Nom : DR DON GLENDENNING
Don Glendenning, a New Brunswicker by birth, was the Founding President of Holland College. He spent a lifetime in education, first as a teacher and principal in the public schools, followed by the training of technical and vocational teachers and later a stint as a Training Officer in Ottawa. After retiring from Holland College, he operated a consulting business.
He has written and spoken extensively on education and for a number of years contributed a regular article in the CVA Journal.
He is a graduate of the first Rural High School built in New Brunswick, Teachers' College and the New Brunswick Institute of Technology. He was a Beaverbrook Scholar at the University of London, England, holds a PhD from Indiana University, an LLD from UPEI. In 1986 he was appointed to the Order of Canada.
He played leadership roles in many national, regional and local professional associations and is an Honourary Life Member of the Canadian Vocational Association.
CVA Report – April, 2010
Today’s challenge
Don Glendenning
In 1969, when I became President of the newly-established Holland College, I believed that the most pressing issue in education was that of institutional flexibility. It was my view that educational institutions at all levels had locked themselves into a system of teaching that failed to reflect what we know about learners and learning. Education systems were bureaucratic, rigid, delivery-centered and time based.
Given a new institution, a young Board of Governors and freedom to act, the College sought out, adopted and further developed a delivery model incorporating a set of beliefs about learning and teaching, program development, evaluation and the role of the learner in the process.
Our search for a model took us to a number of colleges in Canada and the USA, to Project Poet then operating at a military base in Kingston, Ontario, the TERC model being developed at the Technical Education Research Centre in Cambridge Massachusetts; a competency based project in the Bedford-Stuyvesant area outside New York City, and finally to the Nova Scotia NewStart Corporation in Yarmouth Nova Scotia where we saw the DACUM model under development. What we saw in Yarmouth came closest to what we were looking for. We adopted that model because it was learner centered, ensured that competencies were relevant, maximized interaction with the employing community, was cost effective, included a performance based rating scale, provided learners with a tool to aid in planning and recording continuing education, strengthened learner-teacher communication and met our need for flexibility.
Forty years later, I am of the view that the most pressing issue in education today is that of exit standards. A gap exists between what the public expects and what system delivers. The promise of Outcomes Based Education has been replaced with the reality of curriculum objectives.
The non-academic gap between school and employment is well-described in an article, Unemployment Training, by Martin Haberman in the Phi Delta Kappan of March, 1997. A recent US report on Common Core State Standards and the Provincial Report Card released recently in Ontario, address the academic gap but both, in my view, are still works in progress. If working models exist, they have not come into my view - at least not yet.
Our current system should be replaced with performance based standards, the essence of which lies in the clarity of exit outcomes to be demonstrated, well-defined descriptions of performance levels and recognized benchmarks. Progress is being made but more needs to be done, but I’ll leave further comment for my next article.
