Cannon Hill State School – Love to Learn

August-September 2019

Welcome to the August-September issue of Love to Learn!

This time, we will have a look at some of the recommendations arising from our recent school review.

Also, because the discussion emerging from that review overlaps with some of our research, we’ll take a look at some of the stories we shared at our recent twilight conference, Inquiring with the Reggio Emilia Approach.

Once again we’re combining two months’ worth of Love to Learn, as we have adopted an important new project (a new parent handbook for next year) and need to jiggle our resources a bit to make that happen. We think that a comprehensive handbook is worth focussing on.

As usual, this is a long read, so you might like to make a cuppa first!

Our school review

Executive summary

Earlier this year, a team from the Department of Education’s School Improvement Unit visited our school to conduct a review.

The review team evaluated our school’s performance against the nine domains of the National School Improvement Tool.

They also recommended improvement strategies for us to implement in consultation with our regional office and school community.

The Executive Summary (PDF, 615KB) of the school review report is available for download on our school website.

We’ll take a very quick look at their key findings and recommendations, but if you’d like more detail, you can find each point expanded upon in the Executive Summary.

Key findings

The review team found that:

The school has undertaken a long-term commitment to the Reggio Emilia approach to teaching and learning.

Staff indicate that research-based approaches are realising positive outcomes in addressing student behaviour.

School leaders recognise that highly effective teaching is the key to improving student learning throughout the school.

The school is committed to developing and delivering student-centred, engaging and inquiry-based learning experiences.

Curriculum plans highlight the Reggio approach and emphasise higher order thinking, hypothetical thinking, inquiry skills, critical and creative thinking and other cross-curricular skills.

The Explicit Improvement Agenda (EIA) for 2019 is writing and academic enrichment.

The school’s professional learning program is clearly documented and includes a weekly calendar of learning events.

The leadership team is supporting the development of a culture of collegiality and collaboration amongst staff members.

The school has an extremely strong partnership with Slow Food Brisbane.

We don’t see any of these findings as controversial – we think this is an accurate simple description of where we’re at.

Key improvement strategies

These were the review team’s recommendations:

Establish and implement a clear instructional direction for teaching staff in relation to the teaching of writing, supported by ongoing targeted professional learning, modelling, observation and feedback.

Review and embed processes to ensure marking guides associated with assessment tasks are aligned to the Australian Curriculum through deepening teacher understanding of the alignment planning process.

Establish systematic processes to quality assure the curriculum plan and the enacted curriculum, ensuring that all students are taught and assessed against the Australian Curriculum achievement standards.

Review and enhance the school’s Explicit Improvement Agenda, including targets, actions, roles and responsibilities, timelines and clear instructional direction for teaching staff and ensure all research projects are linked to the Explicit Improvement Agenda and identify strategies to document and embed signature practices.

Review the scope and extent of the school’s professional learning plan and individual research projects to ensure they are focused on the school’s Explicit Improvement Agenda.

These recommendations align comfortably with our values, mission, and current improvement agenda.

Our response to the review

The formal response

In response to the school review findings and recommendations, the school leadership has been formulating an Action Plan, in consultation with senior departmental staff (including the Assistant Regional Director and Principal Supervisor).

This is what all schools are required to do, following a review.

While the deeper technical content of that Action Plan is still being tweaked slightly, we can tell you that, broadly speaking, our plan focuses on improvement strategies to address two of the review team’s recommendations.

Those two strategies are:

1. Establish and implement a clear instructional direction with teaching staff in relation to the teaching of writing supported by ongoing targeted PD modelling, observation and feedback.

2. Review and embed processes to ensure marking guides associated with assessment tasks are aligned to the Australian Curriculum through deepening teacher understanding of the alignment process.

The implementation of each of those strategies will be informed by a set of specific, clearly-defined actions.

These actions will build on the foundations established through our ongoing Strategic Inquiry mechanism, and professional development regime.

(For more information about that, you can see earlier issues of Love to Learn, where we talked about our focus on writing, as expressed in our explicit improvement agenda).

The resources required to address each step in our Action Plan have been clearly identified, responsible officers have been designated, and targets, milestones and timelines have been set.

