Overcoming challenges facing contemporary curriculum: Lessons from British Columbia

British Columbia’s school system is one of the highest performing in the world. The western Canadian province, which educates around 640,000 students1 , consistently receives high scores for both excellence and equity on the Programme for International Assessment (PISA) measure. It was also the only province to outperform both the international and Canadian average on the 2011 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS).

High-performance, though, is not an excuse for complacency. Like those in other high-performing systems, educators in British Columbia recognise the potential pitfalls of inertia in a complex and changing world. British Columbian educators have joined the global chorus of policy-makers, school leaders and teachers calling for a greater emphasis on competencies to better equip students to thrive in their life and work.

Unlike many other systems, however, British Columbia is putting its rhetoric into action. In 2011, it launched an overhaul of its common curriculum and some aligned assessment structures, from Kindergarten to Grade 12. The change transformed expectations for teaching and learning across the province. The new curriculum focuses on the development of core competencies alongside foundational literacy and numeracy skills and is shaped by a vision for students’ futures as thoughtful, creative, skilled, productive, co-operative citizens.

The 2016-2017 school year marked the first year of mandated implementation of the renewed Kindergarten – Grade 9 curriculum, with implementation of the Grades 10 – 12 curriculum to be staggered over the next two years. The Ministry involved a large proportion of educators in its development and there has been significant buy-in to the new model. Seventy-two percent of teachers recently surveyed by the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation say they have used the new curriculum to a “moderate”, “large” or “very large” extent during the 2016-2017 school year.

Yet curriculum reform in British Columbia is still a work in progress. The comprehensive nature of the reform has forced teachers and school leaders to grapple with the implications for their professional practice in every subject and across all grade levels. The Ministry and districts, in turn, are continuing to consider the implications of curricular reform for student assessment and reporting and for professional development and resourcing. All of this is occurring in a context involving several powerful stakeholders, including a strong teachers’ union.

Systems that talk about the potential of curriculum to enable innovation and continual improvement have lessons to learn from British Columbia (see Figure 1). They can also learn with British Columbia, as it rolls out its new curriculum and begins to gauge the impact on teaching and learning. This system has taken a leap that others might shy away from. The outcome – and even how one might measure and articulate the outcome of such a dramatic curriculum change – remains a challenge for all systems looking to promote innovative teaching practice and prepare students for a changing world. It is a challenge British Columbia is tackling head on.