we cannot really compare knowledge of content, because they are not set up that way. You know, if you are going to look at Macbeth, for example, the old style of exam they might ask for a piece of memory work, and that is good. There is nothing wrong with memory work. I love memory work. You see people on the radio advertising, come take my course for $1,500; I will improve your memory and make your life wonderfully successful. So I think there is a great benefit to having a well-trained memory, and I think any Alzheimer's patient can probably verify that the loss of memory is a devastating thing. However, our tests are not geared to memory work. But you might ask a question, you might put a reading from Macbeth in to test to see how well the student can read and understand what is there. It is a different style of English; it is an older style of English. How comprehensive are they in analysing that? You could still have Macbeth but it would be a different kind of experience. So I just mention that as something I think we both know.
What the member is looking for is what can you compare, I believe, in her question. The uniformity and the consistency of the provincial examination process did provide some hard comparable data, and staff has provided me with a little information here that might help. There was data that contributed to an enhanced understanding of student achievement across the province, because the examinations help to minimize conjecture and misunderstanding about the level and quality of student achievement. We did provide a benchmark to review local student assessment and evaluation procedures and policies and standards. The results provided an understanding of strengths and helped to set directions for areas of improvement in student learning, in classroom programs and school effectiveness, and the test results from the English language arts exams indicated that students required more learning experiences and opportunities using language arts to inform, explain, instruct, persuade and argue. Similarly, in the math exam, they required more learning experience and opportunities expressing themselves in a consistent logically and mathematically correct manner. I am identifying with things that need improvement.
There were many things that showed there was a good skill level, and the previous style of examination could indicate the skill level of things that did well, and this does that also. We are able to say, for example, in the mathematics exams that, at both the old one and the new one, students could do well on computation. Here we are saying that in the English language arts students have achieved a certain level of understanding of words, et cetera, the basic difference being that these are, I believe, a more clear assessment for diagnostic purposes of what needs to be worked upon in the unit as a whole. There is not any data on file from the 1960s on any performance that existed at the time. The member is correct. We are starting anew in that sense. These tests will be much more useful as time goes on and we can start to truly assess all range of thinking and the progress that is being made. So the comparisons between the old exams and the new ones can be made in those ways that I indicated, but they really cannot for the more intricate probing into the actual learning in terms of literacy that both mathematical literacy and language literacy and so, in that sense, the comparisons that can be made are very limited with the old-style exam.
We should begin to be making observing patterns of strengths and weaknesses in a quantitative way within a few years as the exams we are currently doing get put into place. Right now we are still comparing apples with oranges a little bit and the similarity has come about in that they are both fruits and they are both foods, but we are still not in an apples-to-apples comparison.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, there are two things that interest me from this. One, of course, is how does the current kind of exam--and I am thinking in the context here of the English language arts in particular--how does that compare with what we have learned from the continuous kind of assessment of curriculum that we did before? That is one of the reasons I am interested in the evaluation of this project, if we call it a project for the moment, because there was continuous assessment. There were reports that were done about a curriculum, about professional development, about student achievement levels, and I am interested in how different this one is and also has there been any comparison or is there intended to be any comparison between what we learned on the last round of that English language arts assessment--and I would like to know what year that was--and when the report from it was published and what we have now.
Mr. Chairman, it is slightly on a different topic, but it is the same area, is the national comparison. Obviously, one of the things that all provinces are looking at in different ways are those kinds of comparisons. So how does the test that we have just had compare with the achievements of students on the previous national testing? Again, I understand there are differences in the two types of tests but one of the goals, I think, of the department has been to look at that kind of comparative area. I just leave that with the minister for a minute.
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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, these questions get at the very heart of meaningful assessment and measurable standards, and they are tough questions. We had talked in the earlier question about comparing from now to the future. We know right now that we have a base with this English language arts exam, for example, that we will be able as time goes on to use as a base comparison to see whether we are progressing or falling behind or staying the same.
(Mr. Mervin Tweed, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)
We know in the past they had similar comparative things done a little differently that are hard to compare in a straight accurate comparison with what we are doing now. We know that we are in discussions with our colleagues in other provinces who are wrestling with the same kinds of questions to try to ensure that we are in harmony with each other and not working at cross-purposes, and these are major challenges, very exciting challenges, and they do require a high level of co-operation and dialogue.
In terms of the comparison between the old and the new, the data on the old that does exist would be in the archives, but what it would show would be averages, pass-, fail-rates, et cetera. The results would be of questionable use for our purposes today since those results were all marked on a curve, and because they were marked on a curve with so many students doing well or not so well, depending upon where they were in the curve, they could not be a valid comparison to today's marking which is not done on a curve, where it is possible theoretically but not probable that every student could achieve the highest possible mark, the attaining of the standard.
In the old days, there were always some who would not and always some who would excel. So that is one of our dilemmas. The last Grade 12 exam in English was written about 1969. I do not have the exact date, but we know it was in that time period. It would likely be in the archives. It could be researched, but, again, the concern about the comparison's validity would be something that would make any results coming out of the research for comparative purposes somewhat difficult and maybe not that useful, unless we could find some way to break out the common areas.
It might be useful to show how assessment today is different. You might find some data in there as a research project if you could break out the things that were different and the things that were the same that could show disadvantages or advantages of one way of measurement versus the other.
The last writing exam was done in 1988 of the curriculum assessment--[interjection] Oh, I am sorry, the last curriculum assessment was done in 1988 for writing and for reading it was 1992. They had different purposes. The curriculum assessments of the 1980s cannot do what the exams can do in terms of exams being able to communicate a reasoned standard arrived at by a committee of teachers.
Exams and assessments can both provide a system monitoring function but exams are intended to deal with the variety of standards among schools, districts, divisions and individual students. So the curriculum assessment and the exams are differing kinds of assessments and for different purposes, but I can indicate that those curriculum assessments were done in '88 and '92. Are there more that she would like?
An Honourable Member: The national comparison.
Mrs. McIntosh: Oh, the national comparison.
The SAIP tests that were done nationally were tests designed for specific age groups. They were not being done against a particular set of learning criteria but rather against the age of the student, so the SAIP, S-A-I-P, School Achievement Indicators Project was done by 13-year-olds and by 16-year-olds regardless of where they stood in their chronological progress through the system. At that time, the results for 16-year-old students in Manitoba showed they were at or near the top in terms of reading.
We do not have the SAIP report here today so we cannot provide the full conclusions, but they are available. They are more easily obtained than things that might be archived, and we could table them, if the member would like them, at the next sitting. Unless staff, if they are able to find something here, we will table it here later today.
Those were a little different because they were age related, not curriculum based. The ministers, in getting together and talking about national tests, love to talk about national comparisons and different ways in which they are assessing their students, so I am quite confident that at some point in our discussions, whether it be late at night after the day is over or formally on an agenda, these types of topics will be coming up for discussion with the ministers when we are together--next week, I guess it is now--at our next meeting in Edmonton.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, yes, I would be interested in seeing the last SAIP one in English, but if the minister just gave me the date of it, then I can get it from the library.
I was interested in how the provincial English language exam can mesh with the next SAIP examination. We have some historical background here and presumably there would be interest in that kind of comparison. Has there been any attention given to that, any thought?
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(Mr. Deputy Chairperson in the Chair)
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, we will table these SAIP results for the member, and we believe we could probably have them here before we conclude today. If not, we will bring them in Monday. Our own standards tests, for example, the one we just wrote with the Grade 12s--pardon me, the Senior 4s--is still evolving. It is not yet the way SAIP would show things. The Grade 3 test this year, though, will report a profile on the student that will be a three-point profile that will be similar to the SAIP method of reporting; and, ultimately, as our evolution continues, we should be able to do the same thing for the senior high English language arts exams.
The way in which the SAIP exam is written is that it is a standards test totally. These students would take the test at age 13; they would take the identical test again at age 16; and they report back on a five-point profile. They would have the ratings showing on a scale of 1 to 5, from very low to very high, although they do not use the terms very low and very high, but on that scale and somewhere in the middle would be the standard. Students would show progress at the standard, below the standard, above the standard, and on the continuum of their learning they would move, presumably from below the standard to the standard to above the standard depending on their progress. So that is why it is possible to write the same test at age 13 that you write again at age 16; you are measuring progress.
The more sophisticated component on that will be then to have on a three-point profile, which is what we will be using provincially, not just the standard one-two-three, with the standard being somewhere in the middle, but measuring also all the various components of the standard, for example, how well do they do in certain areas of the learning experience. You would have a chart that would be broken down--I think the member is familiar with what I am talking about--so you would be graded not just on the standard, but all the various areas that are components of the subject area.
We expect to evolve to that point in terms of the reporting, to provide a student profile that will do more than it did this year and that will be very similar to SAIP's method of reporting to those who need the results. That would be, first of all, the central authority trying to get an overall picture of how the populace as a whole is proceeding in terms of its acquisition of knowledge skills and achievements, and then to the divisions, to the individual schools to give them an indication as to what areas are strengths, what areas show need for extra work. The profiles for Grade 3 will go to the teachers, and then the teachers, in turn, can share it with the students or family members responsible for the students, and that will give then everybody in the system the opportunity to benefit from the profile.
SAIP, unlike us, has been unable to declare a standard for the age because the test was administered to two ages, and there was no agreement across Canada on what was expected to be the standard for each age, but in our province the tests will be more curriculum-congruent. Since we are the ones who developed the curriculum and the test on our own, no other provincial views will need to be included in our own picture. We will be able to describe a standard for the province that we think will be useful and helpful for the people in the system, most importantly the students.
(Mr. Mervin Tweed, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, one of the concerns that is expressed by every country that is involved in this kind of testing is whether their tests are, in fact, of an international standard. In the United States there are a number of states which have moved to this form of standard testing. One of the concerns and critiques that is being developed there is, where do these state curriculums, where do these state examinations fit in an international context? They do not consider Canada in an international context for the most part--and I suppose that is always something that grates--but there are obviously other English-speaking countries. There is Europe, in particular which has had a long history of this type of examination.
When the department was developing its own examination, was there that kind of international English language context that was considered?
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(Mr. Deputy Chairperson in the Chair)
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, and I should indicate that for the last little while we have had at the table with us Mr. Norm Mayer who is the director of the Assessments and Evaluation Unit for the Department of Education, Province of Manitoba, and I thank him for all the help he gives us in this area.
In terms of national and international presence, the maths test by SAIP and our western consortium curriculum and thus our own mathematics curriculum and then thus our own tests will be very close in approach. They are being used by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics which is a body composed of people from both the United States of America and Canada, and in that sense has that international presence on the North American continent, but we are embarking on a whole new area in the world and it is--[interjection] No, it is only her.
The international work is just beginning in English language arts, but it is beginning and that is the exciting part. Our work here in Manitoba is being used by the International Reading Association, and there are several indications that lead us very optimistically into being considered a leader in this area in terms of international reading. So we are very pleased that our work is being used there.
Mathematics and science, of course, are much easier to see on an international basis because mathematical and scientific fact are not localized in the same way that language is, and I am very pleased to indicate some of the things that are happening on the international basis. If you recall last year here at the--this was not mathematics, necessarily. I am going to be hopping, skipping and jumping around a little bit just to indicate where we are going internationally with some of the education work and curriculum development testing and assessment that goes with it.