As the particulars of each strategy are quite technical, we won’t relay the full details here, but do please get in touch if you feel the need for a deeper understanding.

Our leadership team has a strong understanding of the work involved in the next phase of our school improvement journey.

And we will be progressively sharing and applying our Action Plan across the whole school in coming weeks.

We should clarify, also, that the reason for selecting just two recommendations to focus on, is that this Action Plan just covers the next 12 months. The selected action items are those we think need to take priority.

Bedding down the response to these two items will facilitate methodical action on the remainder of the recommendations, which we would be looking to start as soon as reasonably practicable during the course of this next 4 year strategic planning period.

A less formal explainer for our families: How we work within the Australian Curriculum

In response to publication of the school review Executive Summary, our school P&C association expressed interest in the recommendations pertaining to the Australian Curriculum (AC).

Our Principal addressed some of the queries at a recent P&C meeting - but we appreciate that not everyone can make it to those meetings, so we’ll repeat some of her backgrounding here.

Our school began consistently working to the Australian Curriculum (AC) in 2013-14. Before that, we used Curriculum into the Classroom (C2C), a set of materials designed by the Queensland Department of Education, to support Queensland State Schools in delivering the AC.

We chose to transition between these two options so we could design our own curriculum in a way that took our students’ interests into account, while still teaching the AC.

The timing worked, because we’d had several years to refine our Reggio Emilia-inspired approach to teaching and learning, and we felt we’d done enough preparation to migrate to a more dynamic and flexible approach, that better aligned with the Reggio value of Listening to the child. And we had the curriculum expertise within our team to support this move.

There were a lot of advantages to the change in approach, including the opportunity it afforded to improve student engagement.

This decision has enabled students to access curriculum learning by pursuing research that interests them. And it has empowered teachers to facilitate the process of discovery, by becoming adept at asking the most useful questions (rather than blurting out answers), and provoking students to unearth key curriculum content for themselves.

(Our classroom learning and professional development in Practical Philosophy supports this valuable skill set).

While explicit teaching of AC content remains a useful supplement to inquiry-based learning, we find that knowledge acquired through effort (rather than passively received) is better retained and more readily applied.

Students and teachers are now more empowered to work as partners in the learning journey, together developing the skills associated with clear thinking, proactive learning and a growth mindset. This aligns well with our school values, and our desire to cultivate a community of lifelong learners.

The AC has a number of structural components, including:

Big Ideas or Concepts that raise the standard of student thinking;

Achievement Standards that are the basis of assessment;

Content Descriptors that contain many ideas of what teachers can do to reach the Achievement Standards;

Elaborations, which give more ideas for what to teach;

General Capabilities such as Critical and Creative Thinking; and

Cross-curriculum Priorities such as Sustainability and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Histories.

These are applied in the context of Key Learning Areas, which the subject titles that you see on school report cards: English, Mathematics, Science, Technologies, History and Social Sciences; Second Language (such as Italian); the Arts; Health and Physical Education.

You can study any aspects of the AC that interest you online – there’s a link on the ACARA website, or go directly to www.australiancurriculum.edu.au.

Our teachers channel a good deal of energy into maintaining a strong working familiarity with all particulars of the curriculum.

Our school’s innovative approach to teaching and learning means that our teachers need to be adept at identifying opportunities to tie inquiry-based learning to key curriculum content.

(You’ll see detailed examples of how this works set out in our Reggio conference booklet, where teachers describe their research and point to the specific curriculum areas that work addressed. An abbreviated version of that is presented in the conference stories, shared below).

A single project may address curriculum learning across multiple key learning areas.

And, of course, our differentiated learning approach also means that students may be achieving standards different than those

designated for their year level, so teachers need to be across the curriculum well beyond the designated year level of their class.

This all sounds like a big ask, but we have an excellent teaching team dedicated to constantly refining their skill set and improving their practice.

Everything we do is collaborative, innovative and informed by evidence, with a view to generating the best outcomes for every single student.

So please be assured, Cannon Hill State School is committed to teaching the Australian Curriculum. We endeavour to excel at this very important work.

That said, because our approach to achieving these ends is very progressive and innovative, it can be difficult for the uninitiated to immediately understand what they are observing. But the epiphany moment, when it all clicks together, is priceless.

