Professional Skills

Curriculum, Assessment and Pedagogy

The curriculum has just undergone a significant change through its transformation into the Australian Curriculum. While the changing of curriculum has been hard for all schools, it is necessary that education evolves with the waves of societal change. Due to the curriculum being determined by the education department and government, change is inevitable, however teachers have the opportunity to utilise the new curriculum descriptors to develop new and exciting learning experiences for their students. 

In my experience with the new Australian Curriculum, the resource has enabled me to provide real life, purposeful learning experiences that are engaging and informative for the students. While for most of the year, I generally followed the Curriculum 2 Classroom lesson plans and resources, as I got into my internship, I thoroughly enjoyed turning the C2C into a resource and creating my own lessons that the students found more interactive and engaging. After one particular Maths lesson, I was told by a teacher aide that my Maths games were fantastic ideas and that the students were really engaged. She was shocked when I told her that I had used one of the C2C resources as inspiration and changed into my own resource. I feel very fortunate that I was able to experience the introduction of the Australian Curriculum in my final year of practicum as I believe that if it had been thrown upon me next year as it was this year for all of the teaching community, I would have found it difficult to use. Now however, I believe that I am a lot more confident with the new curriculum and have learnt how to utilise it and use it to my advantage rather than hate it. 

Assessment comes in many forms, with Authentic Assessment, arguable being the most beneficial for students. “An authentic learning context provides students with a lens to conduct the task through” (Davis & Dargusch, sighted in Lynch & Knight, 2010). Authentic Assessment occurs when a learning manager provides their students with real life activities that assess students whilst have meaning within the real world. To develop authentic assessment teachers must measure student’s learning, achievement, motivation and attitudes toward school (Marzano & Pickering, 2009). 

Throughout my four years at university, I have completed courses that encourage the use of Authentic Assessment. In Ensuring Student Success, I worked within a group to research and create a script and role play that focussed on the benefits of Authentic Assessment. This task in particular helped to scaffold my understanding of how, as learning managers, we can assess students in other ways than the usual test. Authentic Assessment is also a strategy to help with differentiation as it helps to assess those students that are significantly lower than the rest of the class in a way that they can relate to in the real world. Throughout my internship, I was required to use regular assessment tasks to assess students’ knowledge; however I did use some Authentic Assessment tasks for my own personal formative assessment. 

Applying appropriate pedagogy in the curriculum and assessment is paramount to the success to students learning (Whitby, 2007). There are a number of frameworks that have been created to help learning managers use good pedagogy within is often referred to as the art and science to teaching and learning (Sanguinetti, Waterhouse, & Maunders, 2004). Pedagogy is made up of nine instructional strategies that include; identifying similarities and differences, cues and advanced organisers, cooperative learning, summarising and note taking, reinforcing effort and providing recognition, homework and practice, non-linguistic representations, generating and testing hypotheses and questions and finally, setting objectives and providing feedback. 

Throughout the past four years, I have developed and used each of the nine strategies both at university - during lectures and assessment tasks, and during my school placements. Examples of how I have used some of the strategies include summarising and note taking within lectures to ensure that I have gained all of the important information, identifying similarities and differences within a university and school context and finally, setting objectives within the classroom and providing appropriate feedback to my students. 

Managing interpersonal interactions

Throughout their career, learning managers will be involved with a variety of different stakeholders such as parents, peers and members of the community. A good relationship with all these stakeholders is important in order to fully benefit the learners and increase their knowledge. Families in the school bestow different forms of capital upon their children providing different experiences and lifestyles (Bourdieu, 1986). Therefore a learning manager needs to develop an understanding of the backgrounds of each individual child within the cohort so that they are able individualise learning experiences that will benefit each child. This will ensure that students are not marginalised and regardless of their economic, cultural or social capital, are able to gain understanding and knowledge.

Having worked as a learn to swim teacher for five years, in hospitality for two and retail for five, I believe that I have excellent interpersonal skills. I have learnt the importance of building good relationships with others and feel that this is the same within the school community. Throughout the three years that I have completed practicum at schools, I have worked hard to develop good relationships with the staff, children and parents. In my second year at Matthew Flinders, I found the staff slightly intimidating and found the task more difficult, however this year I have tried hard to make connections with everyone. My mentor teacher has told me that numerous numbers of staff have approached her and commented on my ability to build relationships with them. My mentor teacher mentioned that the support staff were also impressed with my friendly approach and that I make an effort to build a relationship with them. 

Within the classroom, I am a strong believer of building good relationships with every child within the room. I understand that some students are very likeable and this task is easy, while others are less likeable and the task can be quite difficult. As a graduate, my goal is to not only love the likeable but also love the unlikeable, as Jo mentioned on our final day of university. This quote by Henry Adams; a teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops, is a true statement of the influence teachers have on their students and I will take this quote with me into my first year of teaching. Finally, as a teacher may never know how much they affect their students and in what ways, they need to continually act with integrity and professionalism within the classroom and out, whilst displaying exceptional interpersonal skills to every stakeholder that they encounter.