Last year at Estimates the deputy was not here, and I was both pleased and not pleased about that. I was a brand new minister so I missed his presence very much, but I was very pleased for the reason for his absence and that was that he was in Finland last year as the chair of the Canadian Educational Stats Council, and the topic was international comparisons and approaches for the international indicators. That was a very important topic, a very important thrust, and that Manitoba, Canada, should have been chosen to chair that, I think, is an indication of the leadership that this province is showing not just in Canada but around the world.
As well, from our Planning and Policy Department, Jean Britton, whom the member may know from the department, has just come back from Spain where she was working on an international working group, again on indicators, and she is very highly thought of in that circle. Again, we are very proud that Manitoba is playing a lead role in that particular arena.
Norman Mayer, whom I have just introduced, was Canada's representative to an OECD conference in England in February of this year on assessment issues and trends in member OECD countries. That is again a tribute to Manitoba and the people we have here to be Canada's representative on an international area such as that, particularly on assessment issues and trends in our member OECD countries because it does show a reaching and a striving for an international standard and international co-operation.
Norm Mayer was also Manitoba's representative in the second international assessment of educational progress, which was a study of mathematics and science achievement at age 13 in Canada, and that age, of course, being a significant age for the SAIP tests. The development of standards is closely related to the curriculum process, and, therefore, the research base of our curriculum development process. I can share some of our research that underpins the curriculum framework in that regard.
The curriculum development, when work began on the western Common Curriculum Framework for kindergarten to Grade 12 mathematics, which we now call kindergarten to Senior 4, the following sources provided the major foundations for both content and philosophy: curricula from the four western provinces and other countries, including Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Japan; the curriculum and evaluation standards for school mathematics by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics; Armstrong's work, Seven Kinds of Smart, Identifying and Developing Your Many Intelligences; Caine and Caine's Making Connections: Teaching and the Human Brain; Jack Hope's Charting the Course, A Guide for Revising the Mathematics Program in the Province of Saskatchewan. Those are some.
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During the entire process the Manitoba mathematics steering committee helped provide the direction and the vision to maintain the philosophical shift in teaching mathematics that had begun in Manitoba in 1991. The work that was done by Freudenthal and others in The Netherlands revealed the following information: Students learn by attaching meaning to what they do; therefore, they must construct their own meaning of mathematics.
You can see that reflected in our mathematics assessment, where we are asking in terms of problem solving that students do a number of very interesting things. One is to what I call play the Jeopardy game: Give them an answer and ask them to construct the problem. It is intriguing, not only that students can construct their own meaning of mathematics, but to see how much fun they can actually have doing it, which brings me back to a fundamental premise, that you must instill a love of learning. One of the ways you instill a love of learning is to make it not just meaningful but also pleasurable.
Meaning is best developed, again, following a piece of information from The Netherlands, from Freudenthal, that meaning is best developed when learners encounter mathematical experiences that proceed from the simple to the complex and from the concrete to the abstract. This, of course, is similar to other theories that are known, a need to shift from having students repeat rote facts to having them demonstrate their knowledge of mathematical concepts and their ability to reason.
Those are some of the international premises that we are incorporating into our own work here, those ones that I just read, of course, being basically from the Netherlands, whose work in turn was based upon other philosophers.
The big ideas indicated in the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards were integrated into all areas of teaching mathematics, in communication, connections, estimation and mental math, problem solving, reasoning, technology, visualization. The van Hiele's work on the Development of Geometric Thought was used to determine the teaching strategies for teaching mathematics throughout the early and middle years. In applied math some of the traditional math content is replaced with applications of technology, and there is a far greater stress on investigation on problem solving and communication. Curricula and student books from European countries provided much of the support for the applied mathematics.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, could the minister tell me whether there are any reports available from the three recent conferences attended by members of her department, the one in Finland, the one in Spain, and the recent OECD one on current assessment issues and trends? Is there, not necessarily that you could table, but at least a reference that I can follow up in the library?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, because the three trips that I referenced here, they were sent as Canada's representatives, they were Manitoba people, our department people, but they were selected by Canada to go. The reports, the deputy's report on the chairing that he did in Finland is filed with the Council of Ministers of Education for Canada, CMEC. The deputy has filed his report with the Canadian council. The conference, the Finland conference itself apparently has not yet filed its overall conference report, but the chairman's report has been filed, and the chairman, of course, is our deputy, and the Manitoba perspective, of course, permeates his report. We have that report as well, but it is on file there.
Similarly, Mr. Mayer's experiences in Great Britain on behalf of Canada have been filed with the Canadian Council and, again, I understand that the overall conference there has not filed, but Mr. Mayer's report has already been filed.
Jean Britton's trip to Spain has been filed with the deputy here. It has just last week been forwarded to the Canadian Council because her trip was more recent, but we have those here as well. I just want to indicate they are available through CMEC for anybody interested. We have them here, and if the member would like them we could make them available or table them, but we probably would not be able to table them today because we have to go find them and bring them out. We could do that sometime next week if the member would like.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, yes, I would appreciate that.
I think that the minister has received various forms of petitions, letters, that kind of thing, from some parts of the province asking for a 35 percent proportion of the standard provincial exams to remain, rather than to move to a 50 percent. I wondered what consideration the minister has given to that.
What consideration have you given? Is that being included in the evaluation? Has the minister been talking to people who have been suggesting this to her? Has she been addressing those concerns?
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Mrs. McIntosh: I have heard from some who feel they would like to stay at 30. I have also heard from some who say, why are we stopping at 50? It is, you know, one of those philosophical things that you have to make a decision on. I think, though, as far as I feel, it is also beyond the philosophical into true measuring of certain skills and abilities. Given the way in which we are testing, which is away from standardized to standards, I think that the 50 percent mark is a fair mark to use. Fifty percent makes the test truly meaningful, still allows for the classroom to influence 50 percent of the mark as well, and it also is similar to what is happening in other provinces where 50 percent is beginning to be seen as the preferred and appropriate percentage.
Almost all of the provinces who have testing of this nature are above 30 percent. I believe there is one that is still at 30 percent, and one or two, I am not sure of the number, who may be at 40, but the rest are at 50 percent, and the trend is moving towards 50 percent. Interestingly, to my knowledge, there is no place that chooses to go above the 50 percent. It seems to be zeroing in at that as a common point for usage. I have, as I indicated, heard from some who say, could you please leave it at 30 percent or put it at 35 percent or 40 percent? I do feel, based upon all that I have learned about this type of marking, that 50 percent is the appropriate place to put the percentage. If you are testing for literacy, for example, in English language arts, there is no way that a person can cram at the last minute for this type of exam the way they might have been able to do for the previous type of examination that used to take place. I think it is an important thing to note, if people are concerned about the percentile or the percentage, I believe, based upon their past experiences of how examinations used to be done.
In the old days, and I will put myself in that category, when I wrote my departmental exam in English, because I enjoyed the subject and had a lot of ability to memorize, because I could cram and memorize, I was able to do very well. My year's work, had it not been good, could have been given a great boost up by my last-minute cramming. Similarly, a student who had had a good year but did not do the required last-minute studying could have the reverse occur. But, when you are testing for literacy, the way in which these exams are done, either you can read or you cannot read, and there is no way you can really study for it. You have to have had a long, consistent period of preparation to develop your reading ability, and, given that these tests are done that way, similarly with problem solving in mathematics and so on, I believe that 50 percent is the right percentage. While I am willing always to listen to people's opinions, I feel that there is not much more that could be said in terms of offering of ideas and opinions that would dissuade me from the conclusion I have come to.
Ms. Friesen: One of the comments that I have heard, and it seems to fit, I think, with my experience of high school exams, is that one would anticipate that in the situation that we are in now, we have had one--and, again, I am thinking in the context of the English language arts where there is much more flexibility and it is a different kind of exam. One would anticipate that the students who write in the second exam are going to do better than those who have written in the first. The teachers will be more aware of the exam; they will be more aware of the process. There are some teachers, I know, who were keen to be involved in the marking of this first exam, so that their students who wrote in the second exam would be better prepared.
When the minister says that this was a good professional development exercise for teachers, I mean, that is the purpose of it, that it would in fact enable to improve the abilities of their students to deal with this type of examination. How is the department looking at this in its evaluation of this first year's round?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the member raises a very interesting question, and we will certainly be looking to see if there is any change there. Traditionally, the experience between January and June exams has not shown any difference, but this is the first time through the English language exam, and our anticipation is that we maybe will not see any difference in the one-year spectrum in that the teachers are teaching to the curriculum. What we think is happening and we will be looking to see that this has, is that in preparation for the January exam, the teachers were teaching to the curriculum and will continue teaching to the curriculum for the June exam. If the curriculum is being followed, then we should be seeing similar types of results.
The member's question, if the quality of teaching has improved because of the P.D. experience, will that show a difference in June, is something we will find out. But basically if the curriculum is being taught, we would hope and expect that teachers will always improve and that each time they teach a course that they would be better and better. If they are constantly upgrading their skills and knowledge and knowing that the assessment tests are coming and the curriculum is expected to be followed, I think that will assist teachers in continuing to improve their teaching skills. It will encourage them not to become lax, hopefully inspire them to keep alert. I am not saying that they are not, but it will be extra inspiration for them.
In that sense, then one would expect that every year that the professional development occurs, the teaching will become better and better so that students who take the exam next year will be in a more advantageous position presumably than the ones the year before, and we are looking for a continuing progress. We are hoping to see on an annual basis scores becoming higher and higher, the standards being met more frequently, et cetera. That is our goal.
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The member's concern, I think, is that in one given year, depending upon when a student writes the exam, competition for things outside of school in that one given year might see the June students having an advantage over the January students. I think the advantage would, if there, be statistically not significant given that we are really talking about a matter of months as opposed to another whole season.
I come back to teachers who might in the course of any given year take advantage of a professional-development experience in February that might advantage the students in that semester in their division more than students in the same semester in a neighbouring division that did not partake of the same P.D. experience. So it is a matter of growth and personal development that is there. It needs to be encouraged, and the advantages or disadvantages could occur across division or between divisions as well.
I know, from my own experience taking part in professional development exercises that were division-run, feeling that the teachers in our division were getting a leg up with teachers in a neighbouring division that did not have the same professional development experience that we had gone through; therefore, our students would similarly benefit from our learning. If we are wondering whether teachers will now be teaching the curriculum and, as a result, students would be improving, we would hope that would be happening, but it does remain to be seen if this would result in a higher result in June. We do not think it is likely, given that it would be the same teacher teaching to the same curriculum. We would hope the teaching would have improved, but the results would probably be statistically not that much, but we will be looking for it.
The P.D. experience for teachers in January was in assessing, not in teaching to the curriculum and so, in that sense, the professional development skills that were required were slightly different from teaching to the curriculum, but they would have carry-over application. Any time you improve your assessing skills, you have an indirect benefit in terms of teaching.
I want to indicate, as well, when we were talking about the 50 percent mark on the provincial exam that, at the moment, it is 30 percent and it will remain 30 percent until such time as the system has had a good number of years to strengthen the student learning using the new improved curriculum and becoming familiar with the concept of writing these kinds of tests. So we will not be moving to 50 percent until those things are in place. So it will remain at 30 percent as it was this year and will be next year. When the system has had a number of years to become familiar with the way of testing the strengthening of student learning to be learning this way, for teachers to be teaching this way and acquiring the knowledge of how to assess this way and understanding how that assessment applies back in the classroom, exams will stay at 30 percent until we reach that comfort level and then they will move to 50.
