The Agenda: Teaching Towards the Future

First of all, the #tag is #learning2030. Check it out on Tagboard

Every Ontario educator needs to watch this episode of The Agenda. Recorded this past Sunday at Trent University as part of TVO’s Learning2030 series, the 54-minute episode digs deeply into the state of learning and education in Ontario today, and asks difficult questions about the system’s readiness to educate the graduating class of 2030.

The Agenda’s Steve Paiken speaks with a panel featuring Michael Fullen, Camille Rutherford, Cathy Bruce, and Ron Canuel, and features wonderful studio-audience interviews with ecoo tweeps Heidi Siwak (@HeidiSiwak), Zoe Brannigan-Pipe (@zbpipe), and Colin Jagoe (@colinjagoe).

Ontario’s new Minister of Education Liz Sandals, and Ontario’s new Premier (and former Minister of Education) Kathleen Wynne must hear the significant challenge to their mandates in panelist Ron Canuel‘s closing words:

” — the inertia context in education is profound … the system is a big C conservative. The people working within it are trying their best to be creative, are trying to be the risk takers … teachers do gravitate towards this … there’s not one teacher who wants to do a lousy job out there …

“I’m going to say this now, and I may really upset some people, but I think there are some district leaders, and Ministry folks, that have really got to change their paradigms, and they’ve got to show a lot more courage to bring this forth, because without the courage, we’re not going to see the change.”

[Ron Canuel is President and Chief Executive Officer of the EdCan Network. He has over 34 years of experience in the public education sector, most recently as Director General of the Eastern Townships School Board in Quebec, where 1:1 computing initiative was undertaken over ten years ago.]