Pickering College has marked many firsts over its 177-year history, but last week they marked a first nobody in the independent school's community anticipated just two short months ago.

Every two years, all independent schools need to be inspected by the Ministry of Education. This year, Pickering College's turn came and the Newmarket-based school was the very first in all of Ontario to be reviewed virtually by the Ministry.

Reviewers liked what they saw as Pickering College has embarked on a new journey to deliver its key programming from Kindergarten all the way through Grade 12 seamlessly online to its students at home and abroad.

In this regard, Pickering College had somewhat of a head start. The school initiated a Global Online Education Week in 2018, coinciding with March break and Easter. Instead of having boarding students return to the school early, they asked students to stay in their home countries to take part in four days of Global Education.

“We had some experience with this before, but we didn't anticipate this would ever happen long term, under these circumstances,” says Janet Downer, Assistant Head of School.

Just before March break of this year, students and teachers were asked to bring home what they would need to get up and running should operations have to go virtual in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and, thanks to their experience in 2018, Pickering College teachers were able to get online the day after their scheduled return from March break after a day of training to make sure they could indeed hit the ground running.

“There has been a progression of synchronous lessons,” explains Ms. Downer. “That first week when we were online, we started asynchronous lessons to give teachers the opportunity to develop and learn software and also to give students and families a chance, too, to get caught up with everything that is going on. As our teachers became more adept and comfortable with the technology, they started to increase the number of synchronous lessons.

“Our goal was to have a number of synchronous classes for the Junior School students to support parents  – otherwise they become the home schoolers and that is a challenge to juggle everything else they are managing, as well as teaching their children.”

Pickering College is not a school that relies on standard textbooks, adds Kim Bartlett, Senior Director of Teaching, Learning and Strategic Partnerships, and that also helped ease the transition.

“We have been teaching with a variety of tools for years,” says Ms. Bartlett. “The difference [between the grades] is we tried to choose the most suitable tool for each division. With Grades 6 – 12, we're using Microsoft Teams which is actually a fabulous interactive platform and we're able to record our classes so when students are overseas, they can watch classes on demand. We have instant messaging with our students so we can quickly respond to any questions they have, and it is a pretty interactive platform. We're able to have discussions and white boards and debates, and all kinds of things using Microsoft Teams.”

Indeed, Pickering College debating students recently took their verbal bouts online, covering such diverse topics as child beauty pageants to crimes committed over social media.

Ms. Downer served as a judge for this new approach to debating and said while students weren't able to feed off the energy and feedback from live audiences, they confidently stepped up to the plate. The same can be said for Grade 9 students who, as part of PC's Global Leadership Program, are plugging away on their Puma's Den projects – a uniquely PC spin on Dragon's Den.

“Each of us have been given a problem in the world to tackle and we're supposed to create a product that will help us tackle this problem,” explains Aurora student Ella MacAlpine. “My group is looking at invasive species, so we're creating a product that will help the issue of invasive species.

“Getting settled in [to the virtual school] was the hardest thing, but once you got used to it, it was pretty smooth going.”

Deanna MacAlpine, a Grade 11 student, agrees, adding that being able to keep the school's routine of morning meetings and advisory groups has helped to adjust to the new normal.

“It was a little bit difficult just to get adjusted to online learning and not seeing our friends every day, but because our school was mostly paperless to begin with and all of our classes and programs that we use have already been online, it was just getting used to talking to your teachers via video chat. It is good for us to still have our morning meetings and advisory groups, so things still feel familiar. We talk about how we're doing academically, our situation at home, and it helps make everything feel a little bit more normal.”

By Brock Weir