The exams given over the last five years have shown no statistical difference between the January and the June marks. They were done a different way. The circumstances are not identical, but statistically January to June, we have not seen that much difference. It is expected that pattern will probably be there but, again, a new circumstance, a good question, so we will be looking to try to find that out.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, the minister put something on the record which was new to me and that was that there is no definite date--and I am assuming it is in any subject--for a move to a 50 percent final grade. Now that is new to me and so I just wanted to confirm it, that the department does not have a specific date in mind in any subject for a move to 50 percent, that each will be flexible, each will be based upon assessment within that subject area and examination results.
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, no, and I am sorry if I have expressed it in such a way that it is not clear. When I say that we will not be going to 50 percent until we have these things in place, we have a time line for getting those things in place and it is expected it would be the year 2002 for Senior 4 English language arts and math exams. That of course is five to six years from now--I will backtrack. We had originally, when the original blueprint came out and the guidelines and the framework and so on, indicated an earlier date. Then we had expressions of concern from the field about a number of items.
The member may recall a letter that was referred to by the member for Radisson (Ms. Cerilli), I believe it was a couple of days ago, that I had sent out to the field. In that letter I indicated that based upon response from the field and concerns expressed by the field about needing to lay down certain understandings, acquisition of comfort around the procedures and the policies, et cetera, that they required more time. So we consulted with the field and identified that in order to have in place those things that I identified in my previous response to the member, we would require allowing time until the year 2002 for the piloting, for the assessing, for the professional development, for becoming accustomed to the new way of doing things. We accepted, based upon that feedback, that it could not be done as swiftly as had been originally hoped.
So when I say that we will not be moving to the 50 percent until we have achieved those items, we at the same time say that we expect those things to be achieved by the year 2002. So there is a date that we are working towards, and that date has been transmitted to the field.
Mr. Gary Kowalski (The Maples): I have very few questions in regard to this line, because I think the discussion that has already taken place has covered quite a few issues I had concerns about in this line.
Just to take a few minutes to wax about assessment. Yesterday I went to Miles Mac Collegiate to make a presentation to the student body for their Enrichment Week about the value of knowing a second language. It was significant because that is the high school I went to. I had an opportunity to meet many of my former teachers who were very surprised to see that I had amounted to anything because I was not the best high school student.
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At that time there were no departmental exams, and thank goodness. It called to mind that I was not the only one that did not excel in high school but went on to be very successful by some people's standards. I remember Levi Reimer who is former president of Seven Oaks Teachers Association telling me that he barely got through high school, and it was not till he got to university that he did well.
Education is an indication of what we value as a society, and what we assess in education is also an indication of that. But sometimes there are things that are difficult to assess: people's work ethic, people's drive and ambition. As I said, although I was not a good high school student--my marks would have indicated that--many of the people who had excellent marks are now not doing as well as I am, by a number of criteria, whether it is by financial criteria, or position in life, criminal records, marital status, whatever. So what I am concerned about, and although there has been a lot of talk generally about assessment, is that I hope this standards testing never becomes an impediment to someone to succeed in life, in that it will close gates, it will close doors to people who just were not ready at that time in their life to excel.
That is one general concern I have about standards in testing. As I say, I would not have been able to go on to post-secondary if there had been departmental exams at the time that I was going through high school, and I am concerned that there are some people who just have not decided to put the effort into their academics that they should, and because of that, and because of the departmental exams, standards testing, it will close doors. So that is my brief philosophical comment, and other than that, I think the topic has been covered quite well.
One question I do have is: How does the standards testing relate to enhancing the document about teachers' remuneration--in the setting up of the standards testing, was one of the considerations how it was going to be used in teacher assessment? We now have a document out there, and it is a discussion document, as the minister has said. Part of that discussion is, will the success of schools' or classrooms' or individual students' results on this standards testing--how will that reflect on how teachers are assessed and, therefore, receive raises and that? What is the relationship between the standards testing and teachers' pay and promotion in the future?
Mrs. McIntosh: You had indicated that when you were in school, on the departmental exams some of the students performed a certain way in exams, but it did not necessarily reflect the way they ended up in terms of their success in life. I indicate to the member that the old-style departmental exams, I think, likely could have been detrimental in some ways to students, because they counted for 100 percent. They were pass-fail exams. They would not likely have assessed accurately and, therefore, could not have rewarded students who were inclined to hands-on and higher-order thinking. The old tests rewarded lower-order thinking, recall, with some application, but not a lot, but they largely ignored analysis, synthesis, evaluation, application, problem solving, critical thinking, deductive reasoning, logic, and those types of areas. They were, what we used to call, sort of standardized. You could take them, off-the-shelf exams, and off-the-shelf exams that are examining or testing old-think probably did have detrimental effects on a lot of people.
Our standards exams are looking to do the opposite. We are looking to give people a standard that can be measured and identified, that can be arrived at by a solid, well-developed curriculum. They are curriculum congruent and they address skills, not rote application or lower-order thinking. It then provides opportunity through that curricula to reach a higher standard that is identified, and I think that is ultimately to the benefit of all students. But I agree the old way of doing things, I think, might have had the effects. So I just want to assure the member that it is a different type of testing, and it is not intended to have some of the side effects that the old exams used to have.
In the old exam process, they actually set out to fail people. In the old exam process, they marked on a norm. They had a norming process, and they actually drew a curve and said, before they began to mark, a certain percentage of the students will fail, an equal percentage of the students will do extremely well, and the majority of the students will come in as average students--a very destructive way of marking. In that scenario, you could have had students, all of whom were performing at the 90 percentile, and have some of them fail, or you could have had worse, in some respects, the majority of the students performing in the 30 percentile and some of them having an A. So the marking process was designed absolutely to see certain students fail, and in my book, that is a terrible way to mark.
(Mr. Mike Radcliffe, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)
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With our marking, you set a standard that it is conceivable and possible. Every student in the class can reach the standard to some degree or another and achieve a passing mark with no failures whatsoever. So I just indicate that.
The member asked about the Accountability document and were these assessment tests put together to determine a way of assessing teacher's performance for pay purposes? No, the assessment and curriculum-congruent teaching and assessment and evaluation at the end of it were designed for the benefit of students. The whole aspect of assessment was seen as critical and integral to the whole process of teaching. It was determined that to teach year after year and to have a system that makes it possible in some, not all, praise God, circumstances for a student to pass through his or her entire learning experience without a formal evaluation or a formal ability to be assessed or the opportunity to be assessed was pedagogically unsound, and that students have the right and the requirement to have on a regular basis some assessment of their performance done so that it can be determined how well they have absorbed prerequisite skills, so that they move on to the next stage of learning with a solid foundation.
If you move a student on to teach them mathematical tables before they have learned how to add, you do the student a terrible injustice. To say, all right class, we are now going to learn to multiply without pausing to assess whether or not addition has been learned is to guarantee that that student will never ever really be able to grasp the concept of multiplication, and you increase that year after year, you end up with a student who becomes incapable. Just because it was never identified that the basic prerequisite was never learned, you eventually reach the stage where it becomes impossible for the student to move on to higher technical skills, just plain technical skills, let alone the more intricate higher level critical thinking skills. The student then becomes doomed to failure, low self-esteem, uncertain confidence, and it is a very damaging thing to do.
So we have said it is not an option to avoid assessing. You must pause periodically. We have chosen three critical ages or levels of learning at which you must pause--Grade 3, Grade 6, Grade 9, Grade 12. We have said, you must pause at these levels and do a proper assessment to ensure the children or the students are well able to move on to the next level, otherwise you severely disadvantage them. Now if these tests were designed and this assessment was designed to rate teachers for pay purposes, a logical question to ask then would be, why are you only going to rate for pay purposes Grades 3, 6, 9 and 12 teachers? What about the teachers who teach Grades 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, et cetera? So, clearly and obviously just by the fact that we are only doing the assessments formally and provincially at those four grade levels indicates that it is not being brought in for that purpose.
The question that could be asked, though, is, as you provincially develop information about the results of the assessment and you begin to identify, as we just did with English language arts, overall trends, as we said in the mathematics exam that we just put out the marks on, students in mathematics it was shown in their Grade 12 exam this year did very well in the computation, they did very well in the 2 + 2 = 4 or the algebraic functions, et cetera. Where they needed extra help and work was in problem solving or in written identification of the methodology. So we can give that information to the field and say, you are doing well here, you need improvement there. The teachers then have some ability to diagnostically improve the student's performance in areas where they have been identified as needing some improvement. That is very helpful to everybody concerned, but it does not pinpoint people, individual people, in that sense in the provincial reporting of the marks from the standards tests.
I would say, however, that a student whose class repeatedly, year after year after year, consistently fails every year, every year, every year, that that would indicate that student, that teacher would need some help, some very severe help. The question then legitimately is put, should that teacher be given a merit increase in a situation like that while re-enforcement is put in to improve performance? That is a question I do not have the answer to, but it is a question that has been asked and it is one that I ask as well.
Mr. Kowalski: I thank the minister for both asking the questions and answering them too. It makes my job even easier. So thank you for doing that for me. [interjection] That is right. But the last part of her answer gives rise to the question: If she is talking about a teacher whose students do not pass consistently or do poorly in the test, would she also say that it could go for a school where there is a trend, a division where there is a trend, that in one division consistently--is that what the minister is indicating, that would be something that would be looked at as far as merit increases?
Mrs. McIntosh: I thank the member for his question, and I apologize that I was given a document to sign while he was asking it, so I hope I have it clearly in my mind. The member, I think, was asking a follow-up to the same question on the assessment results in the exam being used for teacher appraisal or school appraisal or division appraisal, and I think there are a number of things that we can do with these assessment results that will be of benefit, first of all to students, because that is what our first priority always is, but also to schools and divisions and the system as a whole.
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I can make, as I did, a generic statement that in Manitoba, our students in mathematics do quite well in the technical computation part of mathematics but seem to require generically more work and more emphasis on problem solving. It is not that they did badly; it is just that they could do better in that area. So we passed that on to the field as a generic statement. On a division-by-division basis, then, you could do a further breakdown and say, as we did--well, I guess this is not a division-by-division breakdown--but with the French and the English language arts we found that the English students had certain skills that were being well done and others that needed more work and, similarly, in the French language, but they were different.
(Mr. Deputy Chairperson in the Chair)
The French language students, we felt, needed more work in the poetry area, et cetera; the English language students in the extrapolating of complex analysis from reading. So they were not the same, and yet we could provide to both of those fields information that would help them focus in on areas for improvement. Similarly, you can do it division by division. Each division would show different strengths and weaknesses. Then, within each division, you would have schools with a similar breakdown available for the division to use. So we provide the division with all the data on it, and the division can then say, School A at one end of our division, you really did well on problem solving, better than most of the province, but you need more work in whatever. Similarly, they could give the profile for the school on the other side of the division, which would be, presumably, somewhat different, because no one facility is going to be identical to any other. Then, again, within the school, you will have pupil profiles which can be shared with parents, that would give the parents some idea of where their children are and how they are progressing.
