Great Brain Learning

Super stoked about starting a new venture: sharing the tools I've designed to meet students where they are. Please check out my offerings on Teachers Pay Teachers. I'm adding more resources each day, and they are FREE until April 1, 2026! Look for Ma Pédago!

Hi! I'm Dr. June Starkey. I'm an Ontario-certified educator with 3+ decades of experience teaching learners from Kindergarten to PhD level. Twenty years ago, I left an award-winning 17-year career in French Immersion to open Ontario’s first private, evidence-based bilingual learning clinic. I've never looked back. From Great Brain Learning in Toronto, Ontario, I've worked with over 1,000 families across Canada to transform students’ learning trajectories.

This article marks the beginning of a new foray into writing for me.

In this series, I draw together the threads of data, observations, and lived experience from a teaching career that has spanned 17 years as an elementary French immersion teacher in two school boards in Ontario, and 20 years as an advanced practice educator, bilingual learning advocate, and consultant in private practice with clients across Canada.

I invite you to join me in this critical practitioner inquiry. My goal is to invite engagement and to advance our common struggle to teach and assess all students well so that all students—both now and in the future—may learn. My approach to this reflective inquiry is to address the overflowing bucket of critical questions. How do we find our way? What tools do we really need? Is there any hope for progress? What does growth look like?

Like many of you, I felt a resounding lack of surprise when I heard Ontario Education Minister Paul Calandra’s solemn thoughts about the need for curricular reform and the falling EQAO test scores in his press conference on December 3, 2025. As a former marker of the Grade 3 Writing component of the EQAO provincial test and an experienced teacher educator, I am aware that this performative “improvement” opportunity felt detached from reality.

In retrospect, however, we all knew this news was coming. (Didn’t we?) Against a backdrop of rising anxiety about testing in general (and about what that means for individual school communities and students) as well as anxiety about Large Language Models (LLMs) like Perplexity, Gemini and the nth version of Chat GPT (and their appropriate use in schools); reduced budgets and mushrooming parental expectations all seem very 2015. In a field fraught with competing priorities, post-Pandemic educational recovery is real, however, and a real challenge these days, made no less so in the quagmire of standardized testing in Ontario.

Where and how does one begin to unpack the mess of making a difference, and is making a difference even possible? As I scour my professional toolkit for a better pair of glasses to see the bigger picture, and to ask why this moment matters so much, I seek perspective. Why? Because the overwhelming minutia of our education system overshadows, or at least threatens to overshadow, any real learning we create in real classrooms, with real students.

Join me Monday for part 2 of this 4-part series, when I share observations and begin to unpack the reason for some of the curricular mayhem in schools right now. My goal is to find pedagogical possibilities for a sustainable path forward.



https://www.youtube.com/live/NxCPFHBG6ik?si=Yq3GcqCiMlBnLqPp

This is an important and empirically-validated observation. Thank you, Canadian Parents For French.