This third session at the Oxford Conference was presented by Howard Kennedy (NSW Board of Studies)
I felt like a spy. Maybe the only Victorian in this NSW syllabus briefing getting the secret perspective from below the surface! I thought it was interesting to title the session: ‘incorporating’. This was a session focused on the NSW changes. They aren’t talking about implementing. Its incorporating.
NSW announced a new syllabus website last November. They’ve had thousands of hits. ‘And we’re not even teaching this yet’. Okay. We are.
Kennedy went through the rationale for the AC, and I was surprised to that the old chestnut about families and students who move annually around Australia; I thought that had been dismissed as the reason for all this stuff, and he actually dismissed it a bit himself, when he gave us some Defence Force data about research they’d done, about it not being the curriculum that was the hard thing for students who moved, but the different starting ages, which haven’t really been addressed by anyone to my knowledge. I was surprised to see that he still felt the need to explain and/or justify the rationale for the AC at all, but it was an interesting enough looking-back at the history of this space since 2008.
He denied that “NSW had gone off and done their own thing”, which is basically what I thought. Instead, he argued that the NSW stakeholders requested additional elements. His slide said that in 2010 they endorsed the content, then agreed that the content should be refined. We want more detail, argued NSW teachers (not the response from most Victorian teachers) NSW was used to detail. A study in NSW was 70 pages each. In the ACT, the whole syllabus was 32 pages. Apparently NSW teachers love being told what to do, or love clear, detailed outcomes. Take your pick.
His take-away message to phase 2 and 3 teachers: ‘the curriculum needs to be achievable within existing indicative time requirements and NSW KLA structure, and the appropriate time-frame (a full 12 months preparation). I read that as your time for the subject you teach won’t change.
He then showed us how NSW were basically explaining the ACARA dotpoints. One dot point in ACARA Science becomes 4, one Maths dot point on triangles, becomes 12, the word ‘perspectives’ needs to be explained (imagine how a Turkish person would have felt at Gallipoli?)
Every student has to have been taught this stuff by the end of 2015. (pretty much indecipherable diagram)
The NSW syllabuses for the Australian Curriculum website looks pretty good. He was very happy with the level of interest in the NSW web site from all over Australia and the world. When he showed us the site, some malware or spam started coming up. It was nice to see the site being used live, which is always risky.
The site itself has some good features, some learning support materials, and a thing called ‘Program Builder’, which is available to NSW teachers and others (?) through Scootle. In this section, teachers can create units and programs based on the NSW syllabus. Already, 71,000 units have been developed in Program Builder.
You know, in all this talk, not a mention of the learning, the intention, the big picture and, in the program builder, units build of content and assessment with none of the enduring understandings or intentions that characterise UbD. In this model, curriculum units were cut and paste out of content. I did like that they had unit templates which were able to be customised.
The bridge: photo by Warrick
teaching and learning with technology 