How should Montreal’s high schools be reformed?
If you could redesign high school, what might you change? Like most educational institutions across Canada, Montreal’s English high schools retain structures from the time of the industrial revolution. As the realities of students’ lives have transformed, schools are slowly adapting to a knowledge-based economy and unpredictable ecological and social challenges.
A group of McGill University researchers studying educational change, including Associate Professor Lisa Starr and PhD candidate Aron Rosenberg from the Department of Integrated Studies in Education, have examined new models of education that emphasize learning opportunities that connect to what high school students care about and need to know for the future.
These new models often feature flexible timetabling, project-based learning, co-curricular crediting where students earn credits for participating in extracurricular activities as well as learning hubs that offer small groups of students academic and other holistic supports.