Many of you will have heard of the pending
curriculum changes to all BC curriculum. These changes started a several years
ago with the release of the BC Ed plan. The goal of this revision is to have:
“A more flexible curriculum that
prescribes less and enables more, for both teachers and students and a system
focused on the core competencies, skills and knowledge that students need to
succeed in the 21st century.”
The K to 9 curricula are now available for
interested Districts and schools to begin implementation with full
implementation in Sept 2016.
An August 2015 draft of grade 10 and High
School courses has been posted at
https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/curriculum/10-12
and feedback can be provided at https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/online-feedback
.
Senior
Science Format
The current draft is an “outline” and the
courses are not considered “complete drafts (sic) but offer a flavour of what
optional courses could encompass.” Implementation of this curriculum is
currently scheduled for September 2017.
Many of you will recognize the similar
format from the K to 9 science curriculum. First there are the core
competencies. All curricula are designed to support the core competencies of
and educated citizen: Communication; Thinking; Personal and Social Responsibility.
As a side note, I would watch how reporting practice change over the next
couple of years to better support these core competencies.
Each grade or course is built around 4 to 6
Big Ideas. These Big Ideas “tell the story of science thorough the concepts
featured”. At this point, it’s best to look at these Big Ideas as a work in
progress. There is a lack of consistency in how they are written and how “Big”
each statement is in terms of scope. I suspect in the next revision the Big
Ideas will be more succinct.
Supporting the Big Ideas are the Learning
Standards. These standards are broken into two parts: Curricular Competencies
and Content. Both parts of the Learning Standards are somewhat limited in scope
so the Ministry plans to include elaborations or explanations in future drafts.
For the K to 9 science curriculum these elaborations provide limited guidance. The Curricular Competencies are similar to the
process skills found in previous curricula. The Content is similar to current
PLO except the statement are not written in an assessable format. This is a
serious shortcoming for all curricula and leads to the question: “How do I
assess student performance?” Students are expected to ‘do’ and ‘know’, but there
is minimal assessment direction from this document. This lack of direction will
be a major challenge for Districts. It doesn’t matter whether you agree or
disagree with the vision of this current round of curricular change, the bottom
line is that an ‘A’ will be different in every classroom in the province.
Two areas of interest to senior science
teachers will be grade 10 and course structure.
Grade
10
There are two big questions around grade
10: Will there be an exam for this grade; and what do I have to teach? At this
point in time the first answer is “YES” and the second answer is in the table
below:
Topic
|
Big Idea
|
Genetics
|
Genes are the foundation for the
diversity of living things.
|
Chemical Reactions
|
Chemical processes require energy change
as atoms are rearranged.
|
Energy
|
Energy is conserved, and its transformation
can affect living things and the environment.
|
Space
|
The formation of the universe can be
explained by the big bang theory.
|
Course
Structure
The following Table outlines the current
and new course structure for senior sciences. Students will still need a senior
science course to graduate. Many will welcome the optional nature of this new curriculum
and the new environmental science courses. But, it’s not clear how timetables,
and consequently funding, will allow for combinations of various courses. It is
also not clear how students currently taking Science and Technology type
courses will find an appropriate course to reflect their needs.
Current IRP
|
Proposed Provincial
Optional Curriculum
|
Biology
11 and 12
|
Biology
11 and 12
|
Chemistry
11 and 12
|
Chemistry
11 and 12
|
Physics
11 and 12
Applications
of Physics 11 and 12
|
Physics
11 and 12
|
Earth
Science 11 and Geology 12
|
Earth
Sciences 11?
|
Sustainable
Resources 11 and 12
Science
and Technology 11
|
Environmental
Science 11 and 12
|
For more detail on each course, please see:
https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca/sites/curriculum.gov.bc.ca/files/pdf/s_10-12.pdf
Future posts will examine the changes in
each curriculum, but in broad strokes only Biology 11 will have significant changes.
And of course, Environmental Science is completely new. It is hard to comment
on the Earth Science as grade 12 is missing and grade 11 appears incomplete.
Final
Thoughts
As a publisher of print and digital
resources, my goal is to provide you with the tools to be successful as a
professional and help you create an exciting learning environment for teaching science.
While this curriculum clearly has a goal of bringing more students to science
and allowing them to explore their interests I am concerned that this is being
done with insufficient resources. Not having the time and funds to learn, plan
and implement this new curriculum is a recipe for continuing the status quo. We
will do our part to support you as the classroom teacher. I believe you know we
always have had this goal as our main focus when producing resources for a new
curriculum. But, it is time for our educational leaders in Districts to demand sufficient
resources before passing these new policies along to the classroom teacher.
Towing the party line just to get the job done is no longer acceptable.
