11 November 2021

The teachers behind our curriculum resources share their top tips to help you deliver the Australian Curriculum in 2022.

Show Notes

• Curriculum resources overview (EDi)
• Units of work on plink
• Contact the curriculum team: education.curriculumdevelopmentdirectorate@sa.gov.au

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome back to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. I'm Dale Atkinson from the Department for Education,

Monique Miller: and I'm Monique Miller, primary school teacher at Westport Primary.

Dale Atkinson: In September, we expanded our suite of curriculum resources to help you prepare classroom learning for students.

We added new units for Health and PE, Technologies and the arts, and we added extra year levels for English, maths, science, and HASS. Today, we're going to hear from the teachers and curriculum team who have made these ready to use classroom units of work, and we're going to learn how they can help you plan for your 2022 curriculum.

Whitney Schultz is the curriculum manager for primary mathematics and Henry Johnson. Is the curriculum manager for secondary science. Welcome to you both.

Whitney Schultz: Thank you.

Henry Johnson: Thank you.

Dale Atkinson: So, first of all, you've been building these units of work over the last year, year and a half. What are they, how do they work?

Whitney Schultz: So, within each learning area, the curriculum is broken up into eight units. So every year level has eight units, these are organised by concepts, true to the Australian curriculum. And then within the units, you'll see a sequence of learning, which is a sequence of the overall concepts within the unit, not individual lesson plans. And then you'll see a suite of resources, including PowerPoints, word documents and PDF documents.

Henry Johnson: And also one of the reasons why we've done the units of work is to help teachers translate the Australian Curriculum. Uh, sometimes it can be a little bit ambiguous and we're tracking the nice South Australian contexts and also practical ways to embed literacy and numeracy into your teaching.

Dale Atkinson: So let's talk about the Australian curriculum because it's a beast of a document, right? Like you go onto the website and it is just page upon page of information, which is broad. It's very high level. There's so many different ways of interpreting it and moving from that Into actually standing in front of a classroom of, of students and being able to understand what it is that is going to be able to translate from the Australian Curriculum, into the teaching for these kids. That's a daunting task, particularly if you're a new starter, that's the work you guys are doing, right?

Henry Johnson: Yeah. Correct. And like you said, with the new starter, a new grad teacher, these units of work provide the resources so they've got the confidence that they're embedding an authentic curriculum, and they're not missing anything.

I'm speaking on behalf of science here, but I think maths follows suit. It’s such a conceptual narrative that we need to ensure the students receive at each year level to build upon their knowledge and their, and their prior work. So yeah, having these units of work, it really puts an emphasis on that to ensure that continuity.

Whitney Schultz: And I think being an early career teacher as well is a seemingly endless list of challenges. You're dealing with parents, you're dealing with behaviour, you're working out how to set up your classroom and all the nuances that come with it and taking that load off teachers to give them a planning resource that has really been done for them is going to make their life a lot easier. I think back to my early years in teaching and how long I spent scrounging around on the internet for some resources to use, um, that weren't actually best practice resources, but you can be rest assured that what we've developed is based on research and evidence and is the best fit for our curriculum and our students.

Dale Atkinson: Is that the kind of experience that you've had Monique, you're obviously a year 4 teacher earlyish. How many years now?

Monique Miller: This is my third year.

Dale Atkinson: Third year in. Is that an experience that you also felt like early on that there's an overwhelming amount of information that you've got to try to deal with?

Monique Miller: Yeah. Those first years, um, these resources weren't available. So just trying to find any, anything and everything that I can get my hands on to make my life a little bit easier. You know, I'm already starting to think next year I'll be moving to a different year level. I've been pretty comfortable where I am. So I think these resources are going to be awesome to expose myself to a new curriculum that I'll be teaching. And it's, it's got everything that I need for that year level.

Henry Johnson: I think going back to what you were saying, like you're looking for resources on the internet. As we all know the internet's very, very vast and not all the resources on there, are hitting the required curriculum either. So it's yeah, so another, another reason as to why we should be looking at these units of work and seeing what we can embed into our teaching.

Dale Atkinson: So, how do teachers actually use these things, like what is it? That's in front of them and how's it apply to the class?

Whitney Schultz: Well, if I was starting to plan for my year, I might be working with my professional learning community in my school and working out, uh, what sequence or approach you want to take, to planning our year. The units are sequenced from one to eight in a logical order. So you could very much pick them up and go straight from unit one to unit eight, or you can rearrange them based on your school's needs. So if you're doing some kind of, um, whole-school event, let's say a market day or a fete, for example, you might strategically embed a HASS unit alongside a mathematics unit that focuses on money and data.

