The Importance Of Curriculum Change

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The big news in the #bced world these days surrounds curriculum changes. After a long consultation process with teachers, the government unveiled the new curriculum earlier this week. Its goal is to prepare students for success in the 21st century. It aims to ‘personalize’ learning for students in classes. It focuses on allowing students to pursue their dreams and passions.

From the BC Government:
The key focus is personalized learning – where students have more opportunity to pursue their passions and interests – while maintaining B.C.’s high standards on foundational skills like reading, writing and numeracy.
It all sounds wonderful. And, really, a lot of it is. We should be preparing kids for a 21st century world that doesn’t resemble
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One of the big things we’ve heard from parents is that there’s a lack of ‘basics’ within the new curriculum. Parents argue that kids need to learn the basics, which is absolutely true. “Those basics are missing,” read one message to my inbox. But, I find it hard to believe that the ‘basics’ won’t be an inherent part of the new curriculum.

Consider that, in order for us to help a child pursue his/her passion, we need him/her to have learned those basics. A child who is incredibly passionate about chemistry can’t focus on chemistry without understanding basic arithmetic and science. A child who wants to be a pilot can’t get there without some fundamental math education. A child interested in writing won 't be able to author much without basic English skills. The list of examples goes on and on.

Foundational skills are called ‘foundational’ for a reason. They are the base of everything else. Every passion branches out from those basics. Kids can’t specialize or have their education personalized without them. So, while the basics may not be written down in black and white, it’s easy to see that they will have to be taught if this new curriculum setup is going to be a
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Think of all the textbooks. Think of all the individual attention needed for each student. If Student X is passionate about dinosaurs while Student Y is passionate about physics, how are we going to assist both without more resources? I don’t have the answer to that question. Our classrooms teachers can’t be in two places at once. They can’t be teaching two things at the same time. The dinosaur textbook isn’t going to help the physics kid, is

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