Staff members at the Catholic superintendents’ office are enthusiastic about ‘radical’ change
The B.C. Catholic
Lessons are going to be different when children go back to school this fall.
B.C.’s Ministry of Education has released a new curriculum for full implementation in all K-9 classrooms this September.
“We’ve never seen a change like this,” said Sandra Marshall, an associate superintendent of Catholic Independent Schools of the Vancouver Archdiocese (CISVA).
“It’s a paradigm shift, for sure. It’s never happened in my career, in many decades of being involved in teaching and education.”
The new curriculum was optional for all K-9 classrooms in B.C. in the 2015-2016 school year and will be mandatory this September. In September 2017, Grades 10 through 12 will join in.
Marshall said it’s unlike any updates to the curriculum in the past.
Revisions used to come from the Ministry of Education one subject at a time. There would be a binder each for science, math, and English, for example, and these stacks of binders would list hundreds of “learning outcomes” for students by the end of the year.
“When the ministry came in to evaluate your Catholic school every six years, they came with that checklist in hand. It became more about meeting the curriculum than teaching and learning with our students,” Marshall said.
The redesigned curriculum focuses on “core competencies” instead. Those include good communication, critical thinking, cultural identity, and social responsibility, lessons teachers can creatively weave into science, art, or PE.
“We’ve always called these ‘enduring understanding.’ What do you want the kids to know, understand, be able to do, 10, 20 years, a lifetime from now?”
There is also some new or updated content in areas such as First Nations and immigrant perspectives.
CISVA educational consultant Rose Pillay said the revision is a shift in approach. “It’s not new,” she said. “It’s just emphasizing all the good parts to good teaching. We want all students to become educated citizens. We need them to come out as thinkers, curiosity seekers, and good people who care for other people.”
Thanks to the Internet and mobile devices, she added, students can easily tap into stores of information far more vast than what teachers can keep up with.
That makes it necessary to shift from memorizing content to developing the skills to analyze and use that information.
“We know, year after year, people get to university and then there are dropouts. There’s decline. There are people who struggle because they don’t have those core skill sets,” Pillay said.
“Regurgitating on demand doesn’t cut it anymore. Our job isn’t just to get them to arrive at university, or to survive it, but to thrive.”
Some teachers are not finding it easy. Marshall said while some new and veteran educators find this “radical” change exciting, others find it tough to make the transition, so CISVA has been providing workshops and resources to try to take the edge off.
Those resources include the Principles of Catholic Education, nine months in the making, which provides a Catholic lens for it all.
“It lays out all the principles in every area of learning, like math, science, applied skills, and looks for ways people can imbue the Catholic worldview in that area.”
Pillay is enthusiastic about what the curriculum redesign can mean for Catholics under 18.
“The end goal isn’t just to write an exam. The end goal is to grow as a human being. It’s so in line with our own Catholic philosophy,” she said.
“How can we help them become, not just educated citizens, but educated citizens who have encountered Christ? Our end goal is for them to go to heaven, not just to go to post-secondary.”