There are, of course, some certain prerequisite units that need to come first. So your place value in your number units. You'd want to be making sure that you're doing those early on in the year to set students up for success for the following concepts. If I was opening up a unit of work, um, it really depends on what kind of learner you are and how you tackle them.

If you're a visual learner, I’d jump straight to those PowerPoints. Um, particularly in year 3/4 maths, we've made the visuals really strong. So have a look at how those concepts unfold visually and then pair it up with the unit plan and all of those teacher tips, misconceptions, alerts, adjustments, et cetera, that can support you in delivering.

Henry Johnson: Yeah. And I think for science it’s slightly different in secondary science. Um, from what Whitney was talking about with primary maths. We still have eight units of work per year level, that doesn't change, but the way you can do those units of work is entirely up to you. Some schools might only have one or two science labs, so you can't be doing, you know, you can't have 10 classes during the same science experiment, logistically it won't work.

So we have written them that they can be done in any order. And it's important to note that you don't have to do them prescriptively. It's open for you to adopt and adapt, and how you see fit given your site. Um, for example, your site might have a beautiful ag area so you might want to teach body systems through using animals that you've got rather than what we have we have in the units. And that's perfectly fine.

Yeah. It's good to read them to get a few ideas. And also that conceptual narrative that I was talking about before that really comes through heavily in the unit. So it's important that you do read the units to it. You don't just take bits and bits and pieces because it works as a whole, not just individually.

Monique Miller: Where you guys have sort of catered for different sites, knowing that all schools have different resources and access to different things. So people can get in there and access what they can use for their site and potentially use something and not the rest of it. So, it's really awesome the way that you've made it accessible for all school sites and teachers.

Henry Johnson: That’s a big tick.

Monique Miller: We've talked as well, really a lot about early career teachers, but it's not just for early career teachers. Someone more experienced can definitely get their hands on these and use them?

Whitney Schultz: Yeah, definitely. And we know that teachers are doing amazing things out there in their classroom. And, um, we're not out there to reinvent the wheel of their already fantastic practice, but we are here to offer something that may compliment their current planning and their current units. Even with our experienced teachers, they just don't have the time to keep looking for more and more resources online and, and plan this kind of work. So we've done the heavy lifting for them and it might just offer some new ways of teaching that they weren’t previously aware of.

Henry Johnson: Whitney and I we’re experienced teachers and we found that managing and helping writing these units that we thought, ah, okay, I've never thought about teaching this concept like that before using this context. it's a nice way to self-reflect on your own pedagogy. And so I feel that's where experienced teachers can get a lot out of these units by just reading through them and saying, okay, they’ve done this a bit differently. Why have they done that? Then they can look at the evidence behind why we have put that in place in our units. And yeah um, like Whitney was saying it's just really complimenting they're teaching.

Dale Atkinson: So is this something you’d sort of recommend maybe groups of teachers that are at a site or partnership level, getting together and maybe discussing the units and how they might apply for, for their work?

Henry Johnson: Yeah for sure. I really recommend, um, looking through these as a faculty and looking at your year and what you've got planned and seeing where you can fit these. And also again, you've already might have something great that you use on site already. It might be like a STEM week or something that you may be doing or a science week. So you might want some different units around those types of times, but yeah, really getting down and looking at these units and how they can be placed across your site.

Whitney Schultz: I might just build on that as well. If you're working with teachers across your professional learning community, you might choose the resources to use, to support some observation from cross class observations.

So you might choose a task throughout the units and use that as something that your team can really plan to and think about how would you adopt and adapt in your context? And then go and observe one another and reflect upon what are the key, high impact strategies throughout this task. And how can we continue to plan with this kind of model in place.

Very much we're about adopting and adapting to what the units offer. They're not prescriptive, although there's a certain sequence of learning that needs to take place. Teachers can certainly adapt to their own contexts. Um, we do get a lot of feedback saying, Hey, if I was teaching this lesson or this concept, I would do it this way and that's fantastic, but we've really had to pinpoint, well, how can we make this general and accessible for a statewide audience? And then teachers see themselves in the work and be able to adapt from there.

Dale Atkinson: What do you think the things are that you’ve personally learnt from the experience of building these resources?

Henry Johnson: Yeah, good question. Um, I personally learnt that I wasn't as good a teacher as I thought. Like I was saying before, um, these units give you opportunity to self-reflect in your own pedagogy and in the science units, it's very concept heavy as it should be, not content heavy because it's the concepts that we want students that after year 10 science, we want them to carry forward with them, not the, not the content itself. So I reckon that's what I really learnt is, you know, teach to the concept, not content, that's that's imperative in science.

Whitney Schultz: I've learnt a lot about the research that underpins a lot of these mathematical concepts and how to go deeper with it. So writing the units of work, um, in years, 5, 6 and 7 for maths, I felt almost a little bit like a fraud at first and what I was writing I had never taught anything that well, but that's just because I simply didn't have the time to plan to that extent and to research and to read or those, you know, those name dropped researchers and books and things that people mentioned throughout professional development.

I had the time to sit there and read the whole chapter and then make those decisions based on what the research said and how the concept should be structured and embedded to avoid misconceptions in the learning.

Monique Miller: That's really the great part about it. We've got people who are working hard with the time to find all these resources and really get deep with the curriculum, making sure that we're provided with everything that we need. So it's really awesome. What's something you've put in your own learning areas, work that you think teachers might find particularly interesting. So, um, Henry you’re in secondary science. How about you?

Henry Johnson: What I'm particularly interested in and I know other teachers are as well are the contextualisation of the Aboriginal science elaborations. So what we've done is we've put at the forefront, this Aboriginal science elaborations, where we look at the Aboriginal ways of knowing, understanding and where we can, we've put a South Australian context as well. So we have another curriculum manager, he works closely with the nations groups around the Adelaide area, where we look at the knowledge that they hold and how we can implement that into our units of work.

Whitney Schultz: I'm really proud about the way that the year 3/4 mathematics units in particular make the mathematics really visual. So we've adapted a model called the CPA model, which stands for concrete, pictorial abstract. So we've made sure that students have the opportunity to really go deep with a concept, use concrete materials, see in a pictorial representation before moving to the abstract concepts to really deepen their understanding.

So throughout the PowerPoints, you’ll see some really strong visuals of what those mathematics concepts actually look like, which I think will support not only student understanding of mathematics, but teachers as well.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, it's interesting. And, and have you both been in touch with teachers out in the field, have you got a bit of feedback on how they've received these units over?

Henry Johnson: Yes. We've had several teacher focus groups. The teachers range from having a couple of years’ experience to your HALTs and Cat 1 schools through to Cat 7 schools. So we do get a range of feedback. And we also work with seconded writers who we grab from schools, um, for a term. And again, they come from a range of different Cat schools and as well as experience themselves. So these are very much written by teachers for teachers.

Whitney Schultz: Yeah, throughout the writing process um, keeping in touch with teachers has been really important to make sure that it reflects what teachers need in their classrooms. So earlier this year, I had a small group of teachers who I worked with and touch base with, who were implementing some of the draft work in their classroom and giving feedback.

And they were able to see that their feedback was applied directly to the units. Um, we've obviously also had our teacher reference groups and, um, presenting at Educators SA to teachers, um, even across our Catholic sector as well, who are really excited to get on board with the units. Mostly from first look at the units people say, wow, the heavy lifting has been done for them. And there's things that they don't have to worry about now because they know that it's been done to a really high level and they can focus more on supporting their students.

Monique Miller: It's really great that testing, reflecting and improving is all sort of happening um, before they're published.

Whitney Schultz: I might just add on that as well after all of our units are written we'll be going through a review process. So it doesn't stop there. We'll keep continually refining and improving the units as we go.

Monique Miller: If teachers have any questions? Where do we go for those?

Henry Johnson: Uh, so if teachers, do you have any questions, I can give an email address, but it's pretty long winded. So if, when you go onto EDI and you go to the units of work, it's just at the bottom of the page, but for people that want to know it, education.curriculumdevelopmentdirectorate@sa.gov.au.

Dale Atkinson: Beautifully done. And we'll have that in the show notes too. So just check that out online. Thank you both for joining us, Whitney and Henry. Yeah, that was a, it was a great chat. And obviously we are coming towards the end of the year. So if you haven't already taken a look at the units, please do so in preparation for 2022, it's terrifying that that's the year that's coming up. So thank you both very much for your time. And, um, Monique, thank you for your time.

Everyone: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.