(We witnessed a bit of this at our recent twilight conference, with some visiting educators audibly gasping when they fully understood the standard of thinking our children were achieving as a direct result of our innovative approach. It was all rather inspiring, really).

We will continue working to do better at making our professional learning visible, alongside our work at making the children’s learning visible.

So, now that we’ve clarified our commitment to teaching curriculum, let’s look at one of the recommendations surrounding curriculum content, which was:

“Review and embed processes to ensure marking guides

associated with assessment tasks are aligned to the Australian Curriculum through deepening teacher understanding of the alignment planning process.”

Now, this recommendation relates to the way AC content is assessed.

Just this year, the Queensland Department of Education designed a standard way for teachers to set assessment from the AC, so this particular piece of feedback involves uptake of those mechanisms.

The department is rolling out professional development across our Metro Region to assist all schools in using this new standard

method. Our teachers will be able to access all the relevant training via the Assessment and Moderation Hub.

So we’re already onto it.

The review team’s third recommendation was:

Establish systematic processes to quality assure the curriculum plan and the enacted curriculum, ensuring that all students are taught and assessed against the Australian Curriculum achievement standards.

The key technical term, “quality assurance”, is yet to be formally defined by the department, but we understand that this requirement might be met through the process known as moderation.

In the moderation process, teachers bring samples of student work to meetings and form agreements about the level of the work.

This has been happening at both primary and secondary school levels for years, and our school has been doing internal moderation all along.

To ensure consistency of standards across schools, we also need to moderate with other schools. This will be set in place when the schools in our area have all done the training in the new approach to assessment.

(Our teachers have been doing the relevant training for most of this year).

Even though it’s not practical for us to provide a comprehensive manifesto on the complex subject of curriculum here, we hope we’ve covered the matters our community members were interested in.

In conclusion, the school review team recommendations mesh really well with the work we are already doing in line with our explicit improvement agenda. This is not a coincidence.

The recommendations also remind us about the new assessment and moderation standards being rolled out by the state government, which we have laid the groundwork to adopt, and which we are phasing in (collaboratively, with other schools in our area).

If there’s anything you need clarification on, please email us.

Want to know more?

That’s all we have to say about the review and Action Plan for now, and we hope we have managed to share the gist of how we teach the Australian Curriculum.

At our recent Reggio twilight conference we ran a professional development workshop for educators, exploring the more technical aspects of how to address the standards of the Australian Curriculum within a Reggio Emilia-style learning environment.

We’re likely to revisit that practical workshop format at next year’s twilight conference, as it was really useful. So if you’re deeply interested in this sort of thing, please consider joining us for that (it’ll probably be next August).

Inquiring with the Reggio Emilia Approach

Sharing our approach to teaching and learning

We held our Inquiring with the Reggio Emilia Approach twilight conference on Thursday 15 August this year. Over 100 interested parents and educators attended.

At that event, we shared our continuing journey of understanding how inquiry-oriented curriculum and pedagogy can help enrich experiences for students and staff, and improve outcomes for students.

Feedback from conference participants has been overwhelmingly positive, with attendees excited not just by the possibilities of our approach (and our progress in refining it), but also by the quality of our students’ thinking.

We thought we’d share with you a few bits and pieces of content from that conference, just briefly. (There is a conference booklet available for purchase from the office, if you’re after finer detail than what we set out below).

We think it’s timely to take a look at these stories now, not just because the conference is fresh in our minds, but because this year’s student project work will be coming to the pointy end during the course of next term.

By taking a look at some of the ways that learning emerged from last year’s student work, we hope to help families understand and support the work that children are currently focussing on.

Slow and steady

In her welcoming address to conference attendees, our Principal Chris Ling adopted the motif of the snail shell to encapsulate our ideas.

In the same way that the spiral of the snail shell tells the snail’s story of growth and development, our cycles of observing, planning, acting, and reflecting on evidence tell the story of progress and refinement in our work.

These cycles of inquiry apply in both our work with the children, and among ourselves as teachers and leaders, to constantly improve the effectiveness of our approach.

The snail metaphor works on many levels, not least as an example of deep simplicity and the mathematics of nature.

Chaos theory tells us that small differences, incremented and ratcheted over time, can deliver vastly divergent outcomes.

