Translating, restraining kids, teaching multiple grades at once: Alberta teachers describe complex classrooms

What does a complex classroom look like? Here’s a description submitted to CBC News from an Alberta teacher.

It was two years ago. She recalls sitting on the floor of her Grade 1 classroom outside Edmonton, restraining a child in her arms because he was banging his head on the floor. The side of her mouth swelled from a headbutt.

But she continued teaching.

The substitute assistant didn’t know the right hold to use on this autistic child, and this teacher had 26 other children in that class.

She said 10 of them were learning English and two spoke almost no English at all. They had seven different languages between them.

There was also a student with a speech delay, one she described as gifted but with severe anxiety, and another that she said showed symptoms of ADHD. There was one who recently lost their dad, she said, and another who was removed from their home by police.

• What has been your experience with Alberta schools? Whether you’re a teacher, parent or student, we want to hear from you. Send an email to [email protected]. 
• Read our Inside the Classroom series at cbc.ca/inside.

It’s overwhelming, the teacher wrote to CBC News after detailing her experience working in a complex classroom.

“That day I cried on the way home because I realized I hadn’t had a single moment to check on my little who had lost their dad to make sure they were OK,” she said.

The teacher spoke on the condition we don’t name her so as to not identify any of her students. She showed us documentation of the injury and we double-checked her description of the class with a colleague.

After the provincial teachers’ strike this fall, Alberta Education promised to collect and release data on classroom complexity — the additional student learning and behavioural challenges that teachers deal with every day.

It found 4,486 classrooms in Alberta have high rates of complexity, and in February assigned funding to put some of the promised new teachers and educational assistants toward a system of support teams in those schools.

But data rarely tells the full story. So when CBC News emailed a questionnaire to thousands of Alberta teachers in January, we invited them to share what complexity looks like for them. Out of all the respondents, more than 4,000 teachers participated in this question.

Here is a snapshot of what we heard.

Severe complexities can put a whole class behind

As one teacher wrote, “complexity is complex.” There’s no easy way to describe what’s happening as each class is unique. Sometimes it’s just the sheer number of small challenges, and the fact that so many students are filling the space between four walls.

But in classes like the one described above, we heard that specific, highly complex students are exponentially increasing the challenge.

Several teachers reported getting concussions or whiplash from older students with learning disabilities, who get overwhelmed and lose control. 

Thirty-eight teachers and principals specifically mentioned students who need diaper changes, and at least 80 respondents mentioned kids who regularly bolt from the school if they’re not closely watched. Other students need nursing support or help moving from class to class.

A Calgary-based kindergarten teacher flagged how this can set the whole class back. She says she has one student who is almost non-verbal and will start screaming if upset by something as simple as his shoe not fitting quite right.

It means the rest of the class is behind on reading. Normally, the class would be putting letters together into words by this time.

More English learners but less support

Another factor adding complexity in recent years is the number of students who speak little English.

One teacher wrote in saying they had Russian, Ukrainian, Afrikaans, French, Arabic, Albanian, Filipino and Portuguese all spoken in one class, and many said they’re often translating assignments just to help overwhelmed kids cope. In some cases, teachers reported half the class or more is in the process of learning English, and they don’t have time to teach the basics of English because they need to focus on delivering the provincial curriculum to the rest of the students.

Bernie Dowhan, who teaches Grade 9 in northwest Calgary, has 30 students — about half of whom are trying to learn English or have identified learning challenges.

“When I’m teaching a concept of critical thinking or immigration in social studies, I feel for these students because it’s going over their heads.”

“I do try,” Dowhan said. “Like, if it’s a slideshow or a lecture, I’ll say: OK, you’re gonna write down three words and we’ll try and catch you up on it after the class. … Where do I put my focus — to the majority who are English proficient? Or do I focus on that one or two who might be three, four or five grades below?”

Sometimes students get temporarily pulled out of class for intensive help to learn English, said Dowhan.

“I wish it could happen on a more regular basis.”

Dowhan has been teaching for more than 20 years and says “the complexity has always been there.”

What has changed, he said, is having extra professionals who can sit with a student to help them catch up.

