Due to severe flooding in July, Barnett House will remain closed until early 2027.
The ATA Library is still open and providing resources to members.
Staff are working from home and continue to serve members online and by phone.
The Southern Alberta Regional Office (SARO) in Calgary is unaffected and conducts business per usual.
Following years of unrelenting K–6 curriculum rollouts, Alberta Education and Childcare has slowed its aggressive curriculum development timelines. Since Sept. 2022, the ministry has implemented new K–6 curriculum in seven subject areas. With junior high and high school curriculum development now underway in six subject areas, curriculum development continues to move forward, but at a more deliberate pace.
Throughout this curriculum change process, K–6 teachers have expressed deep concern that the pace of the rollout put significant strain on students and teachers across the province. Taken together with the implementation of literacy and numeracy screening assessments and the shift to a digital provincial assessment platform, K–6 teachers have been inundated with change for years.
In response to these concerns, the ministry has shifted to a five-phase curriculum development process that has slowed the pace of implementation. This five-phase process—develop, consult, field test, pilot and implement—now takes approximately four years to complete and is used for each curriculum draft. This shift marks a significant change from the ministry’s approach to the April 2022 release of several subjects that were piloted and then implemented provincewide in Sept. 2022, only five months later.
The slower pace of implementation for Alberta’s secondary classrooms is a welcome change. However, teachers continue to voice concerns about the ministry’s learning and teaching resource strategy, lack of teacher voice at the curriculum development table and disjointed implementation approach.
As of the time of writing, the ministry has not yet announced subjects that will be under development in the 2026/27 school year. While we do not yet know how curriculum development work will expand in junior high and high school, we do know that the ministry will continue to consult with teachers in the process.
In fall 2023, the ministry introduced a consultation strategy called Teacher Curriculum Consultation Groups (TCCGs), which consist of teachers from across the province who provide feedback on draft curriculum documents prior to their public release. Draft curriculum is developed by the ministry first and then shared with TCCGs and education partners, including the Alberta Teachers’ Association, for feedback. Since introducing them, the ministry has used TCCGs as a component of their curriculum consultation strategy.
At the same time, TCCGs alone are far from curriculum development best practice. Teachers continue to lack confidence in Alberta’s curriculum and, until such time as teachers are seated at the curriculum-writing table, these concerns will likely go unresolved. Teachers also continue to be dissatisfied with the degree to which their feedback is used to inform curriculum development and revision. The K–6 mathematics curriculum, for example, is the subject of substantial teacher concern that has yet to be addressed. Further, teachers have expressed the need to balance the ministry’s intense focus on career education with curriculum development work related to the fine arts and additional languages.
The 2026/27 school year marks the field testing of three new secondary subjects: Grades 7–9 science, Grade 10 career and life management (CALM), and Grade 10 physical education and wellness (PEW).
Up to the public release of the draft CALM curriculum on Sept. 22, 2026, the ministry stated its intention to release and field test a Grade 10 career education and financial literacy (CEFL) curriculum. This unexpected return to CALM and the resulting shift away from the new CEFL curriculum approach we currently see in Grades 7–9 is evidence of a response to calls to retain the time-tested CALM course and further slow the pace of curriculum development within the complex context of high school career education. Teachers continue to call for direct involvement in the design of high school career education pathways and the writing of high school career education curriculum.
Optional classroom piloting is also underway for 7–9 mathematics, 7–9 social studies, 7–9 PEW and 7–9 CEFL. The ministry reports that more than 2,200 teachers across the province have registered to pilot the new curriculum this year, with piloting occurring in public, separate, charter, First Nations, francophone, independent and international schools.
Like their K–6 colleagues, piloting 7–9 teachers have expressed deep concern regarding the lack of purpose-built, comprehensive resources created to support new curriculum. As a result of this lack of resources, the work of resource creation and procurement has been downloaded to teachers and schools engaged in the piloting phase.
Teachers continue to request that the ministry procure comprehensive resources, such as textbooks, that are created specifically for the Alberta curriculum and provide purpose-built support for teachers who are charged with bringing the curriculum to life. Comprehensive resources would work alongside the locally created resources shared on new LearnAlberta and, taken together, create a more supportive approach to curriculum rollout.
In the 2025/26 school year, as part of their consultation strategy, the ministry introduced Leaders of Learning meetings, where school authority leaders and education partners are invited to attend virtual consultation meetings to provide insights regarding implementation, resourcing, curriculum content and other implementation-focused feedback topics.
While the current implementation approach now involves formalized consultation and differs from the ministry’s 2021 intentions to implement all K–6 curriculum at once, teachers have expressed concern that this implementation strategy does not address continuity of student learning.
The current implementation strategy sees curriculum rolled out to classrooms in blocked cohorts. That is, curriculum is generally introduced in three-grade cohorts wherein a subject is implemented in three grades at a time. For example, this year the Grades 4–6 social studies curriculum is now in the mandatory implementation phase. This blocked cohort model does not account for continuity of student learning. Students who are in Grade 8 this year, for instance, have bounced back and forth between old and new mathematics curricula multiple times, impacting year-to-year scaffolding of student learning.
Teachers continue to call for an implementation strategy that employs cohorts that progress through curriculum from year to year to ensure continuity of learning. With the approach to high school curriculum development still uncertain, the Association will continue to advocate on behalf of students and teachers across the province.
Draft curriculum, teaching and learning resources and curriculum implemen-tation information are available at https://curriculum.learnalberta.ca/home/en.
The Curriculum Implementation and Supports Timeline is available at https://abteach.cc/ab-curriculum-timeline.
Teachers interested in becoming involved in junior high and high school curriculum development consultations are encouraged to stay tuned for ministry announcements in the coming months.
ATA Executive Staff Officer, PD
