Matt's Curriculum and Instruction in secondary mathematics (EDCP 342): The new BC curriculum and secondary math course pathways structure

One thing that surprised me was how the BC curriculum was redesigned to provide more flexibility to educators to structure their lessons and teachings to reflect personalization of student learning. This is done through the creation of core competencies and big ideas educators should address when developing lessons; things students are expected to do and expected to understand. Core competencies are sets of intellectual, personal, and social competencies students develop to engage in deeper learning and support lifelong learning (BC curriculum, 2020). Big ideas do not require students to know specific pieces of factual information or isolated bits of information but are broad and abstract statements central to one’s understanding in an area of learning (BC curriculum, 2020). The second thing that surprised me was the inclusion of the definition for 21^st century skills, which was defined as, “a term used to describe the combination of specific skills, content knowledge, expertise, and literacies that are essential for today’s graduates” (BC curriculum glossary, 2020). I really liked this definition. I think it is crucial that secondary students be taught skills that are relevant to them and take advantage of how easily information can be acquired in this day and age.

This is my flowchart for the pathways structure of BC curriculum math courses. The one-way arrows shows where you could go to at the course given. Notice that courses like computer science 11 and history of mathematics 11 have many arrows going into it. I think that those courses could be taken at many stages of a secondary student's math career. The two-way arrows means you could take the course at the same time as another course. There might be a few arrows I missed for concurrent courses as it was hard to keep track of everything.