Blog Entry #2: How does the BC ELA IRP help and/or hinder you as a beginning teacher? Describe who today's ELA students are and how they learn. (Grade 6-7)

     The BC ELA IRP helps new teachers in a variety of ways. First and foremost, it presents an educational ideal that new teachers can use as a guideline for their lessons. As teachers gain more experience, they probably would not refer to the IRPs as much, knowing from their classes what lessons were successes and worth doing again. New teachers will most likely lack a reservoir of lesson plans, and so in making new ones can go back to the IRPs. Second, it standardizes the goals for the province, benefitting new teachers that may be more transient in the beginning of their career as they look for employment, different teaching settings, and experience. It can also provide new teachers with a text to show their students, which may build both teacher and student confidence in the lesson direction. Third, the goals are broad, allowing for a diversity in what successful lessons and students can look like.

     Unfortunately, the same elements of the IRP that can help new teachers, can also hinder them. First, the IRP as a set of ideals, fails to address problems new teachers may have with implementing them. Part of this issue is that the IRP is so general that it becomes vague. Often new teachers need more instruction, direction or guidance to ensure their lessons are successful. There are no specific strategies that can be applied directly from the IRP. There is no "new teacher handbook," despite the fact that one could argue there are several key challenges that new teachers will almost universally face. We are told many times that we as new teachers should not try to re-invent the wheel, but yet the IRP, a standardized reference, does not provide us with a wheel. The other part of this issue is that the IRP does not address chronic problems within some school systems, such as underfunding, increasing classroom sizes, and students who did not achieve their previous PLOs, or the solutions to those problems.

     Second, the legality of the IRPs could be unclear to some new teachers. For example, the IRPs are legally required, but who is actually accountable for seeing the PLOs are met? Also, copyright infringement is mentioned in the IRP but does that not limit a teacher, especially a new one, from trying to build up interesting and relevant topics for students? Moreover, how can such a broad document possibly be enforced? We have all heard stories about students completing a grade without having achieved the expected level in their subjects. How do new teachers, or parents for that matter, address that issue?

     Our ELA students are a diverse group in respect to who they are and how they learn. Diversity in the Canadian classroom must be a huge factor in how teachers construct their lessons. Our students are of different cultural, socio-economic, and linguistic backgrounds. They have different life experiences, family dynamics, health and social issues. They have incredible amount of previous knowledge to bring to the classroom if teachers let them. Much time and study has been put into HOW students learn. There are theories upon theories of different learning style groups such as, visual, audio, kinetic, cooperative, independent, concrete, and abstract to name a few. The most crucial point that I have learned so far from all of this information is that students learn different things in diverse ways. They may also learn differently from day to day depending on what is going on in their lives. Therefore, diversity and sensitivity to students must be reflected in lessons.

     Students in grades 6-7 may face specific challenges and opportunities. For some, this level will be the last time students have one teacher everyday who has a comprehensive view of their progress, interests, and motivations. For others, they might be facing a more compartmentalized, subject based education, possibly even further separated into remedial, regular, or advanced levels. This could present opportunities for those that want to pursue specific subjects or electives, and could hinder those that might still benefit from a broader, integrated learning. Furthermore, students coming up to, or having just transitioned into a new school setting, may be facing different class and social dynamics that will most likely also influence their education. These students are learning as much from their peers and what is outside the classroom as what is inside the classroom.