Ontario looks to expand practical component of teacher education: minister

Changes to how new teachers in Ontario are certified are set to be announced next year and will entail a larger practical component, the education minister is signalling.

In a year-end interview with The Canadian Press, Education Minister Paul Calandra said he is looking at shortening the length of teachers’ college and has been looking over teacher supply and demand numbers.

“Either way, I will say this: The one thing that we keep hearing over and over and over again is that prospective teachers, student teachers, need to spend more time in front of a classroom before they get out into a classroom full-time,” he said.

“We’ll be in a position early in the new year to help people better understand where we’re going on the teacher certification, but suffice it to say more time in front of a class will be an element of it.”

Ministry of Education documents obtained earlier this year by The Canadian Press through a freedom-of-information request showed the province has been looking at how other jurisdictions certify teachers, and findings that longer programs do not make better teachers were highlighted.

Real in-class experience, however, does appear to make a difference, according to the research the ministry compiled, with teachers who complete longer practicums more likely to stay in the profession.

It also noted that Ontario has among the shortest practicum lengths for teachers, at 80 days. In four provinces and territories, including Ontario, they are between eight and 12 weeks, while in the rest of the country the length is between 14 and 24 weeks.

Teachers’ college programs have generally been two years long, divided into four semesters, for the past decade. In 2015, the then-Liberal government doubled the length of the program in response to a teacher surplus. At that time there was a nearly 40 per cent unemployment rate for teachers in the first year after becoming certified.

Making the programs two years long caused admission rates to plummet, and there have been calls from teachers’ and principals’ groups to return to a one-year program in the face of teacher shortages.

The length of teachers’ college was one of the main supply issues highlighted in the ministry document, and on the demand side it noted growing student enrolment, then estimated at 180,000 more students over an unspecified period of time. Internal ministry documents have also predicted worsening teacher shortages in 2027. All of those predictions, however, were made before the federal government began sharply reducing immigration numbers, which could have an impact on the number of students and demand for teachers.

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The Ontario Principals’ Council and the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario are among the groups that have called for a return to one-year programs.

David Mastin, president of ETFO, said the ministry should be focusing more on retention instead of recruitment, pointing to data from the Ontario Teachers’ Federation that suggests there are tens of thousands of teachers who are certified but not currently working in the province’s education system.

“There’s just not a shortage of teachers in this province,” he said.

“There are lots of certified teachers. What there’s a shortage of is the incentive to draw those certified teachers who have invested six years of their educational life to becoming a trained teacher, who are choosing not to be doing that job. It’s tough working conditions, there’s violence, there’s a lack of respect, there’s a lack of supports for students that this group of people care so deeply about, and they’re leaving the profession.”

The Council of Ontario Universities has said post-secondary institutions are working to “compress and streamline” teachers’ education, and suggested that universities where teachers earn their credentials do not want to see programs shortened.

“By ensuring educators are trained to meet the complex realities of today’s classrooms, we are investing in a stronger education system — one that empowers every student to succeed and contributes to the social and economic resiliency of our province,” the council wrote in a fact sheet this summer on teacher shortages.

“Today’s challenges require our teacher candidates to have more preparation, not less.”

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