ASDAPA Clarifying the confusion? The front and the back of the thing!

1. ASDAPA Clarifying the confusion? The front and the back of the thing! Margaret Bendall - Team Solutions

2. Tensions … (1) The Stapling Syndrome) The “front” (vision, principles, key competencies and values) and the “back” (Achievement Objectives)

3. Tensions … (2) Whole school/teachers The development/design of a “School Curriculum” and the development of ways of “putting it into practice”. The development of “NZC in the classroom” (which may be too narrow a concept in the end?) School leadership at whole school and school leadership at faculty/department level, sometimes talking past each other? Celebrate, share at staff meetings and support all development/engagement, with alignment of all NZC work with the school’s curriculum understood as an eventual necessity?

4. Tensions … 3 Challenge and retreat (with thanks to Dr Graeme Aitken) • Complexity in the design of the NZC - autonomy within guidelines, a number of elements and concepts to be integrated in our understanding; cognitive overload. • Eisner “What members of the field of education in general and curriculum in particular have increasingly come to understand is that given a competition between the general and the particular, the particular will win every time.”

5. Tensions 3 - continued… • Spillane - teachers do not deliberately resist or misconstrue but we need sense-making interactions between individual cognition, social situation and clarity of design. • Aitken - look for connections with your own world, understand and clarify for everyone involved the thinking behind the NZC, the whole picture. (with thanks to Dr Graeme Aitken)

6. Tensions …4 Curriculum - Subjects? • Curriculum = Learning Areas? Subjects? Or even AOs and standards? • Classroom or school curriculum? Curriculum = “What we intend our students to learn”? (Sir Ken Robinson): i.e. academic AND social outcomes, in all the learning experiences that the school values. (No “extra” or even “co” curriculum? “What we intend students to learn also includes guidance/student support? Leadership? D of E? etc ) • Implications for reporting? • “Natural Links” between Learning Areas? (Coherence Principle, p16 Intro, and P38 Designing a SC)

7. The front and the back - the hinges! Expectations when the NZC is mandated. • Requirements for Board of Trustees - through principal and staff, develop and implement a curriculum Years 1-13 underpinned by and consistent with the principles, in which the values are encouraged and modelled and explored by students, and that supports students to develop the competencies … • And see the rest of this statement, page 44.

8. The front and the back - the hinges! • School Curriculum - is there merit in a model that begins with “what we intend kids to learn”, our vision for our graduates (vision, values, KCs, and …) • Then perhaps answers the question “what sort of learning environment will promote this kind of learning?” • In this second frame - our commitments? (e.g. to the best Pedagogy? To highly engaging learning experiences in and outside classrooms that ensure the delivery of our curriculum? To Learning Areas at macrolevel? And to making “links between L.As? and …) • Do the NZC Principles underpin this learning environment.

9. The hinges - The NZC Principles (that willunderpin all school decision-making) The principles put students at the centre of teaching and learning, asserting that they should experience a curriculum that engages and challenges them, is forward-looking and inclusive and affirms New Zealand’s unique identity. • High expectations • Treaty of Waitangi • Cultural diversity • Inclusion • Learning to Learn • Community Engagement • Coherence • Future focus Page 44 “the school curriculum be underpinned by and consistent with …”

10. Beyond the Learning Environment -drawing in tools/vehicles/initiatives? • Strategies that help us deliver principles? e.g. Ka Hikitia, as a strategic approach to the NZC principle of The Treaty of Waitangi - to “acknowledge the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and the bicultural foundations of Aotearoa New Zealand. All students have the opportunity to acquire knowledge of te reo Maori me ona tikanga” • “Vehicles” such as Te Kotahitanga, which helps us deliver on “the best pedagogy” • Initiatives, which can be aligned with commitments in the Learning environment and/or the curriculum itself (what the school intends our kids to learn)? Or … drop them? Schools tend to do too much, often without clear links between one initiative and the next?

11. Putting it all into practice in highlyengaging learning experiences! • What will happen with our schemes? Those commitments made specific? • What needs to change in planning “lessons”? The objective is to draw all of this down into specific learning experiences? • Learning objectives - both academic and social? Consciously teaching/learning what students need to know and be able to do.

12. Putting it all into practice in highlyengaging learning experiences! • Starting with pedagogy? (= one possible way of thinking about this) - identifying naturally arising KCs (to “develop”, p44), values (to “model, explore, encourage”p44), principles (to be “consistent with…p44) • NB. AOs and assessment/standards come last in this approach to planning, NOT first! They are applied where they fit…it is up to us not to allow assessment to take over the curriculum?

13. Pedagogy: the key to implementation. A key principle: Learning to Learn • “The foundations of human capital are laid down in schools” OECD Economic Report on NZ • People need to be increasingly adaptive - but what IS “life-long learning”? e.g. Dispositions are the best predictors of success in life (PISA, OECD Programme for International Student assessment) • The importance of being “ready and willing” - accounts for half variation in performance.

14. Professor Guy Claxton: Professor ofLearning Sciences, University of Winchester • Life-long learning dispositions include: curiosity, resilience, the ability to “manage distraction”, experimenting, imagining reasoning … (and we all inevitably “teach” dispositions - are they the life-long learning dispositions/key competencies?) E.g. Avoid producing “certaholics”, who shift blame, are risk-averse (see Dweck) • Life-long learning dispositions flourish where teachers and principals are in the process of “cheerfully finding out” and demonstrate “confident uncertainty” ….

15. Professor Guy Claxton: Prof. of LearningSciences, University of Winchester • … where visitors hear talk about what is being learned, where teachers are in professional learning circles, where students are being asked real questions about improving learning. • … where student voice is engaged, “as crew not passengers” in the business of learning. (We know students love learning “challenging things that matter to someone, learning collaboratively, having some choice and some scope to organise themselves …”)

16. And schools are already doing it well … • Professor John Hattie, Visible Learning • And your guest schools … Kia kaha!