Assignment Cover Sheet

Student ID* S 2 6 8 5 4 0 Postal Address (must be completed by all students)

Number & Street 64 ALICE STREETTitle Miss

Surname* SKORIN Suburb / Town AUBURN/SYDNEYGiven Names* ANTICA State NSW Postcode 2 1 4 4Preferred Name

N/ACountry AUSTRALIA

Are you an International Student* No I am not. Contact Phone 1 0412 829 433Date of Birth 2 7 1 2 1 9 8 5 Contact Phone 2 ( 02 ) 9646 3941

Unit Code* ETL 411 Lecturer name* External Student

External Student (Unit Coordinator: Peter Mcdowell)

Unit Name* Teaching the Curriculum 1 & Integrating Literacy

Assignment Title* Curriculum Through Literacy 50% Words: 2000

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Due date* Posting date * Semester

Monday 26th of May 2014

Monday

26th of May 2014

Semester One (T2)

Declaration

I declare that all material in this assessment is my own work except where there is a clear acknowledgement and reference to the work of others. I have read the University’s Academic and Scientific Misconduct Policy and understand its implications.*http://www.cdu.edu.au/governance/policies/academicandscientificmisconductpolicy.pdf

I Antica Skorin agree to the above statement.

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1 I have completed and submitted the assignment cover sheet. A.S

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Teaching The Curriculum &

Integrating Literacy

Purpose of this document:

Sharing Teaching Ideas With Professional Colleagues.

Out - Of - Class Literacy Research Activity.Promote Purposeful Learning.

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Curriculum Through Literacy

Out-Of-Class Literacy Research Activity:

'An Autobiography Of My Life Before School' is an effective literacy based, novel out-of-class activity design, which I have prepared for a Stage 2, Year 4 class. My design addresses specific multimodal literacy needs whilst engaging and promoting meaningful student learning. 'An Autobiography Of My Life Before School', incorporates theories of learning, literacy pedagogies, the Australian curriculum and NSW syllabus outcomes, community diversity and practical assessment. Multimodal literacy activity 'An Autobiography Of My Life Before School', will be outlined below:

Task:

Students are required to create and write an unusual literature genre autobiography about their life before they started attending school and the key events which occurred in the community and internationally during that period, e.g. elections, natural disasters, inventions, popular music, and clothing trends just to name a few etc.

Students are to research, compile information and illustrate the stages of their life from the day they were born to the first day of Kindergarten, setting these stages to appropriate music. (Music is a purposeful tool to induce emotion and learning, and students will carefully select songs to accompany the stages of their life and key events).

This activity requires students to conduct research outside the school environment by brainstorming important events in their lives with their parents or guardians, along with collecting images, pictures and music that represent those events. Once the first stage of home research is completed, students will then have the opportunity to research key events which occurred during the period at school in computer labs or through class iPads.

Once the out-of-class and computer lab research process has come to an end, students will construct storyboards in preparation for their final Power-Point task and either booklet or newspaper report. After editing any facts, ideas and notes and reproducing their draft work, Year 4 students will present their final task to their classmates and teacher for assessment and feedback. Students are also required to assess and self-reflect on their own performance and write recommendations for future benefit. (The booklet is a nice touch as the students are encouraged to keep their booklet work as a keepsake, and look back on it in 10 years time).

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Multimodal Outcomes of Task:

This out-of-class literacy activity supports the Australian Curriculum content and outcomes, as well as the NSW Syllabus Standards which have been adopted in order to promote purposeful learning, multimodal literacy needs and student engagement.

My out-of-class literacy research activity will be measured against the achievement standards for Stage 2 in both English and History. Receptive contexts include listening, reading, viewing and representing, whilst Productive contexts include speaking, writing and creating. The following objectives are aimed to promote purposeful learning and an engaging learning environment:

English:

EN2 - 2A: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will plan, compose and review a range of texts that are more demanding in terms of topic, audience and language.

EN2 - 3A: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will use effective handwriting and publish texts using digital technologies.

EN2 - 4A: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will use an increasing range of skills, strategies and knowledge to fluently read, view and comprehend a range of texts on increasingly challenging topics in different media and technologies.

