Professional Learning Resources
Most of these learning resources include videos with reflection prompts and activities. Educators may work through on their own, but we recommend sharing the experience with one or more colleagues. Resources can also be used for facilitated group sessions.
- Selecting Learning Resources for the Classroom: Focused ED’s course on ways to make informed and thoughtful resource choices for your students, including selection criteria and social considerations.
- Supporting the Inclusion of Students with Complex Needs: Four courses to help build skills and understanding of what inclusion means for students with complex needs in today’s classrooms.
- What do I do? Trauma-Sensitive Strategies for Challenging Behaviours: Strategies to deal with behaviour issues, foster self-regulation, and nurture a growth mindset.
- Building Capacity in Planning for Literacy and Numeracy Instruction: Instructional examples, strategies, and planning considerations.
- Student-Centred Assessment to Support Inquiry-Based Learning: Practical strategies on student-focused assessment (with examples from kindergarten and high school).
- Building Compassionate Communities in a New Normal: Ideas and strategies to create compassionate learning environments for students.
- Continuing our Learning Journey: Indigenous Education in BC: How to include authentic Indigenous knowledge, perspectives, and content in BC’s curriculum.
- BC’s Redesigned Curriculum: From Theory to Practice: Identifying connections for purposeful, accurate and efficient implementation.
- Trauma-Informed Practice: Four workshop packages supporting developing compassionate learning communities. Each package includes a presentation (with videos), facilitator’s guide, participant’s booklet, and tip sheet.
Open Course Resources (OCR)
Several professional learning courses are available through our online platform. Courses are self-paced so learners can work through all topics or just those of interest to them.
Please note that the courses on this OCR site will be moving to the Ministry of Education and Child Care’s Brightspace site on March 31, 2023. If you are currently enrolled in a course, and do not want to lose your progress, please complete it by March 30. After this date, the course will be freely available on the MOECC Brightspace site through the course title below.
K-12 Educators
This course is designed to provide tools and strategies for incorporating blended learning into your classroom. It consists of three components: foundation, application, and collaboration. The foundation section focuses on the “what” and “why” while the application section focuses on the “how”.
Both sections come together in collaboration: a community of practice where teachers across BC interact to ask questions, share resources, and discuss experiences.
Explore key components of design thinking and making and consider how to integrate them in your classroom. Design thinking and making helps students develop ADST competencies as they work collaboratively to create innovative and sustainable solutions to complex problems. Includes 32 sample design challenges.
Early Learning Educators
The course Introducing the Early Learning Frameworkis freely available outside the OCR.
The exams for the course are within the OCRfor tracking purposes. There are three exams available, each aligning to a section of the Early Learning Framework. Successful completion of each exam can count towards professional development requirements for Early Childhood Educators.
A video-based course, with completion certificate, for practitioners who work with young children and their families. Working through the course will help learners develop increased confidence and open-mindedness in building positive relationships with diverse families.
Teaching Resources
A collection of activity plans and resources to use with students.
- Saffron Threads: K-12 activity plans, timeline card game, and background info to support teachers in integrating South Asian Canadian culture, history, and heritage into their classrooms.
- Focusing on Competencies in Math: Activity plans (Grades 8-12) and videos demonstrating a competencies-based approach to secondary math. Teachers at any level or subject may find inspiration in the approach and teaching strategies used in these activities.
- Bamboo Shoots: Chinese Canadian Legacies in BC: Grade 5 and Grade 9 Social Studies lesson sets that acknowledge contributions of Chinese Canadians and the historical injustices they faced. The resource includes a gallery of historical photographs, archival documents and personal stories.
- Great Bear Rainforest Education and Awareness Trust: Grades 7–12 activity plans and companion resources on the geography, community, and biodiversity within the Great Bear Rainforest.
- Youth Explore Trade Skills: Tools for Teaching: Activity plans for: Core Skills (safe work practices, employability skills), Auto Technician, Baker, Carpenter, Cook, Design and Drafting, Electrician, Electronics and Robotics, Metal Work, and Plumber. Also a self-directed student module on entrepreneurial skills in trades.
- My Seasonal Round: An integrated unit for Grade 3 Social Studies and Science. Five lessons offer an inquiry-based approach to exploring a seasonal round through the perspective of local Indigenous people.
- Extreme Environments: A cross-curricular Science and Applied, Design, Skills, and Technologies module for Grade 6.
- Shouting Whales: A marine science teaching resource for Grades 6 to 8. Explore marine soundscapes, mammals and the impacts of noise pollution through multimedia, activities and projects.
- Speaking Up, Speaking Out: A unit for English Language Arts 10 to help students find and share their unique voices to communicate issues of importance.
- BC First Nations Studies: Digital textbook developed for the Ministry of Education in 2003.