Resources+for+Teaching+&+Learning

 
 * __THIS PAGE WILL PROVIDE EXAMPLES AND RESOURCES TO ASSIST IN EMBEDDING PRINCIPLE THREE IN YOUR LEARNING SETTING:__ **

3.1 Teaching strategies are flexible and responsive to the values, needs and interests of individual students
__Examples to illustrate the component:__
 * A physics unit focuses on sport, and investigations include the design of sneakers, the science underlying a tennis swing and experiments on soccer balls and their flight
 * A history unit on medieval Europe includes substantial discussion of the way young people would have experienced life at that time.
 * A unit on festivals and celebrations embraces the diversity of cultural backgrounds within the classroom by encouraging students to share experiences of particular events unique to their own culture and events that are celebrated in a variety of ways by different cultures.
 * An astronomy unit is designed around issues students raise from a viewing of selected sci-fi video excerpts.
 * A unit on contemporary social issues requires students to analyse the lyrics of popular music
 * Students teach a dance or game from their family's culture to the rest of the class
 * Students arrange a traditional indigenous games afternoon at a local sports carnival.

3.2 The teacher utilises a range of teaching strategies that support different ways of thinking and learning
__Examples to illustrate the component:__
 * A teacher surveys students to determine their learning preferences and styles. Students are identified as predominantly visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learners. A variety of tasks is then developed using Gardner's Multiple Intelligences as a guide. Negotiated tasks further increase student choice.
 * The teacher employs a flexible whole class-small groups-whole class strategy for teaching. This allows for explicit teaching of like-need groups and/or one-on-one teaching.
 * Reading groups are strategically formed to cater for the different stages of reading competence.
 * The teacher establishes a peer support network so that learning needs can be strategically supported. Cross-age tutors offer another means of support.
 * The teacher employs a mix of group based and whole class discussion and activity
 * The teacher moves between open discussion in which students' ideas are freely explored and more focused dialogue which brings disparate views together.
 * The structure of planned teaching sessions is varied to allow for different mixes of student activity and input.

3.3 The teacher builds on students' prior experiences, knowledge and skills
__Examples to illustrate the component:__
 * A design task is preceded by a smaller task to explore the level of students' skills. Special attention is then paid during the design phase to accommodating the variety of levels of skill.
 * A mathematics lesson on triangles begins with an exploration of what students understand to be a 'triangle', including physical objects of a variety of types. The discussion is guided towards a class consensus on the essential characteristics of a triangle as an abstraction from these concrete examples, with the teacher monitoring the variety of student views as the discussion progresses.
 * Prior to a year 8 unit on force and motion, students' beliefs and understandings are explored using a variety of probes including 'concept cartoons', predict-observe-explain sequences involving practical events, and response to scenarios. This raises a number of questions which are then explored further as the basis for the learning sequence.

3.4 The teacher capitalises on students' experience of a technology rich world
__Examples to illustrate the component:__
 * The exploration of ideas involves student collaboration on contemporary technology use including internet searching, multimedia presentation of findings, email communication and chat rooms etc.
 * Students examine the language of SMS messaging and debate its impact on the future spelling of words.
 * Students explore the way in which language and images are manipulated to convey positive or negative messages in order to produce their own advertisement.
 * Students design and create their own video clip with a particular audience in mind and conduct a school survey to evaluate and analyse responses to the clip.
 * Students discuss the social purpose and identity issues related to chat room behaviour.
 * Students design a strategy for the communication of school events to staff, students, parents and the broader community.