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Planning

Teachers plan to ensure that all students engage in meaningful learning.

Planning can be organised in several ways. Schools create curriculum frameworks using the P-12 Curriculum Framework documents:

Early Years Curriculum Guidelines
Essential Learnings and Standards
KLA past syllabus documents
Rich Tasks
Senior Phase documents which include Year 10 Guidelines , Year 11 and 12 syllabus documents and Vocational Education and Training documents.

Planning can also occur at year levels and individual class levels. Planning may encompass organisers such as multiple intelligences or Bloom's taxonomy . Planning needs to provide opportunities for all students to demonstrate the distance they have travelled, and the competencies achieved.

Planning should be a cyclic process incorporating selection of learning outcomes, strategies for teaching, assessment and reporting, and evaluating the effectiveness of the unit. This includes planning at a whole-school, subject, year and class level.

Planning happens on a variety of levels within a school. This includes planning at a whole-school level, subject level, an individual year level and at a class level.

School-level planning

Based on the relevant syllabus school personnel will decide on a scope and sequence of learning in each subject area. Some schools have planning days where teachers are released for a day or half day so that they can work in year-level or unit teams. This helps to facilitate consistency and coherence both across year levels and the school. Planning days provide opportunities for specialist support team members such as advisory teachers, therapists and nurses to be involved in planning with class teachers. School-level planning ensures that all areas of the syllabus and Essential Learnings are covered.

Individual year-level planning

Year level teachers may decide on topics that focus on particular concepts so that whole year cohorts are learning similar material at similar times, and teachers can share resources and plan excursions together.

Class planning

In class planning the teachers decide how they are going to provide learning experiences for the relevant Essential Learnings for their specific group of students.

Planning for the process of learning

Teachers may use a variety of organisers to aid the planning of a whole learning experience. Two organisers are:

1. Orientate, enhance and synthesise

Orientate: Refers to the process of activating prior knowledge of the topic, and giving the student a 'learning map' of the unit. ('This is what we are focussing on'). Teaching strategies in this phase may include immersion in a particular genre (that is, giving the students multiple examples of information reports) or introduction to a concept by providing an experience that engages the student with the concept, e.g. sinking vs. floating activity.

Enhance: This phase gives the students opportunities to engage with the concept and skills to consolidate learning. Teaching strategies in this phase may include some scaffolded and independent attempts at a skill (e.g. in our genre example, teaching strategies in this phase may include writing an information report with some visual organisers and sentence starters in place).

Synthesise: In this phase students bring their new understandings/skills together with their previous understanding and skills and integrate the two together. Teaching strategies in this phase will generally involve a more extended task, e.g. researching and writing an information report as part of a group or independently.

2. 5 Es (QSA 1998).

Engage: Use an activity or discussion to engage the students in thinking about the concept.

Explore: Explore the concept. Allow students time to explore the concept and to make meaningful links to previous knowledge. Activities in this phase may involve group work around a problem involving the concept or whole-class discussion.

Explain: Explain concepts that are not understood; link to other knowledge and understanding. Ask students to explain the concept and refine their understandings through the process.

Elaborate: Engage in activities that demonstrate this concept in different settings and increase the student's depth of understanding. For example, from their understanding of the life cycle of a frog they could extrapolate their understanding to the life cycle of a butterfly.

Evaluate: Evaluate the students' understandings of the learning outcome, and any other assessment standards. Evaluation could include the students' own evaluations of their learning (through reflection) and parents' perceptions of the student's learning. It is also a phase for the teacher to evaluate the unit and make relevant changes for future units.

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