Assessment - Curriculum and application: critique and reflection

Summary:

This assignment is broken up into four parts, guiding you to:

- engage with the study guide on CloudDeakinthat will help you to become familiar with the Victorian Curriculum (Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority [VCAA] 2018) - a document primary school teachers use to plan teaching/learning, assess student outcomes/programs and to report on student outcomes. Your mentor teachers will expect you to have become familiar with this document before commencing your placement;

- watch videos of teachers engaging with children in their classrooms and talking about their practices as they relate to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers using the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL) guidance.

- to engage with these resources, as well as class and self sourced readings to critique and reflect on curriculum and classroom application

Part 1: The Victorian Curriculum

After completing cloud content, engaging in unit readings, familiarising yourself with the Victorian Curriculum watching the video about one teacher's use of the Victorian Curriculumandreading the Department of Education and Training (DET 2018) fact sheet about the implementation of the revised Victorian Curriculum

- Introduce the Victorian Curriculum and describe your understanding of it. Summarise how many areas of the curriculum there are e.g. Science, The Arts etc
- Look up one curriculum area e.g.Science by opening the VictorianCurriculum site and selecting the ‘curriculum tab' and then choose one area.
- Once you have opened this, read the ‘Rationale and Aims' and summarise this describing why children should study this curriculum area.
- Then click on ‘scope and sequence', and open the overall document for this subject. Make note of the ‘strands' within the curriculum area e.g. the main headings in bold black font on the left hand column.
- Summarise the achievement standard for one age range e.g.Foundation - Level 2.
- Make sure you also look at the Levels tab for the area you have chosen AND then scroll down to find the curriculum area.

- Read the ‘Level Description' at the top and summarise this and then the ‘Achievement standard' at the bottom.

Part 2: Australian Professional Standards for Teachers

- Introduce the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers using the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership [AITSL] (AITSL 2018) website and describe the significance of these standards? Say which areas of the graduate level standards you currently feel confident in and which you wish to develop.

- Go to Week 2 of the Study Guide. Use onePrimary School video and oneSpecial Education video for this part of the assignment. Choose one AITSL teaching standard to reflect on as shown in both videos. How was the AITSL standard illustrated in the video? What was effective? What would you have done here? Could you see the practices used in different contexts? If not why not? What did the videos highlight for you about diverse abilities?

- Be respectful when you critique the videos and try to support your points with other literature found in cloud content or sourced elsewhere.

Part 3: Cultural and ethnic diversity, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds and other cultures

- Watch the video of Jamie (a former Deakin student who graduated from the Institute of Koorie Education) in her classroom. Summarise what strategies and practices she used to include all children in her class. Use the readings from the Cloud site about diversity to support your comments. Give one other example of how you have seen diversity incorporated into a primary or early childhood setting. Find one more reading of your own about inclusive classrooms or diversity in the classroom to support your points. Use Google scholar or the library website.

Part4: Formative and Summative assessment

- Using the cloud content on Formative and Summative assessment describe what these terms mean to you. Provide an example of summative assessment and an example of formative assessment that you saw/heard in the videos you critiqued for Part two and/or three up above. If you cannot easily identify either formative or summative assessment from the videos you observed, give an example of what the teacher could have said or done to provide their student/students with formative or summative feedback.