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Core Competency Examples

BC’s Core Competencies fit naturally into home learning! Here’s a quick refresher on each competency, with examples of how students might use them in everyday learning. 

Communication

Communicating (Exchanging Ideas & Information)

  • Speaking & Presenting: A student uses a slide deck (or another format) and clear, spoken language to explain the lifecycle of a cedar tree to siblings or the teacher on Seesaw.

  • Digital Communication: A student writes a well-structured email, blog post, or Seesaw post summarizing a historical event.

  • Visual Representation: A student creates a comic strip, graphic organizer, or other visuals to explain the plot of a story or novel they read.

Collaborating (Working Together)

  • Group Projects: A student collaborates with siblings to build a science model, listens to and incorporates everyone's ideas into the final product.

  • Feedback: While working on projects with siblings, students share ideas or suggestions about things they like or ways to improve them.

Thinking

Creative Thinking (Generating New Ideas)

  • Invention & Design: A student designs a new gadget from recycled materials, testing prototypes to improve the final product.

  • Creative Writing: A student writes an alternate ending to a story or composes an original poem from the perspective of a historical figure.

  • Flexible Problem-Solving: A student runs into a roadblock during a coding project and tries three completely different workarounds to find one that works.

Critical and Reflective Thinking (Analyzing and Evaluating)

  • Media Literacy: A student analyzes two different news articles about the same event to identify potential bias or missing viewpoints.

  • Self-Correction: After completing a math assessment, a student reviews incorrect answers, identifies where they made a mistake, and rewrites the steps correctly.

  • Data Analysis: A student collects data about people’s favourite sports, graphs it, and shares conclusions about what sports are preferred and why.

Personal and Social 

Personal Awareness and Responsibility (Self-Regulation & Well-being)

  • Goal Setting: A student sets a goal to read for a certain number of minutes each day and tracks their progress in a journal.

  • Emotional Regulation: A student recognizes when they feel overwhelmed by a challenging task and practices strategies to self-regulate (e.g., taking a short break and using positive self-talk to try again).

  • Time Management: A student writes and follows a daily and weekly agenda that includes schoolwork, break time, extracurricular events, and fun!

Positive Personal and Cultural Identity (Understanding Self)

  • Heritage Exploration: A student creates a family tree or a digital presentation exploring their cultural heritage, traditions, and family values.

  • Self-Reflection: At the end of the school year, a student reflects on their progress toward a goal set in their Student Self Assessment (SSA), identifying how they met the goal and what they learned. 

Social Awareness and Responsibility (Community & Environment)

  • Empathy and Inclusion: A student notices a friend is struggling to join an activity and invites them in, making sure they are included.

  • Global Citizenship: A student researches a global issue (like clean water access), shares about it, and organizes or participates in a fundraiser to help solve the issue.

  • Environmental Stewardship: A student organizes recycling at home, participates in a local recycling program, or takes part in a community clean-up day.