Day 2: Destreaming & The Toronto School Board
June 7, 2022 Continued...
It was a full day here in Toronto. After spending the morning hearing an overview of Canada and Canada's school "boards" (Districts), we headed to a local high school to hear from the Toronto District School Board.
Principal of the Central Technical School, Anne Chirakal, began the meeting with a personally written land acknowledgement and brief overview of her vision for her school. Her land acknowledgement not only honored the indigenous peoples that lived on the land before but of the formerly enslaved people who survived in the city. I am really appreciating the intention to be inclusive in just the 2 meetings we've attended since arriving to Canada. Here is the Land Acknowledgement Protocol from Toronto School board.
Principal Anne shared that she often is doing student audits within her school asking groups of students directly...she wants to always give students a seat at the table.
What do we need to stop right now at our school?
What do we need to work on?
"What are the most powerful ways all students can thrive?" -Anne Chirakal
Here are some powerful quotes from the rest of the school board meeting:
"For so long adults have just run the show without student input or voice"
"How do we use student voice authentically to guide our classrooms?"
"Teachers have a choice- kids don't have a choice"
Destreaming
We learned that Toronto School Board is doing so much learning and research and through that research they learned that "streaming" students creates inequitable realities for students. My co- Fulbrighter, Marissa Foti wrote in her blog, "Jason To, the math coordinator, presented on the movement to “destream” curriculum which Hang mentioned in her presentation this morning. Destreaming is essentially “detracking” in our terms; a push to stop tracking students into honors tracks or AP tracks-- which over time lead to inequities and correlate with other socio-economic and often racial factors-- separating students early on into the haves and have-nots. The Toronto School Board prides itself on being one of the first to do this important equity research and put it into practice in their schools-- a movement which many other school boards have joined."
You can read more about destreaming here and within my guided question reflection.
