Growing Future Colleagues: Teaching Teacher Education in BC Secondary Schools

The Sustained Global Need for Teachers

Teacher shortages remain a pronounced global challenge. The 2024 UNESCO Global Report on Teachers (UNESCO, 2024) estimates that education systems worldwide will require 44 million additional teachers by 2030. According to this report, teacher shortages are unevenly distributed, with the most extreme gaps in the Global South, particularly in sub‑Saharan Africa, which alone requires an estimated 15 million new teachers. At the same time, high‑income countries face rising rates of attrition, as teachers leave the profession due to workload, stress, and declining working conditions. The recent student-led protests in France have been attributed, in part, to ongoing and protracted teacher shortages. (Brown, 2026) Amidst this global landscape, British Columbia is experiencing similar pressures, where demand for qualified teachers has outpaced supply for more than a decade and continues to intensify.

Growing Future Colleagues

Despite the challenges that this report identifies, after a combined 40+ years of teaching in a variety of educational contexts, the authors of this article believe that teaching remains one of the most rewarding careers out there—a career for which there is a sustained need for caring, energetic, and socially engaged people.  It was in this spirit that in the Spring of 2024, we decided to create a BAA (Board Authority Authorized) course entitled Foundations of Teacher Education 12 in the Coquitlam School District (20 kilometers outside of Vancouver, BC) to invite secondary students to begin considering education as a scholarly discipline.  While most post-secondary institutions in Canada offer courses in Education as a field of study, there are surprisingly few parallel opportunities in K-12 systems.  Some regions across Canada offer co-op programs that place students in early childhood or K-12 contexts with a focus on experiential learning, but we could find no instances of credited secondary courses that explored education as a discipline of study as well as a career path.

In authoring the curriculum for the course Foundations of Teacher Education 12 (Foundations of Teacher Education – SD43 Coquitlam | Focused Education), we hoped to contribute to desperately needed pathways into careers in education, including classroom teachers, education assistants, settlement workers, speech and language pathologists, youth workers, and school psychologists, but we also hoped to better understand how inviting students to think about teaching as a practice might impact how students see themselves as learners and as participants in complex institutions.

Under provincial requirements, B.C. students spend nearly 12,000 hours of instructional time in K-12 schools (British Columbia, 2012). Within the formal curriculum, however, very little time is devoted to examining education as a field of study, a potential career path, or as a potentially fraught institution shaped by historical forces such as colonial heteropatriarchy. Nevertheless, the time students spend in schools is foundational to their future relationships to education, whether these are experienced as post-secondary students, caregivers, community members, or as future educators.  The connections that students form with teachers and their overall experiences inside and outside the classroom play a significant role in shaping how students develop lifelong relationships to learning, and for some, inspire an interest in pursuing education as a career. (Darling-Hammond, 2006)

By complementing students’ formative lived experiences in schools with structured curriculum on educational philosophy, curriculum design, inclusive practices, and anti-colonial pedagogies, we are hopeful that students will develop a more complex understanding upon which to build their personal views of education.  More than a century of educational theory suggests that students benefit when they are active and informed participants in their learning (Dewey, 2011; Freire, 1970; Ladson-Billings, 1995; Bandura, 1997).  We are hopeful that inviting students to look behind the curtain of education will contribute to a richer understanding of their roles as learners. Though this course has only been running for a short time, we hope to engage in future research that might enable us to better understand the impacts of formal curriculum on students’ relationships to teaching and learning, their awareness of their own learning processes, and how it might impact their relationships to their teachers. This article is a reflective description of a course, and any future systematic study of student outcomes will undergo appropriate research ethics review.

