The curriculum of British Columbia is changing in ways aimed to improve the student experience. Although the old curriculum was great in terms of its ability to serve the majority of the students involved, it lacked the ability to be flexible and cater to the needs of individual students. As well as this, the old curriculum forced teachers to teach according to a relatively tight schedule meaning that opportunities to introduce new and creative teaching ideas were limited by time constraints. The new curriculum changes things up in several ways. First, it moves away from teaching subjects and instead looks to teach core competencies. Second, it looks to assess students via the means of both formative and summative assessment. Third, it places a far greater emphasis on the inclusion of First Nations content and learning principles in all facets of the educational experience. These changes act to reinvent the way that students learn and make the learning experience of a B.C. student unique.

Personally, I love the province’s move towards making Formative assessment a more foundational part of the grading experience. The fact that a student can be enabled to demonstrate their learning in a manner that is not stressful is brilliant in my opinion. Testing can be hard on students. Some students, handle traditional Summative testing poorly and can be disadvantaged by their difficulty performing under pressure.

Of course, it is still important for students to learn to perform under pressure. The world we live in can be a stressful one and thus, sending students out into the world without the ability to cope with stress or perform under pressure would be setting them up for failure. This is one of the reasons that I think school speeches are important to student success. I can recall a time back in grade one, I had to do a two-minute speech about potatoes (Silly topic right?). Going up in front of the class was terrifying for me but I did it anyway, and because I faced my fears, I became increasingly more confident with my public speaking. I think the phrase “if great things were easy everyone would do them” applies nicely to this situation. Not to say that my potato speech was particularly good, however, suffering through it helped me become the person I a today.

The fact that the B.C. curriculum uses both Formative and Summative assessments to determine student performance is great in my opinion. Not only are students of various learning styles allowed to shine, but teachers and learners alike are also able to build off each other’s strengths to create a better learning community.