Posts Tagged "National Curriculum"
McDonalds and Culture in the Same Sentence?
Our Year 6′s are about to study a unit on Culture and among discussions during planning the conversation moved towards what definition or concept of culture were the students going to look at. Being an inquiry based unit the decision was to go with what ever definition the student decided to go with would then lend the student to creating their own assessment piece. One of the more interesting or open definitions of Culture is
Culture is the systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people. -http://www.tamu.edu/classes/cosc/choudhury/culture.html
This led to an intersting conversation which ultimately ended with the idea that McDonalds in itself is a culture. I decided to investigate this further during my Spring Break. So here is my interpretation of “The Culture of McDonalds”. Would love to see or hear yours!
Please feel free to use this as stimulus in your classroom.
Read MoreWhat Exactly is the Purpose of Education?
This week I have spent my time in primary school planning meetings. Each of these has started the same way with the teachers being given a copy of the draft National Australian Curriculum. Each of these meetings has then gone in a very different direction depending on the combination of teachers. One thing that did stand out is that the teaching staff got caught up with the content of the Australian Curriculum and how the content was different from what they currently taught.
Something which has stood out to me is the severe lack of skills being taught in the National Australian Curriculum. And the swift way in which teachers (myself included) seemed to throw the thought of teaching students skills out the window.
I was reading Digital Literacy Across the Curriculum tonight and it got me thinking about what exactly the purpose of school and education is? What do we take from school into the big bad world when we leave the gate at the end of year 12? What do we take from school into university? And then our degrees into our job? So as I always do when I start thinking I ask Twitterland!
What is your clearest memory of primary school? High school? University?
My clearest memory of primary school was as a whole class (year 3) being praised for being proactive and going into the classroom after first break everyday and reading while we waited for the teachers to return from their morning tea meeting. Then on the sixth day of doing this scoring a lunchtime rubbish clean up (the whole class did) for going into a classroom without a staff member.
For High School the memory is of me making a fool of myself dancing to Rip Rip Woodchip by John Williamson in Year 8 to explain the meaning of logging. (I doubt I got the meaning across but it was fun even if it was embarrassing!)
Meanwhile in University my memories are of me trying to get my readings complete with one or two children hanging off me.
None of this was about the content or even the skills I learnt at school.
So I asked my twitter friends. And their responses were the same. They were about fights, arguments, results, excursions, bullying, parties, punishments and handing the last piece of assessment in. Nothing about content or skills.
So WHY as teachers do we get so hung up on the content? Reality is none of us really remember it later in life.
We should be teaching skills. Lets throw the content out that window instead.
Who’s joining me?
Read MoreJoin the Group