The Curriculum

Since its board approval in 2024, Foundations of Teacher Education 12 has been run as an independent study course for six students at one school in the Coquitlam school district but was taught for the first time as a full-time course with 22 enrolled students in the Spring of 2025 by curriculum co-author Tara Olchowy. The curriculum for Foundations of Teacher Education 12 focused on developing students’ critical and reflective thinking and fostering a respectful and inclusive school environment. Therefore, the course was themed around surfacing, utilizing, and celebrating the gifts that each individual brings to the classroom and to teaching. Through this lens of celebrating self-discovery, the students engaged with five Big Ideas:

1. Reflecting on strengths, stretches, biases, and passions helps us to identify the steps needed to achieve a career in education.
2. Learning about teaching supports student learning, self-advocacy, self-reflexivity, and ownership of learning.
3. Engaging in teaching requires creating meaningful relationships and respectful connections.
4. Education has an historical and continued role in colonialism and the oppression of marginalized groups.
5. Indigenous models of education foreground ethicality, sustainability, self-discovery, and service to one’s community.

Structure of the course

This course was divided into theory and practice components, with roughly sixty percent of time spent in the high school classroom and forty percent spent in a mentor teacher’s classroom in one of the high school’s many feeder schools. Structuring the class in this manner ensured that the learning from the classroom was grounded in theoretical and experiential learning. To facilitate the mentor relationship, the students were invited to reach out to their previous teachers and ask if they could do their experiential learning there. About one third of them found their placement in this manner. For the rest, an email to the principals of the feeder schools worked to solicit staff who were willing to take on the role of mentor and accept a student learner into their classrooms.

Fortunately, for this first year of the course, it was not difficult to find mentors and classrooms in which the students could engage in experiential learning. Indeed, more mentors volunteered than students enrolled in the course. Students were matched to mentors based on their preferred grade level and proximity to where they live. Beginning the placement process two months before the course began, with a follow-up one month before the volunteer experience, provided sufficient time to put everything in place.

Course Learning 

The content of this course included learning about the history of education, the role of education in society, the relationship between education and colonialism, the structures governing teaching, the legal obligations of teachers in BC, a variety of philosophies of teaching and learning, ministry assessment mandates, some ways of assessing and reporting on student progress, classroom management strategies, engagement tactics, and the importance of relationship building in a classroom. As students were being taught, we often stopped to take note of and to reflect on the method in which learning was happening. For example, students learned about the Professional Standards for BC Educators by being taught how to engage in a jigsaw activity. Students were subsequently invited to reflect on the intended learning based on the activity, but also on the strengths and weaknesses of the methods used to teach them about the topic. As the course progressed, students gathered the instructional strategies that they could then use when they progressed into designing their own lessons.

Students spent much of their time in the classrooms of their mentor teachers, observing and supporting the teaching of their mentor teacher. As part of their volunteer practice, the students experienced scaffolded instructional responsibilities, beginning with planning and leading a warmup activity, followed by designing and teaching a two-day lesson series that culminated in gathering a piece of student learning evidence to assess. Through these experiences students learned how to:

• access the BC Curriculum
• use a lesson plan template to plan for teaching
• draw on the First Nations Education Steering Committee’s (FNESC) First People’s Principles of Learning framework to inform their planning
• consider the inclusion of all learners in the classroom
• think through barriers to learning to ensure that all students are able to engage with the learning activities
• plan for assessment before, during and after learning, providing their students with feedback to move learning forward.

Classroom instruction was complemented with inviting in guest speakers (a secondary principal, a university professor of education, a retired educator from the BC Ministry of Education and Childcare, and a specialist in restorative education) and various hands-on activities. For instance, students conducted a Community Scan of their volunteer school to explore how the location affects learning and completed a gallery style introduction to educational literature, where students shared their learning with one another to support individual inquiry projects. Two field trips reinforced place‑based and experiential learning: a day at Simon Fraser University where students attended a Designs for Learning class, toured SFU Museum of Archaeology, and heard the advice of directors, program coordinators, and admissions and recruitment coordinators of the teacher education program.  Another off-site experience included a half‑day at Colony Farms (Port Coquitlam), where students learned about the site’s importance to the Kwikwetlem First Nation and its colonial history as a site of social exclusion. Students were also asked to consider how they would use the location in volunteer classrooms and to consider the logistical and pedagogical challenges of organizing field trips.