It has been our mission to engineer frequent small, well-informed and targeted refinements, persistently. Over time, compounded improvements add up to generate increasingly beneficial outcomes for our students.

This is the mindset of our journey with the Reggio Emilia approach, a journey our school embarked on 14 years ago, and which we have steadfastly and methodically refined in the intervening years.

Like the snail, we move intentionally at a pace we can sustain. We continue to learn. Not racing, but constantly moving forward.

Like everything we do, our Reggio journey inspires and reflects our school values:

We love to learn Challenge all the time; Thinking all the time.

We don’t give up; Nothing without work.

Ours is not a big school, but our vision is grand. We strive to help children become effective learners, while constantly challenging ourselves to learn alongside the child, to become more effective teachers. We believe that, with informed, targeted and persistent effort, amazing results are possible.

The image of the shell also invites us to remember to listen – not for the sounds of the ocean, but for the voice of the child. The Pedagogy of Listening is integral to our learnings from Reggio Emilia and listening to the child is one of the practices that distinguish our work.

We invest time in listening to children, to their ideas, theories and understanding of the world. We often find that their ideas are advanced beyond our expectations and are surprising both in their creativity and accuracy.

The role of our teachers is to provoke, listen, connect and challenge, while always bringing the learning back to address the content and standards of the Australian Curriculum.

We have learned that this style of teaching and learning is not just engaging, but also compellingly powerful and effective.

Our Reggio-based practice is supplemented by explicit teaching on curricular content as and when necessary. But if we can lead a child to discover the learning for themselves (through inquiry-based research), we find they remember it better. So we continue to try to improve our integration of Reggio learning with curriculum targets.

We love sharing our findings with the broader community, so that others may benefit from our experience.

Because from little things, big things grow.

Stories from our recent research

Now let’s take a dive into some more detailed examples of student learning, as provided by our staff to delegates at the Reggio conference.

Our team presented case studies from last year’s student work (including learning play, inquiry-based learning and projects), and explained some professional learning that teachers derived from each exercise.

Each case study also pointed to the curriculum content students were able to access, and indicated how explicit teaching complemented the learning discovered through our Reggio Emilia-style approach.

Some of the case studies might sound familiar to school community members who attended last year’s Best Of night!

We also ran specialised workshops on the following topics:

The Australian Curriculum meets the Reggio Approach;

100 languages STEAM;

Hypothetical thinking;

Learning Play – Beginners;

Learning Play – Advanced; and

What I learnt when I went to Reggio Emilia.

For now, although the workshops were particularly well-received (especially Sandra Landolt’s fabulous STEAM session, featuring kinetic sculptures from last year’s year 2 students) we’ll just focus on the case studies.

Prep case study: What is Change?

Our teachers Deb Adams, Jane Meisenhelter and Ellyn Rosanoff presented research on their work with last year’s Prep class, on the theme of Change.

This project theme had emerged as a result of students noticing a family of caterpillars eating a peace lily that belonged to teacher aide, Davida Hillier. From this simple provocation, students developed an interest in insects.

As the year progressed, more and more creatures came to live in the classroom: silkworms, snails, spiders, case moths, grubs and slugs. Over time, students observed changes in creatures, and developed an interest in their life cycles.

This led to discussion of the questions “what is change?” and “what is gone?”- followed by collaborative research into the different ways we can represent change.

Students articulated their understanding of change in various ways – through spoken words; through writing and pictures; through mixing coloured paint, acetate and coloured water; and ultimately through a collaborative mural facilitated by Atelierista Julanne McDougall.

(This spectacular artwork is currently on display in the school office).

Through the Change project, students were able to access curriculum content in the key learning areas of English, Science and HPE, as well as developing general capabilities in critical and creative thinking.

Year 1 case study: Interrelations and interactions

Teachers Aaron Cumberlidge and Kathryn Luscombe presented research from some of their work with some of last year’s Year 1 students. By pursuing different interests emerging through Learning Play, students took different pathways to understand some fundamental concepts about the physical world.

One group of students pursued the Car Project, while another group considered how living things interact with their environment as they investigated the question ‘Will it Grow?’