EN2 - 8B: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will be able to identify and compare different kinds of texts when reading and viewing, showing an understanding of purpose, audience and subject matter.

EN2 - 10C: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will be capable of thinking imaginatively, creatively and interpretively about information, ideas and texts when responding to and composing texts. EN2 - 11D: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will be capable of responding to and composing a range of texts that express viewpoints of the world similar to and different from their own.

EN2 - 12E: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will gain the ability to recognise and use an increasing range of strategies to reflect on their own and others' learning.

History:

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HT2-1: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will be able to identify celebrations and commemorations of significance in Australia and the world particularly in relation to the time-frame given in the activity.

HT3 - 1: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will be able to describe and explain the significance of people, groups, places and events to the development of Australia and throughout their life as per the activity.

HT2-5: By the end of this assessment, Stage 2 students will be capable of applying skills of historical inquiry and communication.

Traditional Assessment of Task:

Figure 1: Student's Literacy

Figure 2: What is the balance?

Theory to Practice:

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The key learning area content comes from defined curriculums and is enhanced by a set of topics by the stage-team, or school.

Adequate thinking or process skills can come from various disciplines, such as writing or proofreading from language, arts or math.

Other process skills cut across subject area lines or may be identified as areas of need based on standardised testing instead of promoting purposeful learning.

Traditional testing helps answer the question, “Do you know it?” and performance assessment helps answer the question, “How well can you use what you know?”

These two ways of looking at literacy do not compete; the challenge is to find the right balance between them.

My out-of-class literacy research activity represents Harvey Daniel's and Marilyn Bizar's idea of integrating literacy and research. I have partially adopted their teaching strategy and incorporated it into my design and teaching approach which allows my students to investigate the appropriate historical period between their birth date and their first day of Kindergarten. Such literacy research emphasises on the English study of understanding voice and point of view in a literacy genre writing task.

For example, Carol Booth Olson states that authentic research 'stems from a student's intense need to know about a topic that has immediate relevance for him or her'. In this instance, the topic the student is researching is his or her place in the world at the time of his or her birth, up until Kindergarten.

Also, according to William Kist, 'students should be able to both read critically and write functionally, no matter what the medium'. This is increasingly true since we have broadened the concept of literacy to include multimodal projects so that no student will feel isolated, and every student will gain knowledge and understanding from the sharing of ideas. As the NCTE Statement on Multimodal Literacies states, 'The use of different modes of expression in students work should be integrated into the overall literacy goals of the curriculum and appropriate for time and resources invested'. This statement justifies the fact that my literacy genre out-of-class activity, encourages such lesson integration by asking students to create multimodal presentations.

Literacies to think & learn:

All academic disciplines use literacies as a basis for communicating knowledge, and also for learners to represent knowledge to themselves in their thinking. Piaget states that as a child grows and acquires language, words which describe things that happen to be beside each other in the world turn into concepts, which allow for generalisation, abstraction of higher order and adult like thinking. According to philosopher Charles Sanders Pierce, there is a clear distinction between 3 kinds of connections and what they represent to the world, e.g. icon, indicator and symbols.

Icon: A likeness through a particular thing, e.g. a picture is not the thing, it is a representation of a thing through a likeness.

Indicator: A direct pointing to connection between a sign and the world, e.g. a thermometer points to the temperature, a clock to the time etc.

Symbol: Based on the kind of thinking a human has created and can pass on generation to generation, e.g. word symbols, visual icons, gestures and sounds which represent signals.

Literacies standards & assessment:

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Analysis of Task:SKORIN_A_S268540_ETL411_ASSIGNMENT2 8 | P a g e

How do I prioritise curriculum elements?

I believe the single most important initiative a school can engage in is to raise student achievement. The highest quality curriculum is developed by utilizing a wide range of resources during the development and subsequent monitoring of the curriculum, such as:

StandardsBenchmarksPerformance objectives / GLEsAssessmentsTeacher experience

I believe that not all content is equal and that some performance objectives are more important than others in helping students succeed in school. As a pre-service teacher I prioritized the curriculum outcomes into essential, important and compact categories i.e. Essential vs. Important vs. Compact.

For instance:

Essential - 50% of the Content & requires 70% of the Instructional time.(Refers to the 'Big Ideas' or concepts that you want your students to understand at a greater depth).

