EP 257 - Understanding The Changes in Ontario's Literacy Curriculum for Grades 3-6 Teachers

In this episode of the Ignite Your Teaching podcast, host Patti Firth discusses the upcoming changes in the Ontario curriculum for language instruction in 2023 and how they will impact teachers in grades three and beyond. The new curriculum strongly emphasizes student-centred learning, communication skills, digital literacy, and integrating Indigenous perspectives and cultural content. Teachers must adapt their teaching strategies to align with these changes and create a more engaging and inclusive learning environment. Overall, the changes present both challenges and opportunities for educators to enhance their teaching practices and provide high-quality education for their students. To learn more about the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.madlylearning.com/257.


📌 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

How the old curriculum compares to the new 2023 version
Why we need to update our teaching practices
What has changed and what has stayed the same

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📚 REFERENCES

Source 1: https://www.dcp.edu.gov.on.ca/en/curriculum/elementary-language/resources
Source 2: https://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/curriculum/elementary/language18currb.pdf

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Transcript

0:00

So the curriculum has changed for language in Ontario in 2023. We know this means huge sweeping changes to how our colleagues in K to three are going to be teaching. But what does it mean for teachers that are teaching grade three and beyond? Welcome to the Ignite Your Teaching video podcast where we help elementary teachers to make good teaching easy again. I'm your host, Patti Firth, mom of three, wife, and experienced classroom teacher who's made it my mission to help other teachers establish efficient routines, find effective solutions, and deliver engaging lessons over at madleylearning. com. So are you ready to ignite your teaching? There are some significant changes, but we need to understand where these changes are and how the old curriculum is different from the new curriculum. With a specific look on how it affects teachers from grade 3, 4, 5, and six. In the previous Ontario curriculum from 2006, there were four strands, Oral, language, reading, writing, and media literacy. Now these have been rearranged into connections and applications, foundations, comprehension, and composition. A lot of the expectations are the same, but they've been reworded, reorganized, and there's often new pedagogy that supports these teaching. So again, here in Ontario, we have the Connections and Applications, Language Foundations. So we're going to go through each one of the old Ontario standards and look for where it is found in the new ones. So first, let's start with oral language. In the old curriculum, this was its own strand. Now, many of the expectations in this strand were redundant and covered by other expectations in other sections, such as reading and writing. However, so I'm not really surprised to see that we have reduced this expectation to its essential components, and it's a strand within the language foundations. In this new curriculum, it's now part of this foundations and it's been expanded to also include some nonverbal language with speaking and listening. So you'll now find the oral language standards from the old curriculum is now in section B1 of the language foundations. The old reading strand remains. However, it's been split up and redefined. If you are in the K 2 space, this is where most of the changes have been made. And there are some significant changes, not just in the expectations, but more significantly in the pedagogy of how you're going to be teaching. There are also been some changes in the grades 3 to 8 grades. These are less drastic, as the goal has always been in these junior grades to use reading for learning as opposed to reading to learn. Matches the science of reading and the reading rope. Now, reading for meaning expectations 1. 1 to 1. 6 is now in the section of C2. Many of the expectations and comprehension strategies that we've used before are here again. So while you may update how you teach these skills, this section should feel familiar. Now, the next section of our reading expectations is reading for meaning. This has been moved into C3 of the new curriculum. This is talking really about analysis, evaluation, and reflection, and there's also the inclusion of new Indigenous perspectives. So still in this reading for meeting section of the old document, but these expectations 1. 7 to 1. 9 can be found in the new C3 section of the new curriculum, which has been slightly expanded. These include things like analysis, inferences, responding to text and literacy devices. I like to think of this as the deeper understanding strand. Also in this new strand is looking at cultural elements of texts, which hopefully will encourage us to be reading more diverse texts and perspectives. I personally strongly encourage teachers to be reading picture books at the junior grades as models here. Novels are, Great for when students get older and they have the ability to understand the complexities and analyze the complexities of a novel. However, I think picture books are more appropriate for grades three, four, and five. This strand also includes indigenous perspectives and the inclusion of indigenous texts. Now this section rounds out our new C strand with a big focus on style and text forms, and you'll find this section now in C one of the new curriculum. This is where more, where various text forms are going to be introduced and analyzed for specific features and matches the 2. 0 to 2. 