When you see trends coming out of these, it is easier to identify problem areas than it is when you do not do this kind of thing. We have known, and divisions have known, through the years that the vast majority of teachers working in the system perform adequately, comfortably and well in the classroom. They are competent people who go to work every day and do their job teaching the children of Manitoba. That is the vast majority of teachers.
At either end of the spectrum, however, you will see teachers who stand out for one reason or another. The superb master teachers tend to stand out by virtue of their outstanding achievements, and they are easy to spot. They are easy to spot because parents fall all over themselves trying to get their children in Mr. So-and-so's class because they know that, if they get into Mr. So-and-so's class, their children are going to do well. They will also go to great lengths to fall all over themselves to make sure they do not get Mr. Such-and-such because they know in Mr. Such-and-such's class the children do not do well, and students themselves will be able to point that out quite clearly.
The bulk of the teachers that I referred to in the first instance really form the majority and set the tone for the division. There is nothing in place right now, short of a promotion, and they are not always available, to do something to reward with extra reward those outstanding teachers who go above and beyond the expectations of the field, those master teachers, I call them, who shine with brilliance. They can be given an award, they can be recognized with plaques, they can be given thank you letters from their students, but there is nothing to reward them in the system in terms of financial compensation. Similarly, for the teachers at the opposite end of the spectrum, whose students consistently complain and avoid trying to be in that class, where you can see by virtue of the next year's experience that the bulk of the students who were in Mr. Such-and-such's class had not acquired the knowledge needed to build the next level of learning upon and yet they were all given the go-ahead to move into the next grade, there is nothing in there to prevent those at the bottom end of the spectrum from receiving a financial reward. So you see the bottom-scale teacher and the top-scale teacher moving through the system receiving their automatic increments equally, and yet you are not comparing like value to the system at all, not at all.
These assessment results would, in all likelihood, on a school-by-school basis, reveal trends. You may have a teacher who is having a bad year. Perhaps they have had a serious illness or some horrendous trauma in the family or some other circumstance that would create an anomaly year, a year of unusually bad performance, say, because of circumstances outside the school setting, or it may be that you have some other thing that has happened to that teacher which is correctable. So you see that surfacing, you ask yourself, first of all, is this an anomaly, if you are the division personnel, because the department would not do this but division personnel would in assessing their teachers, which we would hope they would be doing on an ongoing basis. Regular performance evaluations are something that teachers are entitled to receive. If it appears there is a problem, then they are not only entitled to receive a performance evaluation, it is essential that they be given one, for their own sakes and for the sakes of the students they are attempting to teach. The division can ask itself: Is this thing that we saw this year an anomaly. Was there something unusual, or is it a trend? Is there a pattern in this particular problem here that needs to be looked at?
I want to make it very clear that there are certain teachers whose students will never do well, not based upon the teacher's performance but about the kind of class they have been given. There are certain teachers who are put into classroom situations year after year after year with low-achieving, low-functioning students because those teachers are skilled at bringing those students from a 10 to a 20. If they can bring a student from a 10 to a 20 and every year their students show they are not passing, that is not a reflection on that teacher. If they have brought some of those kids from 10 to 20, they may have done a better job than some teachers who bring them from a 90 to a 95.
So when you do this kind of assessment, you have to take into account the types of students being taught, the type of setting in which they are being taught, and you know when you put a teacher in with a whole series of FAS students that you cannot expect the same results from that teacher's class but you may see a trend of the students in that class never performing well, not because the teacher is not good, it may be because the teacher is very good and therefore consistently assigned to work with those kinds of troubled students.
But presuming that the division is aware of all those factors, and they should be, because when they place teachers they should be placing to mix and match talents--some teachers are very good with gifted children, some with the bottom end of the scale, and they may not be good if they traded roles. A person may shine brilliantly teaching gifted children and be hopeless teaching the other end of the scale and vice versa. So a division must place the teacher carefully so they have the right mix between teacher and student. Presuming the division has done that, if a trend shows that repeatedly year after the year the students are not fulfilling whatever potential they may have, then the division should know they need to get in there and help that teacher. The question that has been asked is if the division is in there helping that teacher because of low performance, should the teacher be given an automatic raise during that period of revitalization and help?
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Mr. Kowalski: I am very happy the minister finished her response the way she did, because early in the response I was getting very uneasy because there was this concern that the effectiveness or the quality of teacher was directly related to the performance of the student, and as the minister finished her response she indicated, yes, there are considerations as to what is a teacher given to teach. You know, she is not responsible for that student, how they come to them. As she said, there will be teachers who some administrators will notice the ability of certain teachers to work better with high-risk students so that a principal will have a tendency to assign the high-risk students to some teachers.
With everything there is good and bad, and in the standards testing, one of the concerns--and I think I even put them on the record in last year's Estimates--is interpretation of this, because as the minister has said, when we are looking at teacher performance and if someone did not think it through, they could say, well, the students from that teacher consistently are below the Manitoba norm and therefore that must be a bad teacher. But the minister has indicated that, yes, it may be because that teacher may have gotten all the high-risk students. But, also, it goes on beyond that. The interpretation is very important. You could go to a school, maybe one school consistently has lower scores. Could it be because that community where that school is located has a satellite dish that broadcasts TV 24 hours a day into that community? Could it be because that community where that school is has an emphasis on sports and they have some champion baseball team or football team and the focus is on that? Then we could even go to divisions. If one division consistently has lower scores in these tests, but maybe there are other explanations.
I think the Department of Education has a responsibility with the introduction of the standards tests to educate the public in the interpretation of the results. Otherwise, simplistic interpretation of these results could lead to misunderstanding, could lead to attacks on either teachers, schools or school divisions because there are other reasons for low student or high student scores, with anything to do with what happens in the classroom or in the school. It could be outside the classroom; it could be what is happening in the home, what is happening in the community and many other factors.
So I guess, simply put, what is the Department of Education doing to educate the public so they could interpret these scores not in a simplistic way but in a knowledgeable way?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I quite agree that we need to help people understand the difference between this way and the old way. I realized as I was providing my answer to the previous question that I needed to put some clarity around what I meant by the students doing well, that a teacher consistently performing well or consistently performing not well, that most people interpret that automatically to mean, by high mark, low mark. I think it is very important that when we talk about a student's progress, that a good teacher will see that student come as close as possible to full potential, whatever that potential is. It may be a low potential, but a good teacher will move that student to full potential and a poor teacher will not. It is that simple.
That is separate and apart from measuring the standards, and it has traditionally not been seen that way. We are saying that we need to measure a standard and we need to know where all students fall on that standard measurement, recognizing that we can pull out of that assessment areas to work on, et cetera, but that it does not necessarily indicate the amount of progress a given student has made during the course of the academic year, nor the successful teaching that has been exercised in that classroom.
The one example I used that the member has understanding of is the teacher who does an exceptional job with low-achieving or high-risk students and, therefore, year after year is assigned to work with them. His students on a standards test may or may not do well, but it would not be a reflection of the progress that he has made or she has made with that student. But having said all that, it cannot be ignored that some teachers achieve results with their student which are poor or unacceptable, taking all of those factors into account, and we need to find a way to address that too. I do not pretend to have any answers, but I am looking for them.
In terms of the member's specific question on--oh, I had a note here that indicates that local principals and divisions would be considering all data and not just focusing on one indicator, and I agree with that.
The Grade 3 standards process is developing supports for schools for interpretation and use of the results, and I have my action plan for renewing education, New Directions, in front of me. There are some schools which could be effective, but they are not. The literature on effective schools is pretty clear.
I will just read to you from the New Directions No. 3, School Effectiveness. It indicates, first of all, that principals should be designated as the primary instructional leader in the school. If you wanted to, if you have the document, you could just check it on page 16. It says: The principals shall be the chief educational leaders of the school; shall administer and manage the school; shall participate in the hiring, assigning, and evaluating teachers; taking parental and community input into consideration in making recommendations to the school board.
I will just pause there for a moment to indicate that when I talked earlier about hiring, assigning and evaluating teachers, and I talked about the division making sure when they hire and assign a teacher that they make the mix and match good, teachers are hired by the division to teach; they are not hired for a specific grade or school necessarily. They may be in some instances, but generally they are hired by the division to teach, and therefore the onus is on the decision makers to assign that teacher to a certain place in the division. I think it is imperative when they are assigning a teacher that they have a good sense of whether this teacher would be best working with young children, middle-years children, high school students, or whether they would be good working with bright children, children performing in the middle range or children who are slow or who have behavioural problems or whatever the area is.
In the high school level, it is important wherever possible to try to place the teacher in the discipline of the teacher's experience. It is not always possible, and both boards and teachers are frustrated when it is not always possible, when a teacher who is a teacher of English also has to teach a subject that is not English. It is assumed, and the society will tell us, that teachers are once a teacher, able to teach, and that the subject area can be learned if the pedagogy is sound. There is some merit in that, but, by and large, where possible, I still like the person who is the master in his or her discipline teaching the subject.
If the placement is good, then the evaluation usually shows a more positive result than if the placement is not good, but it is imperative that there be ongoing evaluation of teacher performance. That would involve a whole wide variety of assessments that need to be done. One of them, of course, is to ascertain whether or not the students are absorbing knowledge and the ability to learn from that teacher.
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The principal shall take into account parental and community input in making recommendation to the school board about hiring, assigning, and evaluating. By that, we mean that if there is a teacher in the school who, year after year, is complained about by the majority of parents in the classroom to the administration of the school division, that should signal a concern and should signal that some questions need to be asked. That does not mean that parents can come in and tell the principal what decision to make about a teacher and the teacher's placement because that decision is not up to the parents, and the reason it is not up to the parents is because you want to avoid a vendetta occurring, where if all students are treated a certain way that the parents do not like or whatever circumstances one might be able to imagine, you do not want a vendetta or a vindictive vigilante-type thing occurring.
But if the member has ever had an experience where his child has been in a classroom with a teacher who was in that unfortunate category and has ever had occasion to call the administration or school division to say, I am really upset about the way my child is being treated or about the type of learning that is going on in that classroom, the administration receiving those complaints on a repeated basis should definitely pause to ask pertinent questions about why those complaints are coming forward, and that is what is meant by community input. They cannot ignore those kinds of comments. They may come to a conclusion that is quite different from the complaint, but they should be looking at it.
We know that instruction can make a difference in the learning performance of a child, and we need to continually focus on improving the school's conditions that can assist with a child's growth because instruction and the interaction between teacher and child is at the heart of education. It is what it is all about, and if it has a flaw and if it is not working, we are irresponsible and abdicating our responsibility and accountability by closing our eyes to a problem, if it exists.
Mr. Kowalski: Earlier in Estimates, the minister acknowledged and said that she recognizes her role as an advocate for teachers. In questioning on this line, I have mentioned how these standards test scores could be used by ill-informed people or people who interpret them incorrectly to be used against either teachers, schools or administrators. So I would remind the minister that in her role as advocate for teachers and for educators that she has a responsibility to make sure that the public interpret these test results correctly. For example, in her news release dated April 30 in regard to the provincial examinations show strengths and opportunities, I would respectfully suggest that there could have been a mention in there--it talks about the strengths of students, but it could have mentioned something about the strength of our teachers and it shows that we have good teachers in Manitoba, and at every opportunity the Minister of Education should be advocating for the teachers of Manitoba and making sure that these test results are not interpreted in a way that attacks teachers.
