When I asked to be reassigned to Grade 8, I made the move knowing that I wanted ot be part of a dynamic team. With all due respect to my colleagues at the high school, I had felt isolated and adrift for a very long time, and I saw the opportunity to work closely with 2-3 other teachers as a chance to learn and maybe approach the classroom in a different way. The Grade 8 team were already known for their pioneering entrepreneurship project, and for their non-traditional approach to student engagement and motivation. I wasn't sure what role I might play, but I knew that if I was going to stay in education I needed to find a different way of doing things. What I hadn't expected, was that working as part of a team, after spending the bulk of my career alone in a classroom, would be completely transformative - to the point that it has changed my relationship with my work, and breathed new optimism into those ambitious plans I was prepared to abandon.
When Éric Levesque approached us in the Fall of 2019 with his challenge to shake things up, and re-imagine the way we were working, it was like an invitation to play. Éric, who had spent his first seven years of teaching trying to push the envelope in a variety of ways, seemed to sense that for all the excitement and dynamism the team brought to Grade 8, that students were not really any more motivated or engaged than any other year. He was ready to move forward, or to move on, and so he proposed reaching out to the school district with a plan to reinvent our learning space, and the way we approached working with our students. Isabelle Chenard and Carole Boucher, Éric's long-time co-conspirators (and the resident voices of reason) gave the idea their stamp of approval, and within days we were all dizzily brainstorming, researching and composing a project document we could present to the district.
The walls came down nine months later.
While the Pandora's Box of 2020 brought with it much suffering - from the global pandemic to civil strife, as well as innumerable surprises and disappointments - it is also the year that The Centre d'apprentissage 8 was born, and that the four of us began to sow the seeds of what we hope might be a laboratory for change and an opportunity to do education differently. While we can't quite do all that we hoped we might - COVID-19 is still very much with us and will likely cast a long shadow - the foundations are here, and with a little luck (and a mass-vaccination campaign) we will build upon those foundations, and surprise everyone - including ourselves.
Sometimes, when we least expect it, something will happen to remind us that everything - even our own disillusionment - is temporary. Change is the contstant, and while it seemed like there was little chance that I would see any of the changes I hoped to see in education happen before I took my leave, here we are. These past months have taught me that when we work together to take down walls, walls will fall, and when we work together we make each other better. I can't wait to see what comes next!