Important - 30% of the Content & requires 25% of the Instructional time.(Refers to the key knowledge and skills that lead to student understanding of the essential knowledge).

Compact - 20% of the Content & requires 5% of the Instructional time. (Refers to the less important stuff that students can usually get by without or will be acquired as a result of other instruction).

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Figure 3: Prioritising Toolbox

After I prioritize my benchmarks/outcomes, fellow teachers and I meet in stage meetings where we review and discuss our rationale for how we prioritized each benchmark/outcome. Stage supervisors look for redundancies and gaps before returning to their stage teams to make revisions. Teachers clustered those benchmarks and outcomes in the 3 categories into topics that will be used to guide our instruction. We then identify the concepts that are contained in each topic. For every topic, we created a Content Map including all the necessary elements.

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For example:

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Learning to mean:

I prioritise curriculum outcomes by initially focusing on my learning approach which is Authentic pedagogy where students assume the role as questioners and experimenters. I focus on and prioritise my curriculum outcomes by their relevance, purpose, respect, meaning and power in relation to purposeful learning in the classroom.

As a pre-service teacher I try to avoid my Stage 2 students from reading and reciting textbooks since all it does is bore them and enhance poor behaviour. Instead, I recreate textbook information onto worksheets or multimodal techniques, which are colourful and encouraging, allowing students to interact with one another to read and understand the information and facts being portrayed in a way which only they understand, but the message is still conveyed accurately, efficiently and reliably.

I believe the student ought to be in control of meaning learning, and feel some degree of power as a knowledge-maker, students should also be involved in purposeful work, and be respected for their contribution. This learning strategy can only be accomplished if I prioritise my learning outcomes as close to accurate as I can to achieve an encouraging, motivated and self-managed classroom environment where I act as a watcher and mentor. I want my outcomes to focus primarily on the meaning which students choose to communicate, allowing independence, self-awareness, and self-development.

What ideology is implicit in my pedagogical approach?

I am a firm believer of the Authentic pedagogy learning approach, and I endeavour to prioritise my curriculum content and outcomes based on my reformed class activities and projects which I also believe better serve all the students in my Year 4 class and promote a higher level of student learning.

Authentic pedagogy has been found to support the learning of students at risk and to foster high levels of engagement and interaction (Newman and Wehlage, 1995; Newmann and Associates, 1996). The key concept in my Authentic learning approach is the 'construction of knowledge' concept or ideology if you like by students engaging in higher order thinking activities in which they manipulate information and ideas by synthesizing, generalizing, explaining, hypothesizing or arriving at conclusions that produce new meanings or understandings. For example: the out-of-class research activity that i designed is a great example where students will be required to gather and manipulate information and facts by synthesizing, explaining and arriving at conclusions.

The beauty of Authentic pedagogies is that students truly engage ideas and issues with complex thinking which allows the students to develop themselves, and develop new meanings and deeper understandings which would not be possible in a Didactive or Critical pedagogy approach.

How teachers exchange information about teaching ideas?

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Teacher collaboration is essential, whether it be academic and/or vocational teachers, they are expected to work together to alter the curriculum and pedagogy within subjects, make connections between subjects, and explore new relationships between the school and the world of work. Teachers can also exchange information about teaching ideas through social networking i.e. teaching blogs, Word-Press, Google sites, school intranet to name a few, through communication, staff and stage meetings on a daily or weekly basis, or simply through word of mouth.

In my current prac school, the Year 4 teachers meet up every Monday afternoon and discuss their topics of the week and how they will go about teaching the content to the class. This is a simple and effective way to share information and teaching ideas to other teachers, who may also have ideas which other teachers would like to implement.

Schools benefit from teacher collaboration and the exchange of teaching ideas in many ways such as:

Through formal and informal training sessions, study groups, and conversations about teaching, teachers and administrators get the opportunity to get smarter together.

Teachers are better prepared to support one another's strengths and accommodate weaknesses. Working together, they reduce their individual planning time while greatly increasing the available pool of ideas and materials.

Schools become better prepared and organized to examine new ideas, methods, and materials. The faculty becomes adaptable and self-reliant.

