The Standards for the Education, Competence and Professional Conduct of Educators in British Columbia were developed with three major purposes in mind. These are:

• to establish commonly held standards of practice and conduct that help to guide teacher education, practice and ongoing professional growth;
• to communicate to the public the standards that educators hold;
• to establish a regulatory framework that guides the Ministry of Education in decisions related to teacher education programs, certification, fitness to practice and discipline of certified teachers.

The Ministry is cognizant that the Standards will be used only to the extent that they are understood and seen as valuable by certified teachers, teacher educators and the public. With this in mind, a series of questions were developed and short case studies were designed to focus on critical aspects of each Standard as they relate to the three purposes. These can be used as a way of developing frameworks for discussion and application of the Standards from scholarly and practical perspectives. Student teachers, professors, certified teachers and others are encouraged to develop additional questions based on their experience and understandings in order to promote further discussion.

We have listed each Standard and its description followed by questions that may help you to think about how the Standard can be understood and applied. As well, we have created a general section for questions related to the concept of standards. For example, Standard 1 (Educators value and care for all students and act in their best interests) identifies a number of big ideas related to the overarching notion of caring for students. People may wish to use the questions for different purposes. University instructors may wish to use the questions to initiate discussion among students or to relate the Standards to their assessment of students. Certificate holders may use the questions to help guide professional development decisions or to engage in ethical, philosophical or pedagogical issues that attend to the Standards. Members of the public may use the questions to help them understand the complexities of the role of teachers.

As you read the questions, we hope that you can see many applications for them and we encourage you to download as many as you think useful. If you have feedback regarding the Standards or the questions, please contact us by using the feedback form.

To view the questions and case studies and to use these to generate a printable document for discussion purposes, please click here.