District plans to focus on engaging with students, teachers and the community

This is the last school year until a newly developed K to 9 curriculum becomes mandatory across the province, and SD 58 superintendent Steve McNiven is confident that it will be a change for the better.

He also said that with each of the district’s schools having a goal surrounding student wellbeing, one of the goals of the district moving forward would be engagement — with students, staff and the community at large.

The two ideas work in tandem.

“How do we move forward, as everybody is across the district, with inspiring students to be engaged in their own learning?” McNiven said. “That’s our focus and it’s broad, obviously, but it’s something that will take up most of our conversations going into the new year.”

Part of the answer is in metacognition, as young children come to realize who they are as learners, and what makes them passionate. The district’s job will be in capitalizing on that and bringing it into the classrooms.

As kids get older, they need to have pathways to choose from. McNiven said that’s where a “blended” education can be useful. “[We have] opportunities to use distributed learning for courses, opportunities to mix that with face to face, and get students choosing how they want to take that course, because you’ve got kids who want to do it at a different time, a different pace, a different way.”

The district will have a South Central Interior Distance Education (SCIDES) teacher at Merritt Secondary School to support students in distributed learning on site, though most of their students will still be offsite students. “The opportunity to bring that type of teaching into the school, and have those conversations going and that teamwork is really a step in the right direction for me, in my mind,” said McNiven.

He outlined how next year’s curriculum will change not just students’ learning experience, but teachers’ teaching experience as well.

For one thing, the new curriculum will have fewer learning outcomes. The superintendent said the rationale for that was providing more space for students to focus on what they want to learn, in a less content-driven environment.

“Access to information changes what we need to do around teaching content,” he explained. “If we want to know about medieval history it’s at our fingertips with the technology we have. So we’re focusing less on competencies that are across the grade levels, and then allowing for that space to happen for personalization and differentiation — and in many cases digging deeper into what kids are interested in learning.”

He described the goal of personalized learning as a lofty, but he was optimistic the school board could achieve it. “When you talk about a system that has a history of stand and deliver, perhaps — that isn’t the case now, there’s lots of different types of learning, lots of different types of teaching that’s taking place — but you have a classroom full of 30 learners.”

The high-level solution to this is through engagement, by the school district.