Spotlight


Smaller class sizes help students learn

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Transcript

Lidia Di Lorenzo, senior kindergarten teacher: (to students) We’re going to put together our story of Humpty Dumpty.

Lidia: When I first started teaching kindergarten about five years ago I had approximately 24 students. This year I have 15 students. If you have a student who has a special need, it’s much easier to take that child out of a class of 15 and work with them than it is to take them out of a class of 24 kids.

Kindergarten students: (doing small group work) H and G and F… Did we do F?

Kindergarten boy: (to camera) And if something’s too hard then we raise our hand and then we ask for help and they come and help us.

Kindergarten girl: Yeah.

Christine Curran, principal at St Therese: The fact that we now have a primary class cap size of 20 is phenomenal. What that does is it affords the teacher to have a much more focused time with the children.

Josephine Salvatore, educational resource teacher: The fact that they get more one-on-one time with their teacher, the teacher gets to know each child better. They interact with smaller groups with their peers so the classroom is calmer because the teacher has the opportunity to set up activities that they do benefit and learn from.

Lidia: (to student) You’re very close to writing ‘lizard’!

Kathleen Wynne, Minister of Education: When the McGuinty government came to office in 2003 there was a lot of concern about the sizes of classes in those primary years. Now all of our students in Kindergarten to Grade 3 are in classes of 23 students or fewer. And over 90 per cent of students in Kindergarten to Grade 3 are in classes of 20 students or fewer.

Lidia: (to student) Look at that, you got it right!

Christine: Mrs. Di Lorenzo is a fabulous teacher regardless. So three years ago she was outstanding. Now she’s outstanding but now she’s calmer because she doesn’t have the pressure of the higher number of children. Keeping the pupil-teacher ratio down to 20-to-one, it’s helping everyone.