Backwood in the bush?

For a small rural R–10 school with a 70 per cent Indigenous student population, two things were required with urgency: connectedness and intellectual quality. Natasha Brady describes a school's efforts to reach these goals.

Crossways Lutheran School in Ceduna, remote South Australia, has adopted a transdisciplinary approach to assessment to overcome poor student engagement and an overcrowded curriculum. This has in turn significantly impacted the way we organise, plan and implement the curriculum. The intellectual rigour necessary for this approach has extended both students and teachers.

Curriculum planning

In March 2006, Rachel Boyce (the school's curriculum coordinator and middle school mathematics teacher) and I sat down to map the middle school curriculum. This was a requirement for our application for International Baccalaureate candidature status. We drew links between existing units in the curriculum and identified any gaps or imbalances within each Middle Years Programme (MYP) Area of Interaction. We then reworked middle school curriculum to support inquiry into central ideas. We developed these from concepts from the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme (PYP). The result is a concept-based framework that allows teachers to see the interdisciplinary links across the curriculum. With reference to South Australian Curriculum Standards and Accountability Framework (SACSA) Science and SACSA Studies of Society and the Environment documents, we refined the scope and sequence of our framework. The intersections, generated by the alignment and juxtaposition of concepts and Areas of Interaction from the IB and suggested content from SACSA, created all these possibilities for creative, exciting and relevant learning interactions. We got really excited and enjoyed the whole process. However, it was hard for other teaching staff to envisage how this map could be implemented. We needed to chart a process so that they could see how it would work.

In May, not long after completing the draft middle school Curriculum Map, I attended the first conference of the Association of Independent Schools of South Australia's (AISSA) Australian Government Quality Teacher Programme (AGQTP) 'Innovative Pedagogies Project'. The research on middle school students and assessment presented by Dr Katie Weir, lecturer at Queensland University of Technology, was a catalyst for developing interdisciplinary Quality Assessment Tasks and planning interdisciplinary units using a backward by design process within our school. The backward by design planning process is the work of Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Our backward by design process for planning begins with the development of a rich, relevant summative assessment task that will allow students to authentically demonstrate their understanding of the central idea and concepts. From there, we ask ourselves what skills and knowledge do the students need to develop in order to accomplish this task. Then we work backwards to put in place the learning activities that will facilitate the development needed.

Through our involvement in AISSA's AGQTP Innovative Pedagogies Project, the middle school staff developed a rich integrated assessment task (ready for implementing in Term 4) that allowed key concepts, knowledge and skills to be assessed in a number of curriculum areas (English, history and geography, science and technology). In the process of collaboratively creating the rich assessment task, middle school teaching staff developed an understanding of how to create an integrated assessment task, how PYP concepts could be used to develop assessment tasks that demand higher order thinking, the value of an integrated assessment task, and an effective way to proceed to create an interdisciplinary approach to teaching.

Following on from this project, Rachel and I documented and presented to all teaching staff how to proceed to create a quality program of work. We presented using PowerPoint and examples from the Project and my own units of work. The PowerPoint presentation is still used as ready reference for teachers to synthesise the various resources (IB and SACSA documents, our MYP and PYP curriculum maps, First Steps Resources) to create their programs of work. The approach to planning we charted has been used school wide for three terms now and we are seeing exciting developments in student and teacher learning.

The interdisciplinary approach to planning and assessment has developed teachers professionally by requiring engagement in professional dialogue to find common concepts across disciplines and links that make learning more meaningful, accessible and true to life. Middle school staff have grown in their understanding of others' curriculum areas. Collaborative planning has demanded a higher level of thinking, communication and social skills than planning alone, or even with other teachers teaching the same subjects. However, there are also now more opportunities to benefit from the modelling of skilled teachers in order to develop professionally. As we focus on developing our thinking, communication and social skills in the context of collaborative planning, we will also become better models for our students.

For students, there are definite advantages in interdisciplinary units and assessment tasks. I would like to highlight two from our experience. Firstly, students find connection in a transdisciplinary approach. The curriculum has an overall coherence. They explore and re-explore concepts in depth across a number of curriculum areas at once. Since their learning is contextualised, they are able to see how their knowledge, understanding and skills are relevant to everyday life. As a result, we are seeing increased student motivation.

Their risk taking in mathematics has increased as the knowledge they have from other subjects supports their discoveries. They are making connections, and are being able to form opinions, on how mathematics can be used outside of the school environment to solve problems. We are drawing on and recognising their prior knowledge and cultural backgrounds, which is enriching our lessons.
Rachel Boyce, middle school
mathematics teacher

Another important benefit of transdisciplinary units and assessment has been improvement in the intellectual quality of students' work. The transdisciplinary assessment tasks provide evidence of students synthesising and problem solving, and we also hear it in the understandings students verbalise. Especially for our Indigenous students, the mass exposure to topic vocabulary has enchanced their ability to comprehend and communicate concepts.

Through having summative transdisciplinary assessment tasks, students experience a reduced assessment load. This frees them to focus on producing quality work. The backward by design approach means that each aspect of the assessment task is addressed in the unit. For example, students required to present a poster of their understanding of the way humans adapt to live in extreme climatic conditions (science) learn how to format a poster in English. We are seeing more students expressing pride in their work because they recognise their work as commendable.

While we continue to experience some frustrations in our ability to collaboratively plan, we value the difference transdisciplinary units and assessment makes for our students. For this reason, our commitment to transdisciplinary planning remains.

Reference

Wiggins, G & McTighe J (2000). Understanding by Design, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, Alexandria, VA.

Web references

For more information on our project visit www.ais.sa.edu.au

For more information on IB visit www.ibo.org

Natasha Brady teaches Year 4/5 at Crossways Lutheran School in South Australia.

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