The Delta school district is forging a path as a leading district for innovative teaching.
That's the enthusiastic assessment by superintendent Dianne Turner in an interview this week to talk about what's in store for the upcoming school year.
"What's happening now, I believe, is we have such a wide array of course offerings and choice programs for students, that parents and students can get a better start," she said.
The Ministry of Education has been consulting stakeholders throughout the province as it attempts to come up with a new B.C. Education Plan, aimed at reforming the K-12 system. The Delta school district, however, had already been engaging students, teachers and parents, coming up with a new district vision last year.
"We're relying on input from our community - thousands of people I'm talking about here - who contributed to our vision.
We are very excited about moving forward and our academies are only a small part of what's coming," Turner said.
Turner said the new vision wasn't fully implemented last year due to the teachers' contract dispute and job action, but this upcoming school year will see many of the changes.
New this year is the appointment of a director of inquiry for the district, who will consult with coordinators of inquiry in all Delta public schools.
The exercise is aimed at helping teachers find and implement new and innovative teaching practices as well as share their results.
"The coordinator's job is to take all the inquiry questions that are taking place in the school and help develop those inquiry questions with the teachers. This inquiry has its own process and cycle that allows people to dig deep into a topic. Then, the coordinator's job is to help make that happen, either by providing some relief time and taking over that class while the teacher goes and shares something collaboratively with another teacher, or helps to work with a new technology," she explained.
"Currently the inquiry is really about the adults digging deeply into their practices and studying a little bit more about their own teaching. They develop a question and they test their question. So it may be about a particular technology and whether it assists students learning their math better, for example."
The district hopes to engage students as well, finding the best ways to have them succeed in more problem-based, projectbased learning. It is also planning to offer even more choices and flexibility, including online courses, to suit individual needs.
Turner said the distinct is starting an online platform where the learning community can engage. It will have various blogs, including a public blog for students and parents, as well as an internal portion where students can communicate and work collaboratively online. The platform will be especially useful for inquiry coordinators, who might be working on the same topic.
"It could be five of them working on a technology of some kind or on a particular reading strategy for the elementary school students. They may want to talk about how it's going for a common purpose. We're not sure how it will work yet, but we're excited it's happening," Turner said.
"We're really trying to be an innovative district for teaching and the kind of programs we offer. Sometimes academies are the way to go, sometimes there's other programming. We haven't quite discovered all that yet... potentially there's other types of programs that aren't necessarily academies.
"With all of that array of offering, I believe that people are choosing to have their students educated in the district and we have a few coming from other places."