In the Car Project, teachers leveraged students’ interest in playing with toy cars into investigative learning related to the Science and English curriculum.

Students practised the curriculum skill of Critical and Creative Thinking (and incidentally gained some basic knowledge in mechanical physics), by observing how their cars interacted with found objects in their play environment.

Guided investigations saw students learning how various phenomena (like ramp steepness and surface friction) influenced the speed of their cars.

The children investigated options and predicted possible outcomes, using information from previous experiences to inform new ideas.

Toby: “We picked this spot because there is a slope and it will make it go faster.”

They recorded and sorted their observations to share with others. And they practised listening and taking turns when responding, in one-on-one, group and class interactions.

All of this learning correlates directly with specific items in the Australian Curriculum.

Meanwhile, another group of Year 1 students responded to a learning play provocation involving three bean seeds in three different environments, and asked ‘Will it Grow?’

These students set about investigating what environmental conditions were more suited to germinating a seed – and then what the plant would need to stay alive in the garden.

After determining that plants need roots, water, sun, food and air, students set about investigating how roots grow.

They planted three irises - one in sand, one in healthy rich soil, and another in car park dirt, and observed that if “if the iris grows in healthy and rich soil, then it will grow roots”.

They also tested how 3 similar plants grew when one was given water, one was given milk, and the other was given cola. Children observed and drew any changes that occurred.

Sarghi: “I noticed that cola makes the roots grow longer but the leaves and petals turn brown, so it kills the plant”. Mrs L: “Why do you think this happened?” Dylan: “Because there aren’t any nutrients in cola”. Mrs L: “What is the best liquid?” Dylan: “Fresh water. The roots grew and the plants looked the best.”

(The milk one produced maggots - let us never speak of it again).

Just for this case study, we’ll give you extra detail to show you what specific curriculum content was addressed, so you have a detailed example.

If you want to know this level of detail for the other case studies, it’s all set out in the Reggio conference handbook (available at the office).

Through the Will it Grow? project, students accessed curriculum content in the following Key Learning Areas:

Science (by describing changes in local environment and how different places meet the needs of living things; responding to questions and making predictions; recording and sorting observations and sharing them with others); and

English (including listening to others and taking turns in conversations; creating texts that show understanding of connections between writing, speech and images; making short presentations about familiar topics; interacting in pair, group and class discussions);

They also applied the Critical and Creative Thinking skills of:

Identifying and describing familiar information and ideas during a discussion or investigation; and

Connecting information from one setting to another.

And, we think they enjoyed it, just quietly.

Gladiators in King George Square

Teachers Jeanette McKilligan and Sandra Landolt presented research from last year’s Year 2 class project, Gladiators in the King George Square. (This work was also contributed to by teacher Shona Byrne, before she went on maternity leave).

This project provided curriculum learning opportunities in English, Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) and Technologies, aligned to specific AC standards. (For the purposes of the conference, we matched learning to Year 2 standards, but of course this approach gives us flexibility to include learning to other year level standards, differentiated according to student needs).

This multi-dimensional project emerged from a simple provocation involving cardboard boxes. As the students had been studying famous landmarks in Italian class, they were inspired to transform the boxes into the Colosseum and a Roman warship.

By the end of term 2, students had developed their own Ancient Roman Museum, by researching different Roman buildings and using a variety of media (including box construction, digital technologies, painting, mosaics and writing) to communicate what they discovered.

They shared their findings with the class, and with the broader community through their museum open day.

In exploring the concept of what made the ancient buildings significant, students also began to consider which buildings in their own city might be considered significant (and why).

Students recognised that places can have different meanings for different people, and considered why the significant features of places should be preserved.

As the year progressed, students began to apply that understanding closer to home – for example, they noticed similarities between the Colosseum and the Gabba.

“I think the Colosseum is similar to the Gabba. Both have shows in the middle of them.

Both are ring shapes”.

The class built on this segue by undertaking excursions into the city, to consider which buildings they thought had significance.

They applied thinking routines such as ‘See, Think, Wonder’, to conclude that Brisbane City Hall was a significant building. They provided reasons to support their conclusion.

“Brisbane City Hall is significant because the government has meetings there.

Secondly, lots of tourists come to Brisbane City Hall. Thirdly, the Lord Mayor works there.