“That hasn’t been there the last few years.”

Rural schools trying to teach more with less

Complexity looks different in rural areas, but from what teachers describe, it’s often no less intense.

Classes tend to be smaller, but teachers say they have fewer specialists to help with more complex students, English language learners or those who need mental health support and counselling. And they told CBC News they’re trying to tailor lessons to a greater range of student ability in one class.

For Jody Peebles, complexity means trying to teach five different courses in one. She works at the high school in Crowsnest Pass, and recently taught Math 10-3, Math 20-3, Math 30-3, Math 10-4 and Math 20-4 in the same room to about 30 students.

In Alberta, –3 or “dash three” courses are the less academic courses for students heading into the trades. And 10/20/30 roughly equates to Grades 10, 11 and 12. “Dash four” courses are focused on life skills. Each has a full provincially-designated curriculum.

Because she had five classes in one, Peebles couldn’t stand at the front and lead students through the concepts, she said. She had to divide the students into groups and let them teach each other, stopping at each table to help.

“These are the students who require the most academic support, the most hand-holding. They hadn’t been very successful in math leading up to this point,” she said. “It was absolutely impossible for me to teach the entire curriculum for any of them.”

And she worries it had a long-term impact.

“If they were doing an apprenticeship or went to trade school [after her class], I guarantee they would have struggled with any math component. They wouldn’t have had the confidence that would have been required.”

In an email to CBC News, Alberta Education confirmed 11 per cent of English-learning students are outside the province’s main centres. They’re the children of immigrants working in agriculture, meat packing plants, small town health-care facilities, restaurants and more.

For example, Claresholm is a town 120 kilometres south of Calgary with a junior high/high school with about 400 students. High school English teacher Alexander Yanko said his most complex class had only 21 students, but four of them knew almost no English; they spoke Indian, Mandarin, Spanish and Japanese. At that time, the school had few additional resources to help.

Yanko said he’d have to make five versions of every assignment, relying on tools like Google Translate or ChatGPT.

“I can’t just give them a chapter from S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and say, ‘OK, answer these chapter questions as best you can.’ They have no idea, right? So I need to give them a story in their language so they can at least start talking about what they think the message is,” he said.

“I am an English language arts teacher, not an English language learning teacher, not a special education teacher.”

He says this year, the school reassigned a teacher to run an English-language learning class.

The burden of feeling ineffective

The final theme CBC News identified in the teachers’ submissions was how debilitating the level of complexity is for them, how demoralizing the sense of failure can be, and the impact it has on the students in class.

“I constantly feel like I’m drowning,” said one early-career teacher from Red Deer.

“It’s impossible to support anyone,” said a Calgary teacher.

“I used to love my job. Now I’m just trying to survive it,” said a Grade 5 teacher from the Edmonton area.

“Teaching happens in the gaps between emergencies,” added a first-year teacher with 30 nine-year-olds, including seven with complex needs and a kid who frequently tries to run away.

Last semester, Devon Peck taught a class with 36 students in Rimby, Alta., about 50 kilometres northwest of Red Deer. About two-thirds of students were in Grade 11 and the rest in Grade 10.

“It was pretty discouraging last semester. I would often feel when I left work that I wasn’t successful, like I missed somebody,” said Peck.

“It’s damaging to relationships, and that’s kind of at the heart of what we’re doing.”

But it wasn’t just a matter of how many students were in that class. They were in the less academic stream, often because they had learning or behavioural challenges. Some needed support due to family issues or addictions, some needed individual learning plans, and 10 were chronically absent, missing at least one class a week and needing extra help to catch up.

The students heading into trades or other jobs out of high school would benefit from one-on-one feedback on their persuasive writing, but Peck couldn’t do that. She had to increasingly shift to multiple choice questions on tests rather than written answers to manage the marking.

And even though she had an educational assistant for that class, she couldn’t keep up.

Meanwhile, Peck felt like the quiet, well-behaved students got ignored.

“That was a pretty disheartening experience. It’s hard to give so much of yourself when you realize it’s not really getting you anywhere.”