Leaders and teachers from St Augustine’s Parish School in Adelaide have been developing integrated curriculum units through a joint project with ACARA, the South Australian Catholic Education Office and the South Australian Department for Education. Nine schools in South Australia were involved in the project, which focused on designing learning with the SA Keeping Safe: Child Protection curriculum within the learning areas of the Australian Curriculum and through the development of one or more of the general capabilities.
The Child Protection Team, consisting of the deputy principal and year level leaders, participated in the project where they collaboratively planned, peer-mediated, taught, assessed and moderated an integrated unit of learning.
Whilst participating in the series of three workshops along with leaders and teachers from other schools in South Australia, the leaders from St Augustine’s Parish School developed their learning at two levels. First, they worked together to design, teach and assess rich units of learning for students in their own classes. As part of the process, the deputy and year level leaders then provided professional learning as well as time, space and expertise for collaborative planning for all teachers in their year level teams.
This targeted and intentional process means that all students in all classes have already benefitted from well-designed learning opportunities, which brought together the mandatory learning from the Keeping Safe: Child Protection curriculum within the context of their learning in areas such as HPE, English, Technologies and The Arts.
“I focused on The Arts as well as Health and PE … getting the children to form their own role plays and dramatisations. It was really obvious to see the personal and social capability, critical and creative thinking skills develop as they worked collaboratively to plan and perform.”
Year 3 teacher
In some classes, students use their learning and skill development in Drama to explore aspects of the South Australian Keeping Safe: Child Protection Curriculum such as how to recognise and report abuse, and strategies for keeping themselves safe. They have developed their personal and social capabilities in the areas of self-management and self-awareness.
Other students combine learning from Health and PE and Technologies learning areas to learn about online safety, as well as developing personal and social and ICT skills using the general capability continuums.
St Augustine’s Parish School continues with this focus on using the Australian Curriculum learning areas and general capabilities to ensure that all students are deepening their learning in the area of child safety.
“The capability continuum that we used was really helpful because we could see where our students were on that continuum, what we needed to go back too and what we needed to focus on, … what we would need to modify or adapt to suit all students. Having a lot of different abilities, different interests it was the continuum that helped us to actually pinpoint where each student was at and where to go next to move them forward.”
Year 5 teacher
Gez Mulvahil, Principal
Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School in Woodroffe, Northern Territory, is located on a very busy road. With a number of near-misses on the school crossing, the student leaders decided to gather data and write to the council to address their concerns.
Gathering data
With the support of their teacher, students monitored the school crossing for 25 minutes each day for a week, before the school day began. They collected and collated the data over the week:
Vehicles |
26 Feb. |
27 Feb. |
28 Feb. |
1 March |
2 March |
Total |
Cars |
258 |
175 |
346 |
360 |
372 |
1511 |
Buses |
5 |
5 |
7 |
8 |
7 |
32 |
Trucks |
0 |
0 |
1 |
0 |
3 |
4 |
Illegal parking |
4 |
23 |
15 |
20 |
8 |
70 |
What’s next?
The students then wrote to Palmerston Council, requesting that traffic management strategies be implemented to make the school and the crossing safer places each morning. A few weeks later, the council placed a temporary “Slow down” electronic sign before the crossing. The feedback from the crossing guard and the students was that this had a significant impact on slowing down the traffic in the area. The student leaders then wrote to the council again, requesting permanent signage.
Just recently, the students met with the mayor of Palmerston and raised their concerns about the traffic flow and again requested that council look at options to address these safety concerns. The mayor assured the students that she would follow up with the council.
Meeting the mayor and addressing their concerns in a formal meeting raised the awareness of the steps that needed to be taken in problem-solving.
Curriculum content
This example of how students have incorporated curriculum into ‘real life’ is a positive way to have students realise how they can take action to make a difference. The range of curriculum areas integrated into generating solutions for a real-life problem included: Digital Technologies, Civics and Citizenship, Health, Mathematics, Personal and Social Capability, Critical and Creative Thinking Capability, Literacy and Numeracy.
We are immensely proud of our student leaders who took it upon themselves to devise a plan to address the safety concerns at the crossing and follow through.
We are hopeful that we will soon have the installation of some traffic calming signs and continue to ensure our students arrive and depart safely.
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