If you don’t have a watch you can look at the time on the clock.”

– Buddy

Building on their Roman Museum experience, students developed their own Museum of Brisbane to share with the school community at our Best Of night.

They worked with the Atelierista to create models of City Hall and the Old Convict Windmill.

And (together with our resident kinetic artist), they developed a series of very clever moving parts to drive the movement of the windmill and City Hall clock.

(These very cool constructions were well-received at the conference and are still a massive hit with students. If you missed the opportunity to check them out, see if you can pop into the STEAM room sometime for a demonstration).

This project produced a whole series of valuable curriculum learning opportunities.

It also resulted in a spectacular array of artworks that made the children’s learning visible, as well as generating engagement and learning opportunities across the broader community.

Songlines: from learning play to projects

Teachers Jodi Stephenson, Michelle Godsall, Amanda Brooks and Ianthe van der Walt presented research from the 2018 Year 3/4 Songlines project. Our wonderful (but since retired) Atelierista, Juleanne McDougall, also contributed to this research.

The Songlines project emerged in response to our 2018 school priority of improving the way we embed indigenous perspectives throughout the curriculum.

We decided to develop the students understanding of Songlines (which are the Dreaming story lines crossing Australia, pinpointing landmarks and sacred sites in the environment), by weaving these concepts into the Year 3 Geography curriculum.

Students had been considering the idea of space, by mapping the school grounds using cartographic conventions.

On this foundation, teachers provided opportunities to develop ways of thinking about the importance of connection to place, in line with the way maps are created by Indigenous people.

Students walked around the school grounds, thinking about the pathways they took, how places made them feel, and which places had meaning to them personally.

While the students were creating maps, they were concurrently exploring indigenous painting techniques in art class.

Informed by this experience, students developed their own symbols and patterns for their school maps, remembering to respectfully refrain from appropriating known traditional symbols.

Students also collaborated with the music specialist, to develop songs to remind themselves about how to behave in certain spaces. (This emerged in response to an issue of running on verandas, with children theorising “If we create a rhyme or a

). saying, then we will remember to use the space calmly”

After the whole class shared their ideas for rhymes and ostinato patterns, the final song was developed by a small group of students, who then took on the role of teaching it to the rest of the class.

Finally, the students were filmed walking around the school environment, to show how their relationship with the space had changed. This footage and stills of artwork were combined with music to make a video.

The curriculum content delivered through this research involved Key Learning Areas of HASS, The Arts, and Music. It also aided the development of curriculum-defined general capabilities in Critical and Creative Thinking. The learning outcomes achieved were based on differentiated learning goals for each student and measured against the related standards for each year group.

Teachers also learned valuable professional lessons, including:

The value of collaborating with specialists (in this case, music and art teachers);

That a ‘100 languages of the child’ approach enables children to self-regulate their behaviour; and

That direct experience of the school environment in this project helped the children attribute meaning to particular places.

Day and Night

Our teacher researchers Jodi Stephenson, Amanda Brooks and Joy Pohlner presented outcomes from their 2018 Year 3 student project ‘ ’. Day and Night

This project demonstrated the transition from Learning Play to Project work, which was also covered in one of the practical workshops – so we’ll also include some of that background as we look at this case study.

At our school, most children from Prep to Year 2 engage in Learning Play to develop and practice complex oral language.

Learning Play involves a child engaging with carefully-curated ‘provocations’ – play spaces, ideas, or concepts that inspire the child to investigate and engage, to discover something they find interesting.

Confident use of complex oral language provides a foundation for progress in all learning areas at school, as it facilitates deep thinking and deep learning. When combined with explicit teaching in Practical Philosophy, the discovery process involved in Learning Play helps students develop skills in creative, critical and hypothetical thinking. (Again – it’s about teaching students how to think, not what to think).

In Prep, Learning Play is about exploration, with some engagement in small, short projects. Students begin to explicitly connect their Learning Play to specific learning intentions or purposes.

By year 1, students are encouraged to think about maintaining a Learning Play project over a longer period. They are encouraged

to write, draw, build, model, construct, photograph and paint their theories, and to build on them over time. They discuss the purpose of their work, create hypotheses, and practice connecting the two.

