Community survey available now
Garden Valley School Division is exploring the feasibility of offering a new kind of high school experience, and they’re looking to the community for some feedback.
The Winkler area school division launched a survey on its website (gvsd.ca) this week to gauge interest in what’s known as Big Picture Learning (BPL).
The driving thrust behind BPL is the idea that students learn best when they are doing something they’re passionate about.
“In a Big Picture Learning school, before a student even comes into Gr. 9, the student, the teacher, and their families all sit down together and talk about, ‘What are your interests? What are your challenges? Who do you want to be when you grow up?’” explained Carrie Friesen, coordinator for BPL in GVSD and a former longtime principal at Garden Valley Collegiate.
From there a personalized learning plan can be created, one that allows for the student to spend up to two days a week learning on internships, perhaps at a local business, medical centre, or farm—places that match what the student is interested in.
“So they’re actually in mentorships in the community every single week,” Friesen said. “They’re going to go out and learn different things, see how things work.”
A student might think they know what they want to do when they grow up, and then learn through their internships that it isn’t for them. That’s not a problem, Friesen said, as they have the opportunity for multiple mentorships through their four years in a BPL school.
“They can try everything out,” she said, noting it gives them a head start on figuring out what they might want to do with their lives, while also building valuable transferable skills.
Students are still required to attend school regularly and earn credits for approved courses under the Manitoba curriculum so they can graduate with a provincial diploma. But they reach those curriculum-based goals in a much more flexible, community-integrated environment than traditional classroom-centred teaching.
“Even when they’re with their teacher, their advisor, they’re not necessarily in the classroom,” Friesen explained. “If you’re working on a project that is about, say, trying to understand a concept in science, they can stay in the classroom and do an experiment or they could go find the person who actually does it as a job and learn from them.”
Teachers in this context become more like air traffic controllers than professors standing at the front of the class lecturing.
Most BPL schools place students in small groups—around 15 students or so—called an advisory that is led by a teacher who will be with them from Gr. 9 all the way through Gr. 12.
There’s less focus on a defined daily schedule ruled by bells and timetables, and more on exploring interests and learning from real-world mentors, building not just skills but also connections that will serve them well in life after high school.
“When you take off all of those constraints and those pressures and you just get to sit with this kid and really help them understand and apply it somewhere, the learning is so much deeper,” Friesen shared what a teacher at one of the Winnipeg BPL schools told her.
Alternative forms of education are nothing new in GVSD—self-directed learning, the Fresh Start program, GVC TEC, all are designed to engage students in a different way from traditional schooling
“That’s one of the things I think we’re really proud of in our division is that there’s so many right ways to educate, but there’s isn’t one way to educate everybody,” Friesen said. “You need to have lots of models.”
It’s about maximizing a students’ chance of success, she added, noting approximately 15 per cent of students who start Gr. 9 in the division don’t graduate, and a further 10-15 per cent never arrive in high school in the first place. The hope is a school that is smaller and able to offer a more personalized education plan will reach more of those kids.
If the GVSD board opt to move ahead with BPL, it would become the third school division in Manitoba to do so. There are currently five BPL schools in Winnipeg.
“The Seven Oaks MET School is right across from Garden City Collegiate, and they’ve been going for 16 years,” Friesen noted. “But Big Picture Learning schools just celebrated their 30th anniversary around the world. They’re everywhere.”
Friesen has spent time at the Winnipeg BPL schools to see how they’re run. They’re generally individual schools, with their own principals and teachers, but have sister schools where students are able to take part in extracurricular activities and elective courses.
Though it’s still too early to say for sure until the board meets to assess Friesen’s data and make some decisions, that’s possibly how it would work in GVSD—the BPL school would be its own distinct school but students would be still be able to play sports or take certain courses at GVC or Northlands Parkway Collegiate.
Right now the question is whether this model of learning is right for the division, or whether the community can even sustain it.
“We need to have adults pouring in and mentoring to help us meet the curriculum outcomes, to take kids on as interns,” Friesen said. “It’s a big commitment, a big investment. But the return is you don’t just attend grad and watch the kids—you feel integrated and invested. You help to create our future, what our future citizens, our future business owners, future employees are going to be in our community.”
The Big Picture Learning survey is open to all community members—business leaders, parents, students, educators, and the general public. The survey, which can be filled out anonymously, will remain up for the next few weeks.
“Right now, we’re just exploring this, nothing’s been decided,” Friesen stressed, urging people to weigh in on the idea. “We, as a division, don’t want to move ahead on something that doesn’t feel right for the community.”
Friesen will be presenting her findings on BPL to the board of trustees later this year. If the division decides to move ahead with this, student applications for enrolment would be open in early March and the program would start up next fall.
You can learn more about Big Picture Learning at gvsd.ca, or connect with Friesen at bpl@gvsd.ca or 204-325-8335.
