A trio of North Shore schools recently shared an $8,000 provincial grant following an innovative partnership that might shift the way teachers and students learn in every classroom in the province.
Carson Graham secondary, Rockridge secondary and Mulgrave School started working together two years ago in an effort to refine the way students are assessed and teachers communicate.
The collaboration is the first of its kind among the three International Baccalaureate schools. IB programs generally put more emphasis on bigger concepts and more thoughtful questions, rather than just “regurgitating facts,” according to Kristy Dolha, the IB co-ordinator at Carson Graham.
Concepts include identities, relationships, personal and cultural expression, noted Dolha.
“We’ll be … trying to help kids understand why what they’re learning here in our classroom would be meaningful and important to anyone in any place in the world,” she said. “We’ll look at the content that we’re learning through that bigger lens.”
In an effort to fashion that bigger lens, teachers at the three schools held workshops where educators could talk about the curriculum and the best ways to help students learn a particular skill, according to Mulgrave principal Martin Jones.
Part of the system involves communicating more with parents, Jones said.
“They’re now getting much more detail about their child’s self-management skills, their ability to collaborate and their ability to reflect on their report card.”
These different approaches to learning may help shape the B.C. curriculum in the future, according to Jones.
“We’re hoping it will impact every student across the entire province of British Columbia, not just the students within our school.”
For Dolha, the program is about helping develop minds that can think beyond a Scantron sheet.
“We’re not looking to just perform on a multiple choice test,” she said. “We’re not looking to get all the answers right, we’re looking to try and figure things out.”
The ability to adapt to new situations is crucial in the job market, Dolha added.
“Those are the kind of people that we want to hire. When you look to hire someone, you’re not looking to hire someone who just has these preconceived right answers, you want to hire someone who’s keen to approach a problem with the attitude that they want to figure it out and learn from it.”