Mrs. McIntosh: I am just looking for it here. I believe that it did indicate a special thanks to teachers for their work with students in preparing for--I cannot find my press release, but I believe it does have a statement in there. It may not be worded exactly the way the member has indicated, but I had asked for and, I believe, checked to see that it was included, a thank you to teachers for having helped--I am not quite sure how it was worded.
I have the member passing things to me. Thank you very much.
I had indicated in there: “I was very pleased with the dedication demonstrated by teachers during the marking process. I thank them and their school divisions for their contribution. Both mathematics and language arts teachers indicated that marking the provincial exams was an excellent professional development opportunity to enhance their student evaluation skills.”
I see what the member is talking about. You were asking for--I am thanking them for their participation in the marking process and the development process and thanking them for all they did with the preparation of the assessment and the marking, et cetera. You are asking for something a little more than that in terms of an addendum to the sentence, which could have gone something like this: We thank the classroom teachers involved for preparing the students to be able to have performed as well as they did on exams, or something to that effect. I am maybe not wording it the way it should be, but is that the kind of thing that you are indicating? If it is, I agree with you, and if I am missing an opportunity, which I should be taking to thank teachers, then I think I should be conscious of not missing such an opportunity in the future because, God knows, they get little enough thanks for some of the things that they have to go through, particularly in certain classes on a regular basis.
I wanted to indicate one other thing, and I got so carried away talking about evaluation that I forgot the main point I was going to make in my previous answer, about page 16 in New Directions, because the member had asked how we could inform the public and make sure that the public was aware of why we were doing the assessments and how the results were to be used, that they were not to be used in negative ways. They are to be used in positive ways, to enhance the learning for students and to be helpful for teachers. The fact that they will pinpoint problems for which we can put in measures to assist is also a good thing; it is not a bad thing.
But point 4, on page 16, indicated that principals, amongst their other duties, shall provide pertinent and meaningful information about school and educational matters to parents and community members.
In some of the other points it also says that the schools are required to develop and communicate yearly school plans. School plans, of course, will include a number of these things. I think there are others in here as well, but I think those two, where they say you have to communicate these things to the parents, would be part of the onus on local decision makers to get this information out. Insofar as there are things that the department can do to help with that, I have noted the member has indicated it as a point of concern. The critic from the other party had also noted it as a point of concern. It is something, then, that I will be discussing with the implementation committee on educational change to see if they could provide any guidance as to suggestions we might put to the field, as to how to better communicate what this is all about because I think, especially with something new, there is always uncertainty, and, if we do not clear up the uncertainty, we will lead to misgivings, misunderstandings. It is our job, and I take it seriously. It is the job of divisions and schools to support assessment tools and to make sure that documents and parents in the field reflect what our intention is so that no one is confused.
Mr. Deputy Chairperson: The hour being 12 noon, we will recess until 1 p.m.
The committee recessed at 12 p.m.
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After Recess
The committee resumed at 1 p.m.
Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Order, please. Will the Committee of Supply please come to order. This afternoon this section of the Committee of Supply, meeting in Room 255, will resume consideration of the Estimates of the Department of Education and Training. When the committee last sat, it had been considering item 2.(c)(1) in the Estimates book. Shall the item pass?
2.(c) Assessment and Evaluation (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits $1,700,900--pass; (2) Other Expenditures $971,100--pass.
2.(d) Native Education Directorate (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits, $160,800. Shall the item pass?
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, last time I spent quite a long time on native education. It is a branch which has, over the last few years, been downsized considerably, and the minister's explanation is that the same amount of activity is going on in different forms, in regional forms. My concerns at the time last year were that this was not evident and that much of the curriculum changes were not necessarily dealing with native education, and so I wanted to follow up on that and to ask the minister to put some information on the record about what is being produced, I mean in visible terms, whether it is multimedia curriculum, whether it is new curriculum units in different parts of the curriculum system, or whether it is curriculum guides.
What has actually been produced in this past year, and what does the minister anticipate for the coming year? One of the ones I am familiar with is the updating of the resources guide for native education, which, I think, came out earlier this year, and which continues a long-standing, I suppose, bibliographic process as much as anything else in putting that together. Okay, let us start there.
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, just before I begin, I have here for tabling some information that had been asked for earlier. I have the names of the contractors for the Assessment and Evaluation branch, and the description of their contract and the amount involved in the contract. I have three copies that I would like to table at the request of the critics at the table here.
As well, I have the SAIP Council of Ministers of Education Canada reading and writing material, the reading and writing assessment material that we discussed earlier today, and I believe that in each one there is a summary in addition to the full report, the Reading and Writing Assessment 1994 highlights. So we have quite a few of them there. We have them for reading and writing, three copies in English and en français--I do not know if you want the français ones, but there they are--and also the Mathematics Council of the Ministers of Education, the SAIP Mathematics Assessment for 1993, again in both English and French, Mathematics and Mathématique. If you could reach them there, I will pass them over.
I would also like to introduce Juliette Sabot, who is the Director of the Native Education Directorate for the government of Manitoba, Department of Education and Training.
In terms of the documents produced, I would indicate to the member that we have the native studies teachers resource book and teachers resource book framework. We have the early years, K to Senior 4 released in the fall of 1995, the middle years ready for print, and the senior years printing in 1996-97. We have the teachers resource book Framework, which addresses the major goals of Manitoba Education and Training, and it intends schools to address these goals through the integration of aboriginal perspectives into curricula.
It provides the conceptual framework for teachers using the native studies resource books; it identifies learner outcomes, and assists the teachers in the development of specific lesson plans. The teachers resource book provides background information about native perspectives on issues and suggestions for developing skills and attitudes. It is intended to be used along with the appropriate grade level social studies curriculum. We also have a document called Native Peoples Resources pertaining to First Nations, Inuit and Metis, and I have that here, if the member is interested. It is a fairly thick book that we have prepared. It has some 260 pages in it, I believe, of material, and I have that here, if the member is interested, as well as the teachers resource book framework. I only have the one copy, so maybe pass it down for her if she wants to take a look at it. I only have the one copy here, and I do not want to be without one, but, if she wishes to peruse it, just maybe pass it down for now.
The cost of maintaining a directorate: even though we are going into integration and permeation, we still felt it important to maintain a directorate, so that we would have that strong central focus and emphasis on aboriginal issues, and so we saw a blending of a directorate that would provide that leadership and focus plus a need to address the whole department and have the whole department address aboriginal issues from curriculum to implementation to parent involvement. Hence, you will see the two thrusts. Prior to this, as I indicated earlier, we just had the one, and we have the two now. We did not want to go to full--having everything go into the department without that directorate to guide or to be the central focus for the preparation of documents, specifically on this area.
One of the most important ways that we believe we can affect all Manitobans and aboriginal peoples is through the curriculum, and with curriculum now being mandated, this is one way of making systemic changes. So I do not know if that provides an answer.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, I thank the minister for passing these down. I will pass them back, but I would like to have a copy of them later on. Thanks.
I am familiar with the resources book, but I had not seen before the teachers resource book framework.
Mrs. McIntosh: Just for clarification, you can keep those if you wish to. We just do not have three here for tabling purposes, so you certainly can have those. It is just, we do not have the extra two copies with us.
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Ms. Friesen: I am interested in the demographics, obviously, I think, as a government is, and I think in an earlier response, not under this section, the minister had talked about the changing demographics of Manitoba from the perspective of young adults around 2001. There is a familiar statistic on that of the one in four entering the labour force being aboriginal. But I think that, when the minister responded to the federal government's proposals for changing the Canada social transfer, there were some further projections in there which looked at the numbers of students in Manitoba of the age of zero to five, and I think, somewhere in that first decade of the 21st Century, that those numbers will be about a third of Manitoba's population if the current demographics continue. So I am looking through this line at some confirmation, I suppose, of that.
I know the minister's department co-operated in that study, and whether those numbers are the right ones. Are they ones that you are working with? Has there been any formal demographic study of, say, the first decade of the next century?
Mrs. McIntosh: I have just been talking to staff about the problems that we have attempting to get accurate numbers, and we do not have in the Department of Education and Training specific information about the numbers of aboriginal students for a wide variety of reasons. The number of identified aboriginal children, for example, does not equate to the number of aboriginal children who might be in the public schools of Manitoba because some are on reserve, in band schools, et cetera and would not be part of the Manitoba education system but rather the federal system.
That does not mean we are not interested or do not care about how they do, but in terms of counting and statistical purposes it puts them into a different category. The other thing is that we do not know many of the students who do not declare their racial background and many choose not to and, of course, we would not expect them to identify themselves by race unless they chose to. So we do not always have those numbers, and the best we can do is have an approximate and we do have some broad approximates. The member and I have talked about what the numbers are in terms of approximations.
We do know this that whatever the numbers are, there are certain trends and observations and needs that we are trying to address as regards aboriginal students. We do know that in the city of Winnipeg there is a large urban aboriginal student enrollment. We have some data that represents categories; they do not reflect total numbers. We have, again, approximately 9,000 Metis and non-Status students in 38 school divisions and that is from our Manitoba Education and Training English Language Enrichment for Native Studies listings, that is the source for that.
The Management Information Systems in the school divisions profile based on the 1991 census provides information on school age population, the total population by ethnic origin, a rough indicator of aboriginal student enrollment. The limitation is that respondents could have identified multiple origin rather than aboriginal under the ethnic information category. They might put Scottish, Irish, Indian or something, that makes the--and indeed that is the ethnic background of many people. They are such a mixture in Canada.
From the Indian and Northern Development Canada nominal roll source, we have information on the status students in provincial schools. We have 296 status students in provincial schools in Winnipeg No.1, 77 in Brandon, 59 in Portage la Prairie, 93 in Birdtail River, 45 in Swan Valley and 2,556 in Frontier, which, of course, is predominantly aboriginal. In other places in the province, we have 574, and they are not broken down so specifically. So we have about 3,700 status students in provincial schools.
The Frontier School Division, which is Division No. 48, has a total enrollment of 5,800, and about 5,000 of those in Frontier are aboriginal, including that 2,500 group that I indicated just a minute ago, and they pay nonresident tuition fees.
Winnipeg School Division No. 1 has an estimated 15,000 aboriginal students, which is a fairly large proportion when the total division is 34,300-some-odd students. Now, they vary in terms of their backgrounds. It is over a third of the student population there, and 296 of them, as I mentioned before, are status Indians, and they pay nonresident tuition fees. The division may survey schools to determine aboriginal enrollment more precisely in order to implement an employment equity program. Stats Canada, The Profile of Canada's Aboriginal Population 1995 shows us that of the 195,308 provincial students, at least 30,000 are aboriginal. So if we round it off and say 30,000 out of 200,000--I always like to go in rounded-off figures--that would not be exactly accurate, but it gives you a pretty good picture when you do that. Putting 30,000 over 200,000 gives you an approximate percentage of the number of students.
I just want to indicate for clarification that when I say 15,000 aboriginal students in the city of Winnipeg, I am including the Metis, and the member, I think, is aware of some of the tensions over Metis being included in the aboriginal population and vice versa, that there are some who contend the Metis are not really aboriginal, and this debate goes back and forth between people. The member, I think, is aware of that debate that exists. We say that we have 15,000 aboriginal students, and they include the Metis students in that number.
