Thinking in the New BC Curriculum.

I am very pleased about the renewed emphasis on thinking in the new BC curriculum. This focus will provide opportunity for teachers from diverse content areas to find common ground.

Recently, in our school district we have been working on how the curricular competences fit with thinking. To begin with, we compared the curricular competences with Performance Standards in reading and numeracy. Not surprisingly, the two lined up very well. Of course, the Performance Standards, although getting long in the tooth, are still extremely valid documents. They held up very well to the ideas around thinking in our new curriculum.

Completing this exercise was helpful in making connections to teaching and assessing thinking in Language Arts and Math, but questions arose in regards to other curricular areas.

Enter the development of a cross curricular thinking rubric. A few years ago this work was started by a number of educators in our curriculum department and a draft rubric was developed. This fall, we revisited the rubric and have been working with multiple groups of educators to update and align it with the language of the new curriculum.

We are still in the early days of our curriculum transformation, but I feel we are on the right track.