Impact of the course

Through learning about how to teach, these students have learned more about how to learn. They have demonstrated this through reflections in their journals, class discussions, and desk-side chats. Students made connections between what their teachers were doing and the why they were doing it and reported better engagement in their classes because of it. Teachers observed that the students seemed to have a new appreciation for the amount of time it can take to plan a unit or lesson that might initially seem effortless to an outside observer. The teachers who mentored them reported that they are reinvigorated in their own teaching because of the responsibility and enthusiasm they saw in these students.

Not all moments in the semester were easy ones.  Despite difficulties, both students and mentors reported positive outcomes: all reports were positive about the learning that took place, and it was a pleasure to watch the students grow as learners. At this time, it is unclear how many students will ultimately pursue a career in education as a result of being enrolled in Foundations of Teacher Education 12, but it is likely that, at the very least, the students now have a clearer sense of the joys and challenges of being an educator.

Conclusion

The Potawatomi scholar Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) describes gifts as a simultaneous awareness of strengths and responsibilities.  The first cohort of aspiring teachers to complete the course, Foundations of Teacher Education 12, have communicated a strong sense of gratitude and appreciation for the gifts of care, hard work, and knowledge that their teachers extend to students in order to make the classroom experience so positive. They have also expressed a more coherent awareness of their own roles and responsibilities in their ever-changing relationships with teaching and learning. Has this course succeeded in surfacing new and strong future teachers? Upcoming research will help us to understand how this course might impact students’ long-term relationships to teaching and learning and the subsequent impacts on their careers in teaching, but in the short term, we feel confident that it has encouraged participating students to think about all the complexity, care, uncertainty, joy, and effort that goes into teaching and learning.

Reflection Questions:

How might you invite students to think about teaching as a complex process in which they are active participants and to what extent might this contribute to a greater self-awareness of themselves as learners?

How can you create opportunities for students to reflect on how the learning they engage in shapes their growth, understanding, and development both inside and outside the classroom?

How might you inspire students to pursue education as a possible career, either through a formal program such as the one described in the article or through the informal conversations you have with students?

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. W. H. Freeman.

British Columbia. (2012). School Calendar Regulation, B.C. Reg. 314/2012. BC Laws. https://www.bclaws.gov.bc.ca/civix/document/id/complete/statreg/314_2012

Brown, Kyle G. “Student-Led Protests Have Thrown France into Chaos. Here’s What’s Happening.” CBC News. October 7, 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/french-student-protests-whats-happening-explainer-9.7371998.

Dewey, J. (2011). Democracy and education. Simon & Brown.

Focused Education Resources. (2024). Board/Authority Authorized (BAA) courses. https://focusedresources.ca/education/baa-courses

Freire, Paulo. (1970) 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th anniversary ed. New York: Continuum.

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491. https://doi.org/10.3102/00028312032003465

Statistics Canada. (2018). Chapter C: The learning environment and organization of schools. In Education indicators in Canada: An international perspective, 2018

UNESCO. (2024). Global report on teachers: Addressing teacher shortages and transforming the profession. UNESCO Publishing.

Meet the Expert(s)

Tara E Olchowy

Teacher, School District #43

Tara Olchowy is a veteran British Columbia educator with more than 28 years of experience teaching and supporting learning in middle and secondary schools. Passionate about growing both students and educators, she has presented at professional development events, served on district and provincial committees, and worked as a Faculty Associate at Simon Fraser University. Tara co-created Foundations of Teaching 12, a course designed to inspire the next generation of teachers. She holds a bachelor's degree, graduate diploma, and master's degree, and believes that learning is a lifelong journey that extends far beyond the classroom.

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Dr. Greg Sutherland

Lecturer, Simon Fraser University

Dr. Greg Sutherland's research aspires to create ways for teachers and learners to orient themselves to pedagogical and scholarly practices that are grounded in relationality and ethicality. His expertise is in pre-service and in-service teacher education and the ways in which Indigenous teaching and research practices can support students and teachers in exploring their own identities, developing critical literacies, and fostering ethical relationships to learning. Prior becoming a faculty member at SFU, Greg spend 17 years working as a K-12 teacher. Some of his other research interests include Language Arts curriculum and instruction; Social Studies curriculum and instruction; Social Justice Education; Digital and New Media literacies; and Comics Based Research.

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