4 section of our old curriculum standards. Now this is a great integration with writing, because while students are not expected to write in specific forms within the new curriculum, but more specific styles, this connection to reading means that we can use the various texts we bring into the classroom as mentor texts so that students can mimic and identify the differences between forms using these great models. To learn how to teach writing without forms and a focus more on writing styles. Check out www.madlylearning.com forward slash navigate. This, this right here is the big kahuna. This is section B2 of the new language foundations. This is where most of the changes will take place. This is the reading skills and language foundations. While in the old curriculum it was three expectations, it also included the three queuing system for reading. For early readers, this system, 3Qing, encourages them to learn how to read by guessing the word based on context or looking at the picture. While using syntax and semantics are still a part of learning how to read, we weren't doing it the way we should have been doing it. In Ontario, we have an appendix document. That will go much more into exactly what we're teaching at each grade level and how. Essentially what we need to remember here is what we're stopping is asking kids to use pictures and to guess words to solve what they don't know. They need to sound it out. We need to stop using leveled readers and use readers that are decodable for our younger students. For junior teachers, we don't really, we're not really using decodables because typically and in theory, our students are supposed to know how to decode by the time they hit us in grade 3. But this doesn't mean that we need to. What this does mean is that we probably need to stop relying on things like DRA and levels to determine if a student can read. We may be using them as running records or listening for their fluency, but there are other diagnostic assessments that are going to help us better screen students for reading difficulties. So in junior, this means we're really going to be focusing here on morphology, spelling rules and patterns and vocabulary. We're not just simply comprehending texts at the text level, but we really need to dig down here and code at the word level too. We don't need to necessarily lower the level if they don't understand it, but we do need to work on how they're going to understand the words that they are reading and not just the text in general. Now, this isn't simply about doing more spelling tests. We know that spelling tests don't have an impact on actually improving spelling. They look good for our mark book, make parents feel great, but they're not actually great at improving spelling overall. What is a systematic teaching of spelling patterns and rules in the context of reading and writing, webinar later this week. This is the last strand of the old reading document and has been sprinkled everywhere, but mostly you're going to find it here in the A1 and A3 sections, which are transferable learning and critical literacy. Now don't skip over these expectations. They are keys to helping your students consolidate what they have learned and actually being able to retain things. Now on to writing. Writing in the new curriculum is based on the writing process, however in practice we were mostly taught to teach writing about specific forms in specific units. I've always been a proponent that this is an ineffective way to teach writing because it is too much detail too soon. More on that in the webinar. But this new curriculum is more specifically laid out to follow the writing process. The first section focuses on gathering, planning, organizing. In the organizing stage of writing. Now, even the research will tell us that students need to know how to do this and be explicitly taught how to organize ideas for various styles. They need a few options, but what they don't necessarily need is a different organizer for every different variation of narrative form. I mean, you can have one, but it isn't necessary. They need to consolidate what they need to use so it helps them to organize their ideas. This is the next step in the writing process, and again, both the old and new curriculum focus on this in a very similar way. The biggest difference I see here is not what we teach, but how. This section talks about drafting, audience, purpose, and point of view. It also includes the editing and revision portion of the writing, and compares the old expectations of 2. 1 to 2. 8 to the new expectations found in D2. Once again, we have a section of the writing curriculum that has been earmarked for foundational skills. Well, this is more like a footnote in the last curriculum. This is a much more prominent feature in the new one. There's an appendix to this section as well to talk specifically about what is taught. Expectations 3. of the old curriculum now can be found in expectations C3 and D3. Now the biggest change here is that we will need to move into the forefront of what we are teaching. This is where we're beginning to teach about grammar and punctuation. So often this has been a topic that we as teachers have avoided. Probably because many of us have no idea. Because we are part of the whole language generation of kids. And we're never taught this explicitly ourselves. So now is the time to learn alongside our students. Because learning how to map a sentence and identify parts of speech is going to be a really important skill. Finally, our writing is focused on the publishing and presenting phase. Expectations 4 of the old curriculum are now reflected in section D3. This is where we are going to be focusing on the publishing and preventing phase. This is going to happen in language, but there's also going to be so many opportunities to embed and transfer this learning and publishing expectations into things like presentations for science and social studies. The next is media. Now, I'll be honest, I'm glad to see this one changed. It was a little outdated. Expectations 1. 1 to 4. 2 of the media literacy strand in the old curriculum document have now been updated to be A3 in the new one. The move here is more about online behaviors and responsibilities and how to use media appropriately. It's less about creating media types and more about how to use media and technology in a responsible way. I see this as really moving away from the standalone media lessons and moving towards integrating media into everything we do. Thank you for listening to episode 2 57 of ignite your teaching podcast. To learn more about the resources mentioned in this episode, please visit our show notes@wwwdotmadlylearning.com forward slash 2 57. If you're tired of the hours and hours, it's taking you to plan your lessons and find resources to meet the new curriculum. Then we have a solution for you. Ignited literacy is our full year comprehensive program for innovative teachers. That will give you everything you need from start to finish. Learn more@wwwdotignitedliteracy.ca.