Implantation of a
Special project
in an educational environment
WHY AND HOW?
HOW DO WE DO IT?
Let’s be clear: it’s the teachers, in collaboration with all the staff and management of a school, who help to set up a specific project at the school. Teachers and school teams need to be able to think and work together with parents. Some of the issues encountered when setting up such a plant may be :
- work together differently,
- modify professional practices
- materially reorganize the school.
The law provides governing boards with tools to help them move towards implementation (or not!):
- conduct a student survey
- survey the school’s parents
- set up a committee to reflect on or work on the project
- call on the PPO
- invite parents to one or more information meetings
- Individually, a parent can choose a school to best meet his or her child’s needs, and thus gain access to a school offering this program (Education Act, section 4).
- take advantage of the opportunity provided by the revision of the educational project to carry out a more in-depth review, including the program itself
- advise the school board on the intention or relevance of having this program at its school
- ask the principal or director to propose an implementation strategy for a reflection on the subject
- approve or refuse to approve the time allocated to each subject
In a nutshell
The implementation of a special program involves :
- the clash of perceptions with research findings;
- acceptance of individual change, and
- going above and beyond for students
In the regulated context of public education, the challenges are as follows:
- time to establish a good working relationship.
- be engaged in good faith throughout the process,
- use language that everyone understands,
- understand each other’s concerns.
EXAMPLE OF A SPECIAL PROGRAM: INTENSIVE LANGUAGE
Generally speaking, parents, the job market and society in general have expectations linked to openness to the world, which encourages the learning of several languages, especially English.
How do you do this when you attend a public school? How can we achieve functional learning of a second language in an educational setting? The intensive English teaching project meets this demand.
WHAT IS THE INTENSIVE ENGLISH PROJECT?
The Intensive English (AI) project, commonly known as Bain linguistique (BL), has been present in Quebec for over 40 years!
Three factors characterize intensive English:
- more time for teaching English;
- concentration of teaching time; and
- enrichment of the English as a Second Language (ESL) program of the Quebec Education Program (QEP).
It’s important to note that we’re not talking about immersion, as this implies teaching all subjects in a language other than French, which is forbidden by the Charter of the French Language.
Several guides are available, mainly for teachers and school teams:
WHAT DOES THE RESEARCH SAY?
In 2019, the Ministry of Education published an evaluation report on the effects of AI\BL on departmental exam results in French, mathematics and the regular English program.
Findings
Not only did the students achieve higher results in the English tests, as expected, but also :
- French language of instruction (writing), and
- grade 6 mathematics.
In 2014, the Conseil supérieur de l’éducation also indicated that:
- learning a second language is not at the expense of one’s mother tongue;
- it can help consolidate mother-tongue skills, because it involves a process of reflection on how language works.
- and there’s no evidence that AI\BL can harm allophone students.
And in 2016, CEFRIO published a case study on teaching English in small schools with multigrade classes. The findings here are also similar, in that the conclusion is that this type of networked learning is promising.