Ms. Friesen: I thank the minister for putting those numbers on the record, and, obviously, they come from different places, probably have different definitions of selection, but they are, I think, taken altogether, a good indication of probably the different situation that Manitoba faces compared to many other provinces, perhaps except Saskatchewan. I am wondering if perhaps Saskatchewan and Manitoba or whether Manitoba itself is looking to the future and what the planning is that is going on. That is why I was looking for projections for the future, the next--not so much even the next two or three years, but the next 10 or 15 years for the schools and the Native Education Directorate as part of that. What role does the department see itself playing in the obviously expanding area of need here?
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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, under provisions of the western provinces and the territories protocol, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories are designated as lead parties for aboriginal education, which, I think, is really appropriate because Saskatchewan and Manitoba have a very high per capita representation in terms of aboriginal peoples. Manitoba has, I think, the highest of the provinces in Canada on a per capita basis, and Saskatchewan is the next highest. So I think it is good that we, along with the Northwest Territories, which has a very intensive population of native aboriginal, Inuit peoples--I think it is very appropriate that we are the lead parties for aboriginal education or have been designated as that.
They are just beginning their work. They had a meeting. They had only two years ago that the meetings began, so they met in January of '94, they met in May of '95, and in those two meetings they drafted an overview of kindergarten to Senior 4, aboriginal education of western provinces, and they also worked to identify potential areas for joint curriculum and resources development.
The aboriginal working group, as it is called, met in Edmonton on April 12, 1996, just last month, and the participating jurisdictions at that time then included the western consortium group again: British Columbia, Yukon, Alberta, Northwest Territories, Saskatchewan and Manitoba, that little merry band that is starting to meet quite frequently. This group on the aboriginal education and the ministers and the various department officials in that western consortium are really beginning to spend a lot of time together. I think this is very good.
The agenda focused on the development of a common curriculum framework for aboriginal languages. They will be meeting again in Regina next month, the working group, next month being June of '96, to develop a joint proposal for the development of a curriculum framework for aboriginal languages that will parallel the international languages programming framework.
That is expected to be submitted to the western assistant deputy ministers in October '96 when the assistant deputy ministers meet as a group. So the target is to have that working group material ready for the assistant deputy ministers when they meet in October. That is one of their projects. They have another project in the aboriginal languages programming framework, which is the development of a generic, levels-based curriculum framework for aboriginal language courses with general and specific learning outcomes and illustrative examples depicting levels of language proficiency. That is through the whole spectrum from kindergarten to Grade 12.
The responsibility of the budget and the time frame are still being determined, but that project has now been struck. A project on bilingual, aboriginal language programming framework, again the development of a generic, levels-based curriculum framework for bilingual, aboriginal language programs with general and specific learning outcomes and illustrative examples, again from kindergarten to Grade 12, are now underway and their specific responsibilities, budget and time frame as with the previously mentioned project, are in the process of being determined at this time.
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In terms of planning the program and curriculum development, including items and issues on aboriginal matters on curriculum planning and programming, having the people on those committees is something that we feel will give that perspective to curriculum development. As I indicated earlier this morning, we will be putting different protocols in place to ensure that we get the actual representation. As I indicated, not all superintendents have been able to provide aboriginal representation, so we are looking at other ways to ensure that representation. We are still allowing superintendents and divisions to submit names of people they think would be doing well on the committees for the actual work.
The Advisory Committee on Education Finance is also charged with looking at equity issues and aboriginal dollars and issues. The categorical grants, teacher training, multiyear plans for language are all areas that can be used with good results to assist in ensuring that aboriginal needs are not ignored or overlooked. I was going to say overseen, and I thought that is not right. Overlooked is the word. I was pretty close though; seeing and looking are related in some way. The days are getting longer.
In terms of the planning process we were engaged in with the Aboriginal Advisory Committee during the consultative processes leading to New Directions, that is now being realized and we are implementing 29 recommendations that were provided to us by that Aboriginal Advisory Committee. I think they put forward some 36 recommendations and 29 of them are underway. So that has been helpful. Also in terms of planning through Distance Education and Technology, MERLIN is beginning collaboration with Science and Technology Canada to look at a province-wide network which would include First Nations sites and be extremely useful to some of the more remote and isolated communities. Well, as I said, that is in its infancy and it is a thrust that we feel has great potential.
Special needs review. When we are looking at that, of course, we will also include some of the problems that have been identified in aboriginal students that are higher in statistical concern than the nonaboriginal population. The member and I have discussed before and expressed concern about some of the statistics that affect the children in the aboriginal community, and they are worrisome and they do need to be addressed. So some of them would then enter into special needs. For example, if you look at the high incidence of alcoholism, we know, as well, then, that ultimately can come from that dilemma and that distress FAS children, and so there are connections all the way through. Many of these do need to be looked at cross-departmentally. We are aware of that.
The Native Education Directorate in terms of recommendations from the native education advisory committee has--just to give the member a sense of the types of recommendations--made recommendations on the learning environment. They made three recommendations, and those three are in progress or have already been implemented. They made five recommendations on teacher training, four of them are in progress and one will not be implemented at this time. They made four recommendations in the parent and community role. Three of them are in progress. One is supported but cannot be legislated. Special education, and I just made slight reference to it in my comment a few moments ago, there are four recommendations, three in progress, one will not be implemented at this time. Career guidance and counselling, there was one recommendation which we cannot implement. Curriculum, there were six recommendations, five of them are in progress, one is under review; native studies, there were four recommendations and all four are in progress; native languages, there were seven recommendations, five are in progress and two are under review; implementation, there were two recommendations and two are in progress. That gives the member maybe a bit of a feel for the way in which those recommendations are being addressed by government.
Ms. Friesen: I wonder if the minister could table a report from that native education advisory committee with the responses of the government as to which can be and which may not be or may yet be implemented.
I wanted to ask the minister a number of other questions in this area. One is the transition from a native education advisory committee to a steering committee. Earlier in Estimates the minister talked about the proposal, I think. I do not think we talked about the composition of that steering committee. I am also interested in who is the Manitoba representative for the western consortium and particularly in the area of aboriginal languages. Which languages are being considered for the western consortium. Obviously I would think some are common languages, Cree and Ojibway, in particular, and these are ones that do have the potential to survive because of the numbers. Dene, I would think, because the Yukon and NWT and British Columbia are participating, but for Manitoba there would be two other additional ones, Sioux and Michif, which are specific to Manitoba--well, there would be Sioux in Saskatchewan as well, but very small. So I am wondering if Michif in particular is considered as an aboriginal language in the context of this western Canadian consortium.
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Finally, I am concerned about aboriginal teachers and what the department's information is, what numbers did they have at the moment and what kind of projections do they see and what plans do they have for that. It may be something that came up, I am sure it would, in the native education advisory committee, so it may be something we could discuss from that.
Mrs. McIntosh: Just indicating in terms of the information the member requested, we can table it, we will table it. We do not have it here today. We will table it Monday or Tuesday, early next week. In terms of the question that was asked, one of the--I hope I have not omitted anything; if I do, the member can restate it for me and I will include it in the next answer--one of the department's partners in the area of education is called MANL, which is the Manitoba Association for Native Languages. The Department of Education receives many requests for services and materials in the area of native languages, and some school divisions and other jurisdictions are currently developing curricula and materials in this area, but there is no inventory of existing or materials in development that we have, and we are needing to develop that so that we can get a better handle on where we are going across the province, division by division.
Manitoba Education and Training has initiated the collaboration of education partners to participate in a project to inventory, revise and identify materials for further development as required in the province. So we have entered into an agreement, therefore, in order to accomplish this project and get the inventory properly done so that we know where everything is in Manitoba and what we can access easily. We have entered into an agreement with the Manitoba Association for Native Languages, Inc., to hire a native language researcher to carry out the work.
(Mr. Mike Radcliffe, Acting Chairperson, in the Chair)
The status of that is that currently the researcher-writer is working under the direct supervision of the Manitoba Association for Native Languages and is currently researching and compiling an annotated bibliography of existing native language materials right across Manitoba. The overall project direction is provided by a subcommittee. The membership on the subcommittee includes the Winnipeg School Division No.1, the Manitoba Association for Native Languages, the Manitoba Métis Federation and the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, and I might just pause to add here that this is the first time that those bodies have been brought together to do this kind of work, and I commend the staff in the department for initiating this project and for bringing these partners together to work on what I believe is a very important project. A draft of the bibliography is expected to be submitted by August 31, 1996. That is this summer. The future plans for the group are: To print and distribute the bibliography; to analyze the inventory of materials requiring revision; to identify areas for further development, and this area has been identified as a common-needs area by the Western Canadian Consortium. Completed materials will be made available for use and adaptation not just for Manitoba but for all western provinces and territories. We think it is an excellent project that will be very important in helping us with our continued work in this area.
In the transition from a native education advisory centre to a steering centre, the make-up will be representative of all native groups in Manitoba. The former committee provided broad advise and consultation. The next committee will provide input and will work in partnership. The current status of the native education steering committee is that it is currently being established. The terms of reference include: To act as a steering committee for the development and integration of aboriginal perspectives in the provincial curriculum; to validate the process and content as developed by Schools Program Division; to review materials and meet with subject area committees as required; to ensure that the diversity within the aboriginal population is reflected in the content and perspectives; to act as representatives to the various stakeholders within the aboriginal community; and to advise the deputy minister of Schools Program Division in matters related to the development and implementation of aboriginal perspectives in the provincial curriculum.
It is important that process developed by Manitoba Education and Training be validated and the diversity within the province's aboriginal community reflect it. We have existing basic introductory courses in the schools in Ojibway and Cree. We also have some resources but no curriculum in Dene and Dakota-Sioux. When I say we have some resources, I mean that we have teacher-support materials and things of that nature, but there is no full curriculum.
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Once we have the framework in place--and I just want to clarify something because I realize that the member had asked a question. I think I should answer that before I go on to the next; it will make the rest more clear. The western consortia, the western work will not be developing local languages. It will be creating a generic framework for bilingual aboriginal language programs, with both general and specific learning outcomes, but not the actual language curricula.
In Manitoba then, for example, we will use that framework as we implement our own Manitoba-developed specific language curricula. Our partner in this is the Manitoba Association for Native Languages, and we will be working with them for all our languages. They have a specific interest in more than just the Ojibway and Cree that already have a curricula, but it is old curricula for Ojibway and Cree. Once we get the new framework, we will be modifying that Ojibway, Cree curricula to the new framework. MANL is most interested in languages, not just one but all, including Michif, which is one I think the member mentioned specifically.
I think that as we see the framework come in, the provinces then have an ability--I say provinces, I am meaning Manitoba but the western provinces will be using the same framework. So when I say provinces, I am referring to a process that the western provinces have agreed to enter.
I think that framework will be a great value to us to update existing curricula and to implement new curricula in languages that are not currently in curriculum form. Although we do have some resource materials in some of the other languages, they are simply that, resource materials, and there is no curricula to fit them into.
So just make a final comment, that the framework would be inclusive of the big ideas, the philosophy, the general outcomes and the specific outcomes.
Ms. Friesen: The last part of my question had moved on to another topic and that was the teacher education and specifically the numbers of teachers of aboriginal descent who are employed in Manitoba schools, and, of course, also the supply of that labour market as well. The planning for that would interest me.
