The Elephant NOT in the Classroom

Only 1% of students choose teaching as a career. This 1% benefits from years of daily exposure to teachers and the school environment before deciding on their career - a decisive advantage the other 99% do not enjoy.

Educators set the standards, curriculum, and expectations for all students, not just future teachers. Yet what remains absent from most classrooms — the elephant missing from the room — is the opportunity for all students to witness and experience real-world careers the way aspiring teachers naturally do. Future teachers enjoy 12 to 16 years of immersive, work-based learning. Most others are left to imagine a different future with far less context.

Teachers are not typically trained to help students explore career and life options beyond academia. That responsibility often falls to school counselors who, despite their best efforts, are tasked with supporting the academic, social, and career needs of 500 or more students. With limited time and university-focused training, career development is often deprioritized. As a result, millions of students graduate each year without a clear sense of what comes after the final assignment and the last bell.

Preparing students for life beyond school — to be truly life-ready — requires a shift to engaging, hands-on, personalized, project- and work-based learning. Students learn best when subjects are taught through real-world challenges they care about, such as climate change, poverty eradication, and truth and reconciliation. Education must reflect the diversity of adult life and career pathways.

Where schools and systems have embraced this approach, the results are clear: when the missing "elephant" — helping students discover themselves, develop their unique gifts, acquire 21st-century global competencies, and find their rightful place in the world — is addressed, students, parents, teachers, and administrators are more fulfilled. School systems become more successful, and communities thrive.

However, Canada’s highly decentralized education system — with 13 provincial and territorial departments of education, hundreds of independent boards, 15,500 elementary and secondary schools, and 310,000 teachers serving 5 million students — makes coherent, system-wide change difficult. Transformative innovation often remains localized, fragmented, and vulnerable to leadership turnover or funding shifts.

Yet, all students are entering the same global economy, which demands new competencies that most schools have yet to teach systematically. The urgent question is: how do we get the "elephant" into more classrooms, faster?

This challenge inspired a group of experienced change-makers with a proven track record of leading successful pan-Canadian educational initiatives to create Transitions Canada, a bold new platform for systemic, scalable change.