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Showing posts from October, 2014

Exciting times for Year 9 Science

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Further from a previous post detailing a new framework for our Year 9 programme, a colleague and I have started mapping out how a new, more futures focused, Year 9 Science programme might look.  We are trying to find a balance between background disciplinary knowledge and allowing for the development student's capacity to create new knowledge and investigate the world's wicked problems and possible solutions. Key Competencies for the Future (Hipkins, Bolstad, Boyd and McDowell; NZCER 2014) has been an immense help for me as I work my way through the tension that exists between traditional science education which focuses on the acquisition of knowledge and future-oriented science learning, where we should use the Nature of Science learning outcomes to develop science thinking and literacy in an effort to have informed citizens.  A part of the book that has resonated with me the most in this aspect is Chapter 3 p45-46 which describes assumptions about the mind, knowledge and

After #edchatNZ... the conference that never ended

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I was lucky enough to bring a team of colleagues to the #edchatNZ conference in August.  Experiencing the 2 days together showed me I was no longer a lone nut, I was part of a mixed nut group keen to enact change.  We naturally leaned towards ways to improve our local junior curriculum (Years 9 and 10).  In a high performing school so focused on excellence, especially in NCEA, junior classes can easily become the poor cousins to senior classes for busy, fully loaded teachers of multiple levels.  In times of busyness and stress, we readily default to the industrial model of teaching that we were bred and educated in.  So as a group we decided to make our junior programmes an absolute focus for improvement.  We want to work more collaboratively, be cross-curricular, use assessment for learning and explicitly teach the principles, values and key competencies. So post-conference around the lunch table we kept the conversations going, more people came on board and we ended up with a large