Great time to be a student

Photo: Contributed

This is one of the most exciting times to be a teacher or a student in British Columbia.

That according to School District 23 Supt. Hugh Gloster in discussing the province's new curriculum.

The revised curriculum will be phased in over the next three years and focuses more on understanding core subjects through projects.

"It puts both teachers and students in a position to really be able to work well together, and have more flexibility, to allow both to explore areas of real passion," said Gloster.

"You have more time to go into depth and when you do that, it naturally leads to you having to draw on knowledge from other areas."

Gloster said the new teaching method is a huge improvement over the lower level learning model where students typically 'memorize, regurgitate and forget.'

"In the past we saw a curriculum which had a huge number of learning outcomes and often times it encouraged the teaching of events, dates and facts and a lot of knowledge based questions.

"This reduces the number of individual learning outcomes and allows teachers and kids to go way more in depth into a fewer number of areas. I think they are trying to create space in the curriculum to allow students to dig deep in areas and focus less on the content...to something that promotes students acquiring a set of attributes."

Gloster said the program will, hopefully, provide students with the attributes needed to face new learning in the future.

"Sort of the information age and the explosion of access to information for kids."

As for implementation, the province is phasing the new curriculum in over three years. The current school year is a transition year for kindergarten through Grade 9 with full implementation to begin in September of 2016.

Next year is the phase in period for Grade 10 to 12 with full implementation at the start of the 2017-2018 school year.

"We are going to be working through the year to support our teachers and our schools in terms of working the new curriculum, experimenting and getting to collaborate around best practices. That's going to be our focus this year," said Gloster.

The new curriculum was just introduced to school districts a few weeks ago.