At a Year 2 level, students will be continuing to explore, but moving on to a longer period of engagement –developing, planning and presenting projects over sustained periods. Children and teachers will both be documenting the child’s thinking, and children will be using complex oral language to communicate their thinking.

The idea is that by year 3, students will be ready to move on to a sustained Inquiry Project, with strong links to specific concepts taken from the AC Year 3 achievement standards.

This is the context in which the Day and Night project emerged. This particular group of students had participated in the school’s Learning Play program from the start of Prep, and were ready to transition to a more formal type of exploration.

Teachers had allocated students two afternoons per week to engage in Project work, using similar resources to those previously made available for Learning Play.

They found that students needed the challenge of a new provocation to exit their comfort zone (and to develop their thinking to new concepts).

In response, the teachers introduced the Inquiry question ‘Why , drawn from the Science do we have day and night?’

achievement standard ‘Using their understanding of the movement of Earth to suggest explanations of everyday

observations’.

Children investigated possible explanations, using a variety of materials, and presented their discoveries through small group dramas, oral presentations, and labelled diagrams.

Students then began to think about other planets and space, posing the new Inquiry question ‘Does day and night only happen on Earth?’

By the end of the year, students had designed and created final products demonstrating the connections they had made between night and day on Earth (and elsewhere).

They produced models, animations, sculptures and papier-mâché structures.

They also produced illustrated texts to present their ideas, along the way developing understanding not just of their research topic (regarding aspects of the Earth’s motion), but also of how language features are used to link and sequence ideas.

Through this project, students ticked off a long

list of achievements from the AC standards in Critical and Creative Thinking. They also developed an understanding of key curriculum concepts in Science and English, and prepared them for the more advanced Inquiry learning techniques applied in the upper school.

Pitch to project: Trade-offs

Teachers Jayne Aguiar and Dani Phelan presented an overview of the project work from last year’s 5/6 classes, which was centred around the theme of ‘Trade-offs’, and incorporated curriculum learning in HASS, Health, English, Maths, Science and Design Technologies.

The main ‘Trade-off’ concept was drawn from the Year 6 HASS curriculum, with connections drawn to other areas in the Year 5 curriculum.

This project theme emerged in the context of teacher research, with our Principal’s visit to the Bright School in San Francisco leading to the suggestion that we try a new project model. This involved adopting investigation arcs (Exploration, Expression, Exposition) in conjunction with Product-Oriented Learning (for more on this, check out the work of Yong Zhao).

The idea would be to conduct a collaborative inquiry project involving the whole class, which would deliver identifiable products as outcomes. This experience would complement individual inquiry projects, each with their own identifiable products as outcomes.

Also relevant to the project context was our Kitchen Garden program (which we wanted to connect more closely to curriculum) and our existing relationship with the Slow Food movement.

The core Slow Food values (‘Good, Clean, Fair’) lent themselves as sub-concepts through which to explore the leading concept of trade-offs.

Emerging from all these influences was our provocation question, , which hooked ‘How far does my lunch travel to get to me?’

students into the inquiry process. .

Students investigated where their food came from, looking at food labels and distances on ‘the big map’. They considered how trade-offs in cost, location, taste, quantity and impact can affect decisions about the food we eat.

Along the way, they applied concepts from HASS and maths, with follow-up activities involving the Kitchen Garden also providing curriculum learning opportunities in Maths and English.

With this level of awareness established, students looked for a class project to apply their knowledge.

They decided that their project would deliver two products:

1. Literacy Product: Slow Food Snail of Approval application. 2. Project Product: Slow Food lunch.

Starting from menu suggested by teachers, students provided feedback that clearly demonstrated application of the Good, Clean, and Fair concepts (and associated trade-offs).

Students modified the menu to include more produce grown at school or sourced locally. They applied their learning through menu design, decorations, food preparation, speeches, garden tours and meal service.

And they were awarded the prestigious Snail of Approval in response to their successful lunch event and application documentation!

Fuelled by this learning (and some tasty slow food), students were then ready to apply their experience to individual projects. These were provoked by the idea of searching for problems related to the guiding question ‘How can we eat well and look after the environment?’

