How To Help Your Child During A Teacher Strike/Lockout
The History Of Teacher Strikes In Alberta
My mom taught in the public high school for over 40 years. I remember when she joined thousands of Alberta teachers on the lawn of the Alberta Legislature in 1992 to protest unfunded liabilities of the teacher pension plan. That teacher strike left students without instruction for 5 to 30 days, depending on which school division students attended.
Then the teacher strike of 2002 lasted 15 days and focused on the provincial government's mismanagement of education funding, class sizes, and overall working conditions.
Fast forward to the 2020-2022 school years, and the disruptions that were imposed on public schools had an even greater negative impact on student learning as schools were closed for even longer periods of time and online learning was extremely fragmented.
The Impact Of Teacher Strikes
It is difficult to imagine being a parent of school-aged children during any of these times, as the responsibility to academically educate your own child is, in reality, a full-time job.
Teachers work extremely hard to help all of their students practice and become more proficient in all the expected provincial curricular outcomes. When teachers cannot be in the classroom to do their jobs well, it is the students who suffer significantly.
The Current Teacher Strike In Alberta And Its Impact
In Alberta, there is currently a motion to strike and a motion to lockout, with a deadline that is swiftly approaching. Thousands of parents could soon be in a scramble to find child care, and thousands of students could soon be without academic instruction for an indeterminate amount of time.
Foundational academic skills are practiced and honed during the K-6 elementary school years. Regardless of one’s first language and/or ethnicity, basic reading, writing, and math skills are universal and necessary for developing and practicing critical thinking skills.
The provincial curriculum can be overwhelming even for the most seasoned teacher. When a parent is left to try to manage the education of their child as well as manage their household and career, the task becomes insurmountable.
Even when situations dictate that you cannot send your child to school for various reasons, a parent may start to become overwhelmed with feelings of responsibility and remorse for creating interruptions to their child’s academic learning.
The Importance Of Intellectual And Massed Practice
Intellectual practice of provincial student learning outcomes, whether done at home or at school, will guide the child’s brain development in a positive manner. Intellectual practice is better than massed practice. Massed practice is found in unit studies where the same topic and/or concept is practiced in a homogeneous way.
Intellectual practice involves mixing up problem types, which improves one’s ability to discriminate between types, identify the unifying characteristics within a type, and improve one’s success in a later test or in a real-world setting where one must discern the kind of problem one is trying to solve to apply the correct solution.
At Education Rocks, we offer both types of practice as we know that all students learn in their own unique ways. Massed practice is found in our unit plans. Intellectual practice is found in our daily lesson plans for all 180 instructional days of each school year.
How We’re Here To Support You
If you are concerned about the impact the loss of instructional time will have on your child and wondering how you will ever have the time, effort, and patience to help your child learn foundational academic skills, we are here to help you!
We offer a way to streamline the learning process. Whether it is a teacher strike/lockout or familial situations that prevent your child from attending school, you can feel confident that they will develop the necessary grade-level academic skills in the interim with minimal parental investment.
You can explore all of our unit and lesson plans in our K-6 Learning Library on our website, or if you prefer, you can browse our products on Teachers Pay Teachers. Also, if you’d like, you can fully preview all the unit and lesson plans here.
Let me know if you have any questions about any of the products in our K-6 Learning Library! You can email me at hello@educationrocks.ca.
Thank you for reading this blog post on how to help your child during a teacher strike/lockout. I wish you and your child(ren) or students all the best in this upcoming school year!