Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that
this video contains images and voices of people who may have passed away.
I would like to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land
we are visiting today, Gunggandji country.
We pay our respects to elders past, present and emerging.
We acknowledge that this land always was,
and always will be Gunggandji country.
Wanjera! Welcome to Yarrabah State School!
Over the next two segments we're going to share a snapshot of how curriculum leaders
and teachers here at Yarrabah State School are making the Australian Curriculum
accessible for their learners by providing the curriculum
in a way that is contextually and culturally relevant.
It's about the continuous improvement in providing access to,
and the teaching, learning, and assessment of
the Australian Curriculum, to ensure success and well-being
for all students in an inclusive education system.
So our school is located 57km south-east of Cairns and caters to a mainly Indigenous population
across three separate campuses, and that includes kindergarten,
our primary school and secondary school.
So the local language spoken by the people of Yarrabah is Yarrie lingo,
and this obviously influences our approach to curriculum and pedagogy
particularly as English is an additional language or dialect for most of our learners.
When planning for the provision of the whole curriculum,
we consider our students and our context.
For example, we've decided to provide a learning area approach for The Arts,
this allows our Arts teacher to be flexible in his approach to teaching contextualised
art units based on student interest and local events.
[We] provide the Languages programs through the language revival learner pathway.
Students in Years 3 to 10 learn the Gunggay [/Gunggandji] language
which has been built alongside Yarrabah's local elders group.
This work is led by a Traditional Owner and Languages teacher Nathan Schrieber
and our teaching assistant Touche Gray.
We also have a specialist HASS teacher who
in consultation with one of the school's local teachers
has created contextualised HASS units for the early years
that allow us to meet the standard in a context
that is relevant to our learners.
When we are planning our year and band plans,
we consider all of our students and their learning needs and how we can
cover all aspects of the achievement standard.
We provide time for cohorts to meet to develop these year or band plans,
and this is done during our collaboration meetings.
It's during this process that teachers look at existing C2C
assessments and adopt and adapt to suit their learners,
while maintaining the integrity of the year or band plan.
We map all of our summative assessments back to the achievement standard
and then we look at those summative assessments and
make adjustments to suit our students and our context.
In some cases we adjust the timing of the unit
so the topics align, ensuring we can build background knowledge, content,
and appropriate vocabulary and it gives students the opportunity to
transfer that knowledge across multiple learning areas.
Currently we have a whole school focus on moderation to build
assessment literacy with our teachers.
To determine the focus of our moderation processes,
we use data to inform our decision making.
As a curriculum leadership team,
we decided to focus on English particularly on the receptive mode.
We moderate to develop a shared understanding of the curriculum,
the pedagogical practices that we know are effective for our learners,
and the assessment.
I facilitate collaboration meetings with our teachers and we
engage in before moderation activities to plan
how our units of work can be modified so that all students can access
the Australian Curriculum content in a way that is relevant to them.
These weekly cohort meetings provide an opportunity for our staff to
engage in authentic conversations of how they can modify assessment
and unit plans for students in our context.
It is also during this process that we identify and highlight
key language skills that require explicit teaching for our IEALD students.
This is to ensure language awareness is embedded in teaching practices,
not standalone.
So we use our collaborations to unpack each unit of work, and then
we're able to get a shared understanding of the achievement standards,
and then select appropriate text and resources.
So for example when we are planning an English unit,
we look at the recommended C2C text
and see which best suit the learning needs of our students,
and we also use other appropriate texts in order to compare and use
Standard Australian English and Yarrie lingo.
If our students need practise with past tense and plurals for example,
we select texts that enable us to teach these skills.
Providing students with the required curriculum,
and differentiating teaching and learning to meet all students' needs is our core business.
Schools do this by recording their decisions
about how curriculum is made culturally and contextually
relevant to their learners in their three levels of planning and also
by using moderation processes to align curriculum with effective
pedagogy, assessment and reporting.
In the next segment, we'll look at setting students up for success
by ensuring they have access to the curriculum
and a variety of strategies to support their learning.