There is obviously an enormous growth in the number of aboriginal students across the province, particularly in certain areas of the province. What I am concerned about is the planning for the preparation of teachers of aboriginal descent who are to be able to be part of that educational system.
Does the minister have numbers on how many aboriginal teachers are employed now, and that I assume would be by self-definition. Does the minister have a sense of where the department wants to go with this? I know there are other lines for discussing teacher education, but I wanted to draw the minister's attention to it here, given the very large increase and the possible projections for the next decade.
Mrs. McIntosh: The member asks a question for which it is difficult to reply. The number of teachers who are aboriginal--we do not have statistics on that in that there are some teachers who we know are aboriginal because they are coming through a federal system or something where that is known, but we also know that we have many teachers in the public schools who are aboriginal who just simply do not state it or indicate it for whatever reason. I am thinking of one specifically, one of my daughter's favourite teachers, now retired, who is aboriginal, but it was never indicated anywhere on any form and was never utilized in any way as a factor that maybe served as a positive role model or whatever. It just was never mentioned, so he would not be registered anywhere as having aboriginal ancestry. He, on paper, could have been any ethnic background.
So we do not always know who and where the aboriginal teachers are. But having said that, we do not have figures is what I am trying to say and trying to give it a rationale at the same time as to why we do not have those figures. It may be that division by division, a division like Winnipeg No. 1, for example, might decide to track that as they consciously hire for a specific ethnicity for a specific purpose. They may have those tracked for their own usage. We do not categorize them that way here.
Having said that, we do have programs that we target for teacher training that are there for aboriginal students to take to learn how to become teachers. We presume that their employment would then be in Manitoba. The member, I think, is familiar with BUNTEP and WEC, et cetera.
We have Dr. Shapiro examining our teacher training at the universities here in Manitoba, and amongst all the other things that he is doing, he is examining the needs in the system. He has made the statement already because he has done this type of study before, he has already indicated to us the very vast differences between Nova Scotia and Manitoba for a variety of reasons, one being the make-up of our peoples.
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So in commenting upon the types of things that are required coming out of the faculty, I am sure our large aboriginal per capita population will receive inclusion in terms of access and equity, which are issues we have asked him to examine. He is looking at access, equity issues and program needs as well as the type of training and the co-ordination that might be required between teacher education institutions.
Having said all of that, I come back to our desire and need for this full integration and understanding, this cross-cultural awareness that we feel our teachers must have. Teachers, including principals, play a critical role in the renewal of kindergarten to Senior 4 education in Manitoba. They have to be empowered. They have to be equipped with the necessary tools to help students become successful learners, and that means they have to have a whole, wide variety of skills, including knowledge of how children and youth learn. Inherent in that is so important, an understanding of the child's cultural needs and backgrounds.
To help a child come to full potential, the teachers have to understand the integration of teaching methods with subject matter. They have to have an in-depth knowledge of the learning process, which includes a thorough knowledge of and an ability to apply theories of learning, including such dimensions as motivation, retention, practice and transfer. They must have an in-depth, integrated and probing mastery of the other foundational topics. They have to have a wide variety of personal characteristics which they must display when interacting with students. These characteristics include the ability to inspire and intellectually stimulate, the ability to convey appropriate high expectations, moral virtues such as caring, compassion, fairness, honesty, a sense of humour, and they have to be skilful in helping students develop fundamental values and ethnics.
I think, when we start looking at this and what I am about to say next, it does not matter if a person is nonaboriginal or aboriginal. If they understand the need of the child they are teaching, then they will understand the need of the aboriginal student they are teaching or the nonaboriginal student they are teaching.
For students to prosper economically, socially and culturally in the 21st Century, there are fundamental values they will need to develop. Those will include a sense of social responsibility, respect for self and others, respect for private and public property, honesty and tolerance. Teachers have to have the skills to function effectively in an educational system that is committed to partnership and collaboration and they have to be able to respond to student diversity. They have to know and understand that Manitoba is diverse in terms of culture, family structure, values and interests and be able to respond to those cultural differences.
We say that at the teacher training institutions, the student teachers, be they aboriginal or nonaboriginal, must each understand the backgrounds, needs and aspirations of aboriginal students and nonaboriginal students so that they can provide the best opportunities for all of the students that they teach.
I do not know if we will be able to locate someplace the actual numbers of aboriginal teachers, but I think they would have to be extrapolated from other sources since we do not have that information here.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, the minister may not have with her the numbers from BUNTEP, but that would be one indication as perhaps a five-year look at the BUNTEP numbers graduation rates and whether in fact those--I do not know whether this information is kept--but whether those students are in fact in the classroom, whether it is in federal schools or in provincial schools.
Just to clear up a couple of things that I think got lost. I am not sure I took down, and I do not know whether the minister actually said this. Who is representing Manitoba in the western consortium?
Mrs. McIntosh: I am recognizing that the member should be allowed to continue her question, but I will just throw that in because I am afraid I am going to forget again. It is Juliette Sabot who is here with us at the table today, and the other information she is asking for can be obtained. It will be in the Universities Grants Commission line, but we do have figures on BUNTEP we can get.
Ms. Friesen: Then I wanted to ask about the decrease in the budget for Native Education Directorate. In the second part it is in Other Expenditures. The Salaries and Employee Benefits remain similar, but in the other area, in a number of places there are reductions, and I wonder if the minister could give us an account of what those reductions are and what the impact will be upon the functioning of the directorate.
Mrs. McIntosh: The Native Education Directorate--I will just provide some information here, I think, which would answer the questions. There is no impact on programming. We are literally looking at decreased costs due to planned efficiencies and also a little bit of luck. We had, for example, a $1,100 decrease in telephone long distance, a saving due to lower rates. [interjection] Yes, MTS gave us lower rates. Probably they will become lower now in the future, right? But that was something that happened not because we did anything in particular except enjoy the benefit of a lower rate.
Some of the other adjustments and decreases we have had to work more actively to produce. We have a reduction of $7,800 in space lease costs by having a lesser cost for the adjustment there. We have a slight increase of $300 for technology repair requirements, but still we have that overall reduction of $7,800. We have a decrease of $1,000 from savings in printing costs, which has been redirected to offset part of the additional requirements in professional fees. We have a decrease of $2,000 from savings in staff travel, which has been redirected to offset part of the additional requirements in professional fees, and those are the types of economies that we were either wise enough or lucky enough to acquire in terms of a decrease, but the programming has had no impact by virtue of these types of economies.
(Mr. Deputy Chairperson in the Chair)
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Mr. Kowalski: First of all, I am looking at the last annual report from the Department of Education, the last annual report for '94-95--just to make sure we have some things covered. It mentioned, this year the director of the Native Education Directorate chaired a department task team which will produce a comprehensive document including protocols and guidelines for Manitoba Education and Training's involvement with First Nations in the education of band children in the province.
Has that document been completed, and is it available?
Mrs. McIntosh: I first want to indicate that Manitoba Education has always had a positive relationship with First Nations schools, and is looking forward to continued partnership. Also, since the time of the annual report, there have been significant events by the federal government and therefore our timetable and our process has been impacted a bit. I want to indicate a few things in that the First Nations schools now, and presumably in the future, that come under the jurisdiction of First Nations, by and large, do use Manitoba certified teachers and for the most part use the Manitoba provincial curriculum.
The work that we have been doing, and the member may have had to be in the other committee room when I was going through the curriculum work that we are doing in terms of aboriginal education, but that work on curriculum framework and preparation with the western consortium, given those two realities that it is generally Manitoba curricula and generally Manitoba certified teachers, then the impact of the work we are doing, both in curriculum and in teacher training, would have hopefully, positive impacts in the First Nations schools.
The member, I know by his opening comments, and also just because we are aware of these things as MLAs, will recall that in March '94 when INAC announced that Manitoba would be the lead province to dismantle Indian Affairs and--their word not mine--hopefully will be the model for the rest of the country. Although I am also hopeful, I would have left the hopefully out. I would have just said, and will be the model for the rest of the country.
However, the provincial government does support that statement, and we support the concept of First Nations self-government. There still has been a lack of definition around what self-government is in its fullest sense, and I think that will take some time yet to properly flesh out and develop, because it is a very big and complex issue.
Where we are right now as educators, or as the Education department, is wanting to be there to assist, wanting to be there to be a partner, wanting to be there to ensure that First Nations people who live in our province have opportunities for partnerships with us, and we with them. Education and Training related issues and opportunities continue to be explored and areas for potential partnerships with First Nation peoples would include the Distance Education and Technology, which I think will have tremendous applications for some of the more remote First Nations communities for joint ventures in curriculum development so we have curriculum-appropriate learning taking place and for teacher training. Since we have the whole integration model in mind in terms of having aboriginal education and aboriginal issues permeating other subject areas, this one would be most useful I think for First Nations people, and also would ensure some sort of consistency across the province in terms of the measurable-standards issue that we talked about this morning.
Band schools are regularly invited to professional development activities and they do receive our written documents. So, while they have a jurisdiction of their own, we do have a very good relationship, as I said at the outset, and we want to have partnerships with them. I believe that they have the same feelings in return for us.
Mr. Kowalski: I am not too clear on the answer. In the annual report, it indicated that there would be a document. If I understand the minister's answer correctly, it is because of certain events that have transpired, that the wisdom of doing one document at this time, when so many things are in transition, would not be a wise move. Is that the minister's answer?
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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, in essence, the member has made a correct summary. Part of the thing that we face as this growth evolves, as this situation evolves and develops, is that we need to be invited to the table by the federal government and with the native peoples. Because there have been a lot of issues that have been circulating back and forth interjurisdictionally between all of those jurisdictions, we are not yet at that stage. So the member has essentially summed it up correctly. There are some other nuances there, but we have had to modify our original plans. It does not mean that we have changed our original intent by any stretch of the imagination.
Mr. Kowalski: Also in that annual report it states that the directorate will also co-manage the planning and delivery of an aboriginal educators' conference, an event which will be held annually in the future. Is it being held annually now?
Mrs. McIntosh: The aboriginal teachers' circle at Red River Community College and the department together came to an agreement that they would be better spending their energies this year with a summer institute, so they did not have a conference. They are interacting, I understand, all the time. They are having a summer institute, or they had a summer institute? You are having a summer institute in July and not bothering with the conference this year.
Mr. Kowalski: Could the minister tell us, do Saskatchewan, Alberta, and B.C. have Native Education Directorates in their Departments of Education?
Mrs. McIntosh: Yes. I always wanted to do that.
Mr. Kowalski: Now, as far as size of those directorates in comparison to Manitoba--and we talked about this earlier in Estimates about the actual number of staff, because there has been integration throughout the Department of Education. I do not want to compare apples to oranges, but I would like to get a sense of the amount of resources put into native education in Manitoba in comparison--I am most interested in Saskatchewan because I think the native population, percentage of the population, is similar, so how do our native directorate departments compare?
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Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, we do not have the exact figures. We do know that Saskatchewan--when I said, yes, they do have directorates or branches. Alberta's is slightly different in that they fund projects as opposed to having what the other--like British Columbia has a very rich--well, British Columbia is rich, let us face it. Would that we could only have their money. They have in Alberta when I say they just go, projects--I would gladly go there and help them out if they are looking for ways to spend it. But Saskatchewan, I think, which you asked specifically about, Saskatchewan has--they call it an Indian Metis branch. They do not integrate their branch people through other departments as we have done, but they have a branch. We are not sure of the exact number of people and I am giving you an approximate--please do not hold me to the figure--but it is in around seven to nine people.
