Curriculum

Now that we have returned to school and students have returned to their regular timetabled classes, we thought it would be timely to reintroduce you to our curriculum framework.

Our Year 7 curriculum draws from the eight mandated Key Learning Areas of the Australian Curriculum:

1. English,
2. The Arts,
3. Science,
4. Humanities and Social Science,
5. Maths,
6. Technologies
7. Health and Physical Education
8. Japanese

In delivering the Australian Curriculum our key focus is providing students with access to knowledge and skills which allows them to demonstrate all aspects of the achievement standard.

In line with our commitment to Deep Learning , while planning our curriculum, we delved deeply into Australian Curriculum to identify purposeful connections between the key learning areas so as to allow teachers and students the opportunity to reduce the time spent on developing wide, superficial content knowledge and increase the time spent on deep learning and student inquiry, students making connections between the curriculum and the world around them.

Our ‘Worlds’ purposefully connect, through both skills and content  key learning areas:

• Physical World : Science and Humanities
• Social World: English and The Arts
• Healthy World – Health & Physical Education and Positive Education
• Maths
• Technologies
• Japanese

Please see videos of introduction to the subjects from our Heads of Department.

Assessment & Reporting:  COVID-19

At the end of this term, students will receive a semester report. The results on this report card will be indicative only.  Students will only receive four results on their Semester 1 report card:

• Physical World
  • Humanities
  • Science,
• Social World
  • English
• Mathematics

In order to provide students with indicative results for these subjects, teachers will be making on-balance judgement based on a wide range of evidence. As a school, we believe this will provide greater equity to our students, who, during at home learning, have had a wide range of experiences and varying levels of support due to individual family circumstances. We feel students, at this time, would be disadvantaged if we only used official assessment tasks to derive their result.

We wish to maximise opportunity for every student to be successful, so teachers and students will work together to compile a portfolio of evidence of student work and teachers will assess this portfolio of evidence against the achievement standard.

This evidence may come from:

• at home learning tasks,
• in class tasks,
• homework activities
• Term 1 progress on assessment tasks, even if they were never finalised.
• Term 1 assessment tasks, if they were finalised.
• Teacher notes

Over coming weeks, students will also be asked to collaborate with their teachers to identify aspects of the achievement standard where evidence of their learning is incomplete, and there will be an expectation that students compile and/or produce evidence which will support teacher judgment, of their learning against the achievement standard. Students will be supported through this evidence gathering process by their teachers. This is not intended to cause stress but rather reduce stress on students as they work , in partnership with their teachers to compile evidence for English, Maths, Science and Humanities.

These supports we are putting in place are designed to ensure Semester 1 reports reflect clearly what a student does know and can do. We believe this approach to reporting will provide greater equity and provide a more realistic judgment of student achievement than we could achieve if we maintained our assessment schedule and only used results from a small number of official assessment tasks.