The purpose of the Australian Curriculum is to provide greater consistency
between all schools in Queensland and Australia. This results in consistency
across year levels with alignment of content from Prep to Year 6. Teachers meet
twice a term to view and plan future ACARA units with additional meetings to
moderate over the standards of student work and responses to the set assessment
tasks.
Coaching and feedback underpins Kuluin State School’s Explicit
Improvement Agenda to promote a positive and sustainable change with a strong
focus on student outcomes.
The Gradual Release Model is the basis for quality standards in lesson
delivery. Teachers will be provided with professional development and coaching
to ensure a consistent pedagogical approach from P-6. The Gradual Release Model is applied to reading, writing and mathematics.
Mathematics is an integral and highly valued component
of our curriculum. Students identify and explore mathematical concepts and
skills through specifically designed warm-ups, investigations and problem-solving
tasks. Students are explicitly taught the core skills and are then encouraged
to apply these in real-world problem solving situations within a co-operative
learning environment.
The use of computers and other forms of information
technology is deeply embedded in all of the Australian Curriculum units with
students having the opportunity to create multimodal responses to assessment
tasks, interact with digital learning objects