Yukon's First Nation School Board introducing new learn-to-read curriculum

The Yukon First Nation School Board is promising a shake-up in how students are taught to read at its 11 schools, starting this coming year.

"I think it's really important that everyone understands that our students deserve change now, that we don't have time to wait any longer to meet the needs of our students," said Melissa Flynn, the board's executive director.

"I think kids are very adaptable, and I think they're going to enjoy the change and the fun new methods and the new lessons that the teachers will be trained in."

Flynn has been an educator in the Yukon since 2008. She became a vice principal in 2017, and last year was appointed to her new role overseeing the new school board. She said she was very familiar with how literacy was being taught in classrooms and in one-on-one instruction and that it "really worried me, and worried many of us in the Yukon."

She points to two reports from the auditor general, in 2009 and 2019, that found Yukon's schools were not meeting the needs of many students, particularly First Nations and rural students, and that the Education department was not making much progress in addressing the issues.

The new school board made literacy a focus. Trustees were presented with the data about literacy rates in the Yukon, Flynn says, and an action plan.

"From all that information put together, it was a very easy decision to start looking at; how can we change the literacy programs in our schools to better meet the needs of our students?" Flynn said.

Megan Norris, the board's lead literacy coach, says the new approach is about "aligning with the science of reading."

That means a move away from so-called "balanced literacy" — the approach long favoured in most traditional classrooms — toward what's referred to as a "structured literacy" approach.

Introduced in the 1990s, balanced literacy uses what is known as the cueing system, where students are taught to look at the pictures in a book, look at the first letter of a word, or think about what word might make sense, before guessing what the word might be.

It is also centred on the idea that students who are surrounded by books, and who are read to, will become readers.

A structured approach to teaching literacy, by contrast, "means that we're directly teaching skills, that these skills build on each other, and that we work from simple to complex," Norris said.

"The structured literacy approach really emphasizes students sounding out words, and it emphasizes that we directly teach multiple skills — phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension."

Other jurisdictions are also making similar changes to how they teach reading to elementary school students, including New Brunswick this fall, and Ontario, where a landmark Right to Read Report from the Ontario Human Rights Commission recommended a dramatic overhaul of its literacy curriculum.