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.

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.

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.