Students had to come up with an issue they wanted to solve, and turn it into a project pitch. The pitch is a scaffolded process, allowing teachers to listen to the children (asking probing questions like ‘What are you passionate about?’, ‘How are you addressing the big question?’, ‘What is your budget / schedule?’) to refine project ideas.

Students formulated their ideas into PowerPoint presentations, which they had to pitch to a panel of teachers and administrative staff, who applied a rigorous approval process.

They had to identify a project product and a literacy product - a way to share their learning with a wider audience.

After successfully pitching their project, students engaged in investigation, testing their theories with hands-on research, and developing their final products. They were provided with opportunities to present their findings (and for reflection) through tours, presentations, and ‘Best Of’ night.

Teachers also drew from this experience, to identify some ways to improve our future support for this approach to learning. Win-win!

Want to know more?

If the technical aspects of our Reggio Emilia-inspired approach are of particular interest to you, why not pick up a copy of our conference handbook, which is available for purchase in the school office? And book a seat for next year’s conference!

The conference materials (bits of which we’ve shared here) set out the long descriptions of applicable curriculum standards (at the level of detail that teachers need to know).

The conference book contains a heap of other information worth absorbing, including:

A recent cross-curriculum project (engaging students in years 2 and 4 across writing, music, dance and drama), called ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’ which was curated by our music specialist Ianthe van der Walt;

A more complete explanation of how Learning Play works at our school;

Take-home learning from staff who recently attended professional development at Reggio Emilia (in Italy);

A detailed matrix tool for hypothetical thinking routines, called ‘Progression of an Idea’, developed by Aaron Cumberlidge in collaboration with other staff at our school; and

A chart outlining all the elements of The Reggio Emilia Inspired Process.

Moving forward, if you’re inclined to take a deep dive on this subject, you can probably get the gist of how curriculum learning can emerge from all manner of projects, if you have a look at the

curriculum information that ACARA has developed to suit parents. There are downloadable PDFs sorted by adjacent year levels, so you can explore the content most relevant to your child.

If you have questions about your child’s current Reggio-inspired learning, you can chat to your child’s teacher. (Make an appointment, so they can give you their full attention – you can do this via email or through the school office).

In conclusion…

We continue to reflect on our work and improve the effectiveness of our innovative approach to teaching the Australian Curriculum, sharing our learning as we go.

Our powerful Cycles of Inquiry process is woven through our daily practice and our longer term strategic planning, and this reflected in our shared research as well as the school review findings. This evidence-driven continuous improvement process is already well-established, and this fact is recognised in the school review team’s findings.

The review recommendations and our Action Plan response provide a formal document acknowledging the logical next phase in our school improvement journey, for which planning has been underway for quite some time.

Slow and steady, let’s keep at it.

We’ve got this.

And that’s your lot!

Thanks once again for taking the time to engage with our story. If there is any matter you’d like more information on, please email our Communications Officer, Jo Bell.

Next time, we’ll be looking at the project work our students are doing this year, so we can better understand what we’re seeing when Best Of night rolls around at the end of the year.

We’ll also build on the content shared above, by beginning to point to ways that the kids’ current projects are providing access to curriculum learning.

Missed something? Don’t forget, you can also access back-issues of school bulletins and magazines via the school website.

Have a happy and safe Spring break, and we’ll catch you on the other side!

Cannon Hill State School 845 Wynnum Road Cannon Hill 4170

Phone: 3902 3333 Fax: 3902 3300

Email: admin@cannonhillss.eq.edu.au Web: www.cannonhillss.eq.edu.au

P&C: pandc@cannonhillss.eq.edu.au

Text Student Absences to: 0429 776 430 and include

- child’s name - class - date of absence - your relationship to child - reason for absence (no images/emojis please)

Next P&C Meeting:

Monday 14 October 2019 6.30pm in the Staff Room

All welcome

Our Bell Song: Mozart Flute Quartet #3 in C, Andantino,

by Ensemble Villa Musica.

Keep in Touch via

Lifeline Bins Items Outside of Bins: Call, Alan Wadsworth Phone: 0408 773 581

Book Pick Up from your home: www.uccommunity.org.au

/donatefurniture

We rely on the funds raised from our Lifeline Bins to support our Stephanie Alexander Kitchen