This afternoon, our staff broke off into their core learning teams (Religious Education, Literacy, Curriculum and Mathematics) to continue our work towards achieving our school strategic plan and our goals for 2007.  I have been working in the Curriculum team, and with another colleague, have been given the challenge of reviewing the school’s K-6 Scope and Continuum in Creative Arts.

So far, it’s been a slow process of reading the existing units and mapping out exactly what’s being covered, in order to identify gaps and overlapping in the learning, and work from there.

The discussion slowly turned towards the idea of the “Key Learning Tasks” that what bring the units of work to life in the classroom.  We reflected on what they were originally supposed to be; rich learning tasks that brought together skills and knowledge, employed higher-order thinking skills, provided an opportunity for all students at all levels to access the curriculum, were meaningful, directly linked to assessment and to stage outcomes, etc., etc.

Our professional critique was that some of the tasks described in the whole school program were richer than others.  Others sounded like they had great potential, but how they were described on paper just didn’t do justice to them – “you have to see it in action to fully understand…”

So, amongst all the learning agenda that our team needs the school to address, let alone the other dimensions of the learning agenda from the other teams, plus the competing agendas that impact on the work of teachers, where do we find the time and the strategies to re-evaluate the very basis of teaching and learning?

We need to ask ourselves:

  • What is a rich learning task?
  • What does it look like?
  • How is it programmed?
  • What demands should it make of students (and of teachers!)?
  • How is it assessed?
  • How is it resourced?
  • How does it incorporate good strategies like cooperative learning, higher-order thinking/Bloom’s taxonomy/multiple intelligences/integral learning, use of technology, etc.?

Then, set this against the learning agenda outside influences (governments, etc.) wish schools to pursue, and the two can seem out of synch.  Just because the curriculum calls for children to learn about the British Colonisation of Australia in 1788 doesn’t mean we have to adopt 18th Century educational philosophies in order to teach it.

Unfortunately, it seems that the attempt to find answers only leads to more questions.  Yet, we press on…