Teachers who work closely together on matters of curriculum and instruction find themselves better equipped for classroom work. They take considerable satisfaction from professional relationships that withstand differences in viewpoints and occasional conflict.

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Why should students (from their perspectives) in my context engage in these learning activities that I design?

Rapid advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) are changing the ways people share, use, develop and process information and technology, and students need to be highly skilled in ICT in order to develop academically. While schools already employ these technologies in learning, there is still a great need to increase their effectiveness and reliability.

Students ought to engage in my authentic learning (out-of-class) activity as it enables students to become independent, reliable and responsive, and furthermore, develop into young successful learners. For example my out-of-school research task will promote:

The capacity to learn and play an active role in their own learning.

The essential skills in literacy and in turn develop students into creative and productive users of technology, especially ICT, as a foundation for success in all learning areas.

The ability to deeply and logically think, and obtain and evaluate evidence in a disciplined way as the result of studying fundamental disciplines.

Creativity, innovation and resourcefulness.

The ability to plan activities independently, research, collaborate, and communicate ideas.

Students to make sense of their own world and think about how things have become the way they.

A pathway towards continued success in further education, or training.

The skills required to make informed learning decisions throughout their lives.

Encouragement and motivation in students to reach their full potential.

References: NSW Department of Education & Communities: School Libraries & Information Literacy.

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Retrieved on: May 5th 2014 http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/schoollibraries/teachingidea/

NSW Department of Education & Communities: Digital Education Revolution.Retrieved on: May 5th 2014http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/digital_rev/libraries/index.hm

NSW Department of Education & Communities: Primary Education: English K - 6.Retrieved on: May 5th 2014http://www.curriculumsupport.education.nsw.gov.au/primary/english/index.htm

English Teachers Website (ETW) Blogs By English Teachers: English Teacher Blog.Retrieved on: May 7th 2014http://www.englishteacherwebsites.com/teacherblogs.html

English Teachers Website (ETW): English Language Resources For Teachers.Retrieved on: May 7th 2014http://www.englishteacherwebsites.com/resource-te.html

Faculty Focus: Higher Education Teaching Strategies.Retrieved on: May 10th 2014http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/online-education/three-strategies-for-engaging-students-through-multimodal-course-design/

Mary Kalantzis and Bill Cope. 2012. Literacies. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK.

Smith, M. K. 2012. ‘What is pedagogy?’, The Encyclopaedia of Informal Education. Retrieved on: March 11th 2014 http://infed.org/mobi/what-is-pedagogy/

McLeod, S. A. "Piaget - Cognitive Theory". Simply Psychology.

Berk, L. E. 2009, 'Child Development', 8th Edition. Pearson Education Inc.

Queensland Government: 'A Guide to Social and Emotional Learning in Queensland State Schools'.

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Retrieved on: April 27th 2014 http://education.qld.gov.au/studentservices/protection/sel/pdfs/sel_booklet.pdf

Methods That Matter Study Guide: 6 Structures For Best Practice Classrooms, Harvey Daniel and Marilyn Bizar.Retrieved on: April 28th 2014http://www.csun.edu/~krowlands/Content/Academic_Resources/Best_Practices/Beating%20the%20Odds/Daniels-Methods%20That%20Matter.pdf

Daniels, Harvey and Marilyn Bizar. 1998. 'Methods That Matter'. York, Maine: Stenhouse.

Olson, C.B. (2003). 'The reading/writing connection: Strategies for teaching and learning in the secondary classroom'. Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Finch, C.R., Schmidt, B.J., and Faulkner, S.L. (1992, November). 'Using professional development to facilitate vocational and academic education integration: A practitioners' guide'. Berkeley, CA: National Centre for Research in Vocational Education, University of California, Berkeley.

Retrieved on: May 22nd 2014http://www.d.umn.edu/~dglisczi/4501web/4501Readings/AuthenticPedagogy-1.pdf

 Shafer, Gregory. 'Re-envisioning Research'. English Journal 89.1,(September 1999): pgs. 45-50.

Retrieved on: May 22nd 2014http://www.hfrp.org/var/hfrp/storage/fckeditor/File/Parent-Teacher-ConferenceTipSheet-100610.pdf

Retrieved on: May 5th 2014http://www.nea.org/home/12630.htm

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