The British Columbia Curriculum

The British Columbia curriculum has been designed for teaching/learning in the 21st century. The goal is for our BCCIS students to graduate with the knowledge, skills and attitudes that they will need once they leave our schools.

The B.C. Ministry of Education overview of the curriculum is as follows:

Key features

At the heart of British Columbia’s redesigned curriculum are the Core Competencies, essential learning and literacy and numeracy foundations. All three features contribute to deeper learning.

Core competencies

Core Competencies underpin the curricular competencies in all areas of learning. They are directly related to the educated citizen and as such are what we value for all students in the system.

Essential learning

The curriculum for each subject area includes essential learning for all students, which represent society’s aspirations for B.C.’s educated citizens. The redesigned curriculum develops around key content, concepts, skills and big ideas that foster the higher-order thinking demanded in today’s world.

Literacy and numeracy foundations

Literacy is the ability to understand, critically analyze, and create a variety of forms of communication, including oral, written, visual, digital, and multimedia, in order to accomplish one’s goals.

Numeracy Is the ability to understand and apply mathematical concepts, processes, and skills to solve problems in a variety of contexts.

Literacy and numeracy are fundamental to all learning. While they are commonly associated with language learning and mathematics, literacy and numeracy are applied in all areas of learning.

Curriculum model

All areas of learning are based on a “Know-Do-Understand” model to support a concept-based competency-driven approach to learning. Three elements, the Content (Know), Curricular Competencies (Do), and Big Ideas (Understand) all work together to support deeper learning.

The British Columbia Ministry of Education has done an excellent job of describing and defining the curriculum, competencies, classroom assessment and Provincial assessments for each grade level.

This information is available by grade and course at https://curriculum.gov.bc.ca.

Graduation

Grades 10 – 12 are referred to as the ‘Graduation Program’ in which students are required to complete 80 credits in both required and optional courses. They are also required to successfully complete several B.C. Ministry of Education assessments. BCCIS Administrators, Counsellors and Teachers work with our students to guide them through these years. The B.C. Ministry of Education describes the specifics of the Graduation Program at: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/education-training/k-12/support/graduation