The Challenge: Providing our year 10's with quality teaching.

In 2024, the new changes with NCEA Level 1 will need to be implemented as part of the Ministry’s curriculum refresh.  To help get our kids on the ‘board’, some of our core subjects such as English, Maths, Science and Social Studies decided to offer at least 4 credits to support our potential level ones who are at the moment in year 10.  In my department, we decided to offer 4 credits.

I had a look at potential standards we could offer and settled on the achievement standard 91041 ‘Describe a Social Justice and Human Rights Issue’ worth 4 credits.  I had taught this standard to my level 1’s early this year and most of them had achieved the standard.  I also felt that this one was the easiest of the standards in Social Studies to achieve especially with the limited time frame we had. 

I wanted to ensure that all year 10’s would have the same access to the learning that my year 11’s did so I went about setting out a plan.  I set a goal of trying to get the majority of year 10's who attend school regularly to achieve the 4 credits (I will formalise a goal after the initial learning sessions).

This blogpost is in two parts.  This part is about setting up the teaching, then next one is about setting up the learning.

Expert teaching about the standard:

As the only teacher of Senior Social Studies I figured that I could support the staff in my department by taking on the teaching  the teaching and learning of the subject by teaching the entire cohort what they need to know to achieve the standard.

I toyed with the idea of teaching all 180 in the auditorium at the same time, but the differences in timetable meant that I would be impeding on someone else’s classes so couldn't do it that way.  There are 6 year 10 classes and on a Monday, 5 of them have social studies, 2 sets of classes have them at the same time.  As I had hybrid seniors on a Monday, I decided I could try and teach the 5 classes as ‘tutorials’ on a Monday, to set them up for the learning (the 6th class was my own year 10 class that I would teach separately on a Tuesday).

5 of the 6 classes also had a double period during the week on a Wednesday or Thursday so I wanted to combine 2 classes on a Wednesday and 3 classes on a Thursday both in the library for the space and the sense of formality.  I called these ‘workshops’ as this is where the majority of the teaching and learning happens for the kids.

Structure of the tutorials:

1st one is setting the scene, basics of the context, basics of the standard, overview of the timetable, setting expectations of learning.  The rest of the tutorials will be looking at teacher feedback, understanding the focus of the week.

Structure of the workshops:

I decided to structure the workshops as follows:

• Our learning objectives
• The values of the day
• What if provocation
• Prior knowledge: What do you know about…
• Introducing key concepts, words, vocal we will come across 
• 5 minute writing tasks defining words
• Slide with 2 paragraphs maximum highlighting key words on context (read it to them)
• 5 minute quick fire questions referring to paragraphs 
• Hit them with a big chunk of learning but summarise discussions with images and at least 2 supportive videos
• A table with questions, short-answer and paragraph writing activities.
• A reading that supports the learning and a writing exercise.
• Recap learning objectives.
• Extra for experts wanting to do more

Single period sessions with their normal teacher:

Following up on an unfinished work and feedback.

I will write how this part went in a later blogpost.