Manitoba educational theorist gives Sask. back-to-school plan thumbs up

Overall, Michael Zwaagstra thinks the Saskatchewan government’s Safe Schools Plan is pretty good.

Zwaagstra is a teacher in Manitoba as well as an educational theorist.

He said there isn’t anything specific in the plan that he would change, saying it makes sense for the province to give a broader overview of regulations and then allow school divisions and schools themselves to fill in the details for their own particular needs.

Saskatchewan closed its schools in March due to COVID-19. In June, the government announced in-person learning would resume in September, and released guidelines on Tuesday.

Zwaagstra said people need to look at the pandemic in a long-term way, lasting for two or three years even, and need to look at what to do about the learning environment for that long.

“We need to recognize that we’re living with this virus and we need to take a common-sense approach here,” Zwaagstra said during an appearance on Gormley.

Zwaagstra said we know student learning is incredibly important, and the more restrictions you put in place, the harder it’s going to be for students to learn. That means more will fall between the cracks.

The province has a contingency plan that if the pandemic situation gets quite a bit worse, then it could revert all learning to remote or distance learning.

Zwaagstra said there are a lot of things we learned about remote learning at the end of the last school year, including that it’s a stop-gap measure that only works on a limited basis. He believes the only reason it wasn’t a disaster in the spring was because teachers could rely on the relationships they had already built with their students.

“Even then it didn’t work for a lot of students,” he said. “You’ve got uneven access to technology (and) you have situations where schedules just don’t match.”

Zwaagstra said remote learning should be a last resort because in-person learning is better for a majority of students. He said distance learning doesn’t work when it’s mandatory, and the younger a student is, the worse distance learning works.

“Teaching a Grade 1 student how to read online is absurd. To expect that that’s reasonable, it’s just simply not. And even high school students, most struggle with distance learning because it requires generally a lot more time management skills than the average high school student tends to have at that point,” said Zwaagstra.

In Zwaagstra’s opinion, the idea that schools are an inherently dangerous place isn’t helpful. But he also said there’s always a certain level of risk in sending kids to school.

“But it’s important to recognize that these back-to-school plans that are developed in the provinces are done in consultation with public health officials, and so I think we can take some measure of comfort that it’s not that governments are simply going on their own here, they’re relying on medical experts looking at the situation as a whole, and looking at this as a long-term situation that we’re facing,” he said.

Some people have said class sizes should be smaller because of the pandemic, but Zwaagstra says that would require more teachers and more classrooms and would cost too much.

“That’s just the reality of how schools are set up. We can’t completely redesign the entire school system for the pandemic, we have to do what is actually feasible,” said Zwaagstra.

When it comes to teaching students who are physically distancing, Zwaagstra said it’s not realistic to expect kids will be two metres apart from one another at all times throughout the day.