I may be off a few people one way or the other, but it is in that ballpark and theirs is, as I say, all contained within that one branch. They do work on curriculum, a little different approach. It is actually the approach we used to have. We had a similar set-up here a few years ago and then we dispersed the people. We went into the philosophy of inclusion, and I think the model we have honours that inclusion philosophy.
The mandates of these other provincial aboriginal branches, directorates, whatever they call them locally, they vary. They are not exactly the same. Some still do separate curriculum development, but we are starting to come together, as I indicated in earlier comments, on focusing in on a number of areas and issues that we think we can help each other on. We are seeing that just as a generic statement. Now I am not talking about aboriginals specifically, but in a generic sense, we are trying, right across the board, to identify, particularly with our western colleagues, as many areas of common interest and common work that we can.
Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, British Columbia, the Northwest Territories, and the Yukon really have formed partnerships. We see it in so many ways where various endeavours will come together to look for the common thread where we can support each other. I think, ultimately, be it education, whatever the issue, whatever the topic, that we can each grow stronger by that kind of co-operation, not just in terms of cost-effectiveness, but in terms of creating a quality of life that is picking the best from all, I think, will be very good for us.
I am sorry I do not have the specifics on Saskatchewan and the other provinces in the West, but I think that gives you a sense of it.
Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Item 2.(d)(1) Salaries and Employee Benefits $160,800--pass; (2) Other Expenditures $50,400--pass.
Item 2.(e) Program Development (1) Salaries and Employee Benefits $2,481,000.
Ms. Friesen: I wanted to ask, first of all, about the staffing in this department or this section of the department, and including in that the professional fees and the contract staff. Does the minister have a table laying out the positions, vacant positions, as well as, I assume, a separate listing of contract personnel and their responsibilities?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, I have the listings here. I am just assuming, for clarification, that when the member is talking about contract she is meaning term. Is that correct?
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chair, including term. I was looking at the Professional Fees line as well, including those kind of writing contracts, short-term contracts, as well as term employees.
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the staff is looking that up and while they are doing that, I will provide the Program Development Branch information. The director is Pat MacDonald who has joined us at the table. The administrative secretary is Louise Hardy. There is a Technical Support Unit which has a consultant and information writer, a word processor and editing clerk. Do you want the names or does it matter?
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, there are 51 staff years here. So I am sure it would take the minister a long time to read it out, and if she would prefer simply an organizational chart indicating what positions are vacant, what are filled, and how the section looks.
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, that will save a lot of time, and I do have an org chart as well which I can submit. There is one vacant position. The member will notice under Curriculum Frameworks unit there is one vacant position there and it is noted. All the others are filled. So I will provide both. I will give you the org chart and then the contract positions as well--staff has now located and handed over. Did you want the contract one read or just handed like the other?
I can indicate generically on the contract writing, and I will just give this brief overview and then--just to save time maybe I can give this brief overview and then provide the list of names themselves. Brief overview would indicate, looking at the first page, that all of the people on the first page are teachers, either current, seconded or retired, the majority being current teachers. They were hired to write illustrative examples for the common curriculum framework for English language arts to prepare English language arts, K-12, common learning outcomes in partnership with the Western Protocol and to participate in the Western Canadian Protocol for the English language arts workshop. Their honorariums--I do not know if we call them honorariums or fee for service--range from $300, several at $300 and several at $1,000, and one at $7,000. Then on the second page, again all current teachers, and they were hired for English language arts and mathematics, participating mainly in Western Canadian Protocol for English language arts and for mathematics to develop curriculum and curriculum frameworks with detail as to exactly what those were attached. On this page the amounts--a lot of people getting $200, one getting $7,000, one getting $5,000, one getting $9,000 for the bigger projects in mathematics.
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Then, on the next page, all teachers again, one a retired teacher and one a consultant, the rest current teachers, again, working on the preparation of mathematics. We are mostly into mathematics on this page. There is a wide variety of things being done in mathematics, but again, a lot of contracts on the preparation of curriculum frameworks, outcomes, Grade 3 standards tests, et cetera, the K to 4 mathematics curriculum, et cetera, distance education courses in mathematics, the preparation and revision of those, preparing a script and supervising the filming and editing of a video for parents of kindergarten to Grade 4 students detailing the rationale and background for the existing mathematics curriculum.
I am pleased about that when that fits in quite well with the questions I was receiving this morning from both party critics about trying to get the word out to parents as to what this was all about, and I did not realize this one was being done. It is a good piece of information on that particular question. So again it is mostly, it is all mathematics on this page. The range of honorariums or fees for service again range from a lot at $300, then the bigger projects ranging up to $5,000.
The next page has--again, they are all current teachers participating in regional in-services for K to 4 mathematics and facilitating regional in-services for divisional representative teachers and administrators for senior mathematics and participating in the Western Protocol for collaboration of basic education, et cetera. The fees for service on this page range from $100 to $324.
We then get into science and there are contracts that have been given for science. Now these are not all teachers on this page--well, a professor is teacher, sorry. I meant, like, they are not in the kindergarten to Senior 4 system. The others were all kindergarten to Senior 4. We now have a university professor preparing science education background for the pan-Canadian science project which is just beginning. We also, though, have some organizations appearing on this page. You will see the Manitoba Association for Native Languages being given an honorarium or fee for service to help develop native language material. That is a big one on this page; it is $40,000. It is the biggest one I have seen so far, but the project that they are being asked to undertake is huge, so it is not surprising it would be in that range.
There is also an education renewal project under the Manitoba Reach for the Top program, which has a small honorarium of $150 attached. There is a consultant contracted on this page for multimedia software, which is to prepare instructional materials related to the thematic multimedia teaching unit for the interdisciplinary middle years multimedia project, and that is a mouthful. That is $2,600.
We also have a consulting group from the grants program pilot projects to evaluate round one and round two of the distance education pilot projects, and that is the next-to-largest one on this page, again a huge project. It is called Proactive Information Services Inc., and you do have a teacher on this page who has received a $2,000 honorarium to integrate multimedia with the Physics 30-S Curriculum Framework implementation document.
Oh, and there is a last page, I am sorry. The last page has two teachers and a translator receiving a fee for service for other education renewal projects, and the one teacher is developing resources to assist other teachers in the differentiation of instruction, which will be extremely important now that we are going into the New Directions in the high schools. We have a translator who received a fee to translate correspondence to superintendents and principals regarding an appendix to the educational changing document, and we also had a teacher who wrote the support document Towards Inclusion: Success for All for kindergarten to Senior 4.
The total amount comes to $155,208.73. You will see a variation in there, and all the names and details and backgrounds are attached. I have sort of given the highlights for the record, but the member may wish to look at further detail included with them.
I was asked, Mr. Chairman, if I could get some material which has now come up. This was promised this morning, and I do not know how they are doing this when they are all here with me, but somehow they have been able to provide for us, as promised this morning [interjection] Yes, the deputy says it is because they are such an efficient team, and I think I should say that into the record. I am extremely proud of this staff. It is an inherited staff. I did not get to choose them myself, but when you talk about someone being blessed with an inheritance, this is one that I really got lucky on, so I am tremendously pleased and proud of my staff.
We have three copies here each of the Canada Report on Finland at Lahti for the OECD/INES Project. We have the Canada Report on the OECD/INES Project in La Palma, Spain, and we will table the third requested report on Monday, which was the one to Great Britain. There are three copies of each, Mr. Chairman.
Ms. Friesen: Could the minister tell us about the process of the contracts? How many were untendered contracts? How are people selected for the writing of curriculum, in particular?
Mrs. McIntosh: The process that is used is that we will advertise in the newspapers, and what we advertise is a generic kind of request. We will say something like--and I am paraphrasing: Wanted. People who want to write for the Department of Education, that type of thing--you see, we each look at things from our own perspective. This is a very good class, instructional. Look, the member from Maples (Mr. Kowalski), when he sees “wanted” at the top, with his background as a police officer, thinks of something quite different. He sees the top 10. But for this purpose, we probably do not put wanted at the top, Gary. My deputy passed me a note; I will not read it into the record.
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However, they will put an ad in the paper. The department puts an ad in the paper that says that they are looking for people who would be interested in doing contract writing for the Department of Education, and if they are interested, could they send in their resume and some samples of writing, or whatever they are asking for. It is generic. It says, like from time to time throughout the year. So applications will come in that way, and we then have a stable of resumes or a collection of resumes on the shelf, so to speak, from which we can make selections. Our selections are normally based on these, and the other way that we will get names on the shelf, for want of a better way to put it, is that frequently in selection interviews, people will apply for jobs, and you may have 10 people applying for a particular job. You select one, but you know, in the ones that were not successful in getting the job, that there are some capable people that you now know have particular talents because they have been through the selection process. So sometimes those names are kept and held as possibilities for contract writers because they fared very well in a competition process.
In a couple of cases we were not able to use the existing eligibility list for a variety of reasons, usually because of the very specialized requirements of the task. So then we will go to the two lists that we have on the shelf that I mentioned or we will approach people that are known to be master teachers that have been brought to our attention in some way. I will give you an example on the ones that have been submitted of that. The people who wrote the English Language Arts illustrative examples, they wrote illustrative examples for the Common Curriculum Framework for English Language Arts. Those people were chosen directly and not from the application or the response to the ad or any of the other vehicles. We went as a department directly to them and said, would you help us out here? You will see that list. The total amount there was $2,700. Each of the participating teachers received an honorarium of $300, but they were selected outside of the normal way; because of that we did not have names on the list that fit that. So that will happen from time to time but, generally, the majority of the time, people are selected by the first method that I identified for the member.
Ms. Friesen: Mr. Chairman, were there any other untendered contracts in this department, this section of the department, I should say?
Mrs. McIntosh: No, there were not.
Ms. Friesen: One of the areas that has been brought to my attention, and I think the minister has already been asked questions on this earlier, and that is the writing of the phys ed curriculum and the resignation of the person who was writing it. Does the minister have any comments that she wants to put on record about that, and what has been the impact of the resignation upon the changes in the curriculum? Has it delayed any timetables and are there philosophical issues at debate here that are of broader significance rather than of individual significance?
Mrs. McIntosh: Mr. Chairman, the curriculum writing for the physical education, as I indicated the other day, has not yet begun. The work plan is on target. The outcomes are due to be released June 29. The work at the staff level was on topics, themes and structure. Then it was a team approach. It was not being done by any one individual. The person that was referenced the other day, I do not know the individual myself, but my understanding is that her decision to seek employment elsewhere was irrelevant and inconsequential to the work of the committee because it was a team approach and not the work of any one person.
They were laying down topics and themes to be included in the curricula and whether it would be that particular staffperson or another particular staffperson really did not make that much difference because she was just one person out of many, and there are lots of other people as well qualified and as knowledgeable and able to work well with the team. I understand her reasons for resigning were personal. It has never been brought to me as an issue but in terms of the work that is being done, her retirement has really made no difference to the work being done. It is irrelevant and inconsequential.
Mr. Deputy Chairperson: Okay, it looks like a nice day out there. I am sure it is going to be a nice weekend. Everybody have a nice weekend.
The hour being three o'clock, committee rise.