EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
and take part in these companies' networks and
program promoting pedagogical innovation.
Recognizing the need to resource pedagogical
innovation, in January 2015 the ministry launched
the "K12 Innovation Partnership," with a shared pot of
CAN$500,000 of funding. The idea was for educators-
representing schools or districts-to submit proposals
to receive funding and/or exemption from policy
necessary to develop new materials or pedagogical
approaches. They could also get the opportunity to
work with particular research or technology partners.
An Innovation Partnership Working Group was created
to select from the submissions and convene support.
The only condition was that any teacher or school must
have the written support of its district superintendent
to indicate willingness in the district to support and
spread any developed approach. Accepted projects
formed part of an "inventory" designed to communicate
innovative practice to the rest of the province.5
Unfortunately, this inventory has not been sustained
over time, although some of the projects highlighted
remain connected to and learning from each other.
Impact on daily
life in schools
In line with its philosophy, the new curriculum
manifests in varied as opposed to standardized
pedagogies. One uniting feature, however, is a shift
toward more inquiry- and project-based pedagogies:
involving students working on big questions or
challenges either individually or in groups over a more
extended period of time. This is in line with the focus
on the core competencies, as these pedagogies can
develop these competencies. Schools have made these
pedagogical shifts in a variety of ways, ranging from
adopting established inquiry-based approaches, such
as the International Baccalaureate Primary and Middle
Years curricula, to developing their own approaches
from scratch.
Beyond inquiry and project-based approaches,
the initial rounds of projects from the Innovation
Partnership illustrate other efforts to create more
holistic learning, including through outdoor and
experiential learning, multi-grade classrooms, and
approaches focusing on First Nations learners and
learners with special educational needs. Likewise,
many districts have made social and emotional
learning and in particular self-regulation-a focus,
building on the work started in the early 2000s with the
social responsibility standards.
Attempting to summarize the key shift, one B.C.
principal has described it as being "child-centered" as
opposed to "child-led." Students are not taking all the
decisions about what they learn, but the learning design
takes the particular individuals in a class into account.
How this manifests is that students are more engaged
in and more articulate about their learning.
| Assessing change
The question of assessing change remains a vexed
one in B.C., closely linked to the debate over whether
the new core competencies should be assessed. For
the most part, there are no metrics that summarize
what changes have occurred. The exception is the
graduation rate. There has been a marked improvement
in the graduate rate of First Nations students: just over
71 percent of Indigenous students completed high
school in the 2019-20 year, up from 66 percent in 2017.6
In addition, as of 2020, over 52 percent of Indigenous
students from B.C. public schools were attending a
B.C. post-secondary institution within two years of
completing high school, a share that has also been
rising slowly. These trends are seen as an important
indicators that things are moving in the right direction.
Proponents of the reform have argued that narrative,
not metrics, should be the way to mark and
communicate the change that is happening. They
have made efforts to capture the new pedagogies
emerging in short films and blogs. Stories are passed
through conferences and meetings. The Networks of
5
See: http://k12innovation.ca.
6
https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2021 EDUC0059-001682
EDUCATION TRANSFORMATION IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
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