Curriculum planning

In 2018, Kristie Schulz from Parklands Christian College wrote 3 articles for Teacher sharing how the school had successfully introduced a new STEM Studies elective for its year 10 students. Five years on, she shares details of research findings looking at the pedagogical framework used and how the program has since been implemented in 3 prep classes.

How many scientists are mentioned in high school science curricula in Australia and how many are women? After discovering that Marie Curie was absent from the radioactivity section of a state Physics syllabus, astrophysicist Dr Kathryn Ross set out to explore if the contributions of other women were being overlooked. She joins us on this episode to share the shocking findings.

Teachers can now help students better understand what influences their own and others’ mental health and wellbeing with the help of a new resource. ACARA has teamed up with Beyond Blue and Headspace to develop the Curriculum Connection online content.

The design and implementation of a new whole-school or subject specific curriculum is a big undertaking, and relies on collaboration, consultation, monitoring and evaluation. In today’s article, we catch up with the winning team of the Teacher Awards 2023 in the Excellence in Curriculum Design and Implementation category.

School Assembly is the podcast that explores what it takes to build a new school from the ground up. We’re following principal Jo Camozzato and her team at Bemin Secondary College, in the Melbourne suburb of Truganina, which opens its doors at the start of the 2024 school year. In this episode, we’re talking about planning.

In today’s episode of Teacher Staffroom, we’re going to be talking about teacher planning, drawing on 3 articles written by educational leader Michael Rosenbrock, as well as some of the other highlights from Teacher this month.

So far in a 3-part series on teacher planning, educational leader Michael Rosenbrock has looked at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM and support them to build and use their vocabulary in science and mathematics. In this final article, he explores how teachers can best plan to make effective use of manipulatives and representations to help students build understanding.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Kristy Osborne, a physicist, former pre-service teacher and Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) about the science concepts that primary students struggle with and why it’s important for teachers to identify and address student misconceptions early on.

‘Deliberately planning to support students to build and use their vocabulary is critical to ensuring that students can both access the curriculum content and effectively demonstrate their understanding.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock shares what this might look like in practice for maths and science teachers.

‘Teacher knowledge of misconceptions and explicitly planning to uncover and address them is vital for supporting student learning growth.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock looks at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM, and steps though an example from the forces and motion topic in physics.