Questions and Case Studies
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.