Making the Junior curriculum concept driven and student-led

LEM and I have been chatting about how we could make the junior curriculum more relevant to the students and the world they live in. We started thinking about all the ways climate change could be used to hook into the science junior curriculum. How it could be used as a context for multiple content needs in science.

We threw around some ideas at morning tea time, then while my class were doing an assessment I started to pull them into a mindmap using Coggle to link the ideas of climate change, to the Science content, and on to the type of assessments or investigations that could be done.

The goal would be for students to investigate their own interests within a larger framework. When I started to link the content that is essential to Year 9 and 10 it turned out the whole two years could be investigated within the context of Climate Change in Year 9 or Sustainability in Year 10.

The intention is to allow teachers some fluidity in what and how they teach allowing them to follow the students interests. The assessments can be chosen by the teacher to be either a research investigation, using secondary sources; or a practical investigation collating primary data.
Each class would be constrained by having to do at least 6 assessments to report back on, at least 3 research and 3 practical investigations, and for each content strand in the Science curriculum to be assessed at least once. Students who are really into biology can do 3 Living World  themed projects, as long as they still do once each for Physical World, Material World, and Planet Earth and Beyond.

The teacher can follow the students enthusiasms anywhere on the mind map, or beyond if the students are so inclined. As the assessments are Nature of Science based they are comparable.

SNC has developed some good assessment tools, assessing skills not content, so they can be used across different assessment contexts, but still be comparable. The repeated use of these assessment rubrics, coupled with their explicit teaching in class will allow students to both identify what they need to do within an assessment, and identify what their next goals will be to attain the next level in their progression.