Professional Reading #3: Local Curriculum Design and the Aotearoa Histories Curriculum

Challenge:  Students don’t have the subject specific skills or capabilities to succeed in my subject area and I assume that they should know the basics.  When I am reviewing my course, I need to take into account their learning progressions and tailor our programme to gather data and plan accordingly so that the teaching and planning falls into the 'goldilocks zone'.

Research and reading: 

I have been given the role Professional Development Co-ordinator which is role where I organise and support staff around PLD.  I have been researching how to support stuff in Local Curriculum design and I have found some interesting information which in turn supports my inquiry.

I needed to get my head around how to implement a relevant programme that related to our strategic school focus and decided to figure out where to start by talking to a few people like Viv Hall from CORE education and our across school COL teacher Scott Mansell.  We all agreed that the new Aotearoa Histories (AH)was the best place to start.

The new histories curriculum provides opportunities for schools to own their own stories by providing rich contexts specific to our own communities.  As a SOS teacher, I was excited to hear about the opportunity to about Mana Whenua histories and the perspectives of Maori of our area.

The AH website offers lots of new resources and one of them is the coherent pathways resource.  Here is the blurb:

Further on in the toolkit, it offers a focus for important transition points and year levels as well as capabilities that students should be able to do.  It is like a learning progressions chart.  The cool thing with this particular one is that it shows the stages of knowing, understanding and doing across all subject areas not just Social Studies. 

I think it’s important to know what students at the end of year 8 should know and be able to do as it provides a starting point for our year 9’s.  If I could redesign my objectives, it would be to test or measure whether students can do these things right at the start of the year and the data will be more purposeful and related to real outcomes.  What I will do in the meantime is to identify what we do specifically in year 9 which may help me see where the gaps are so that I can plan a potential intervention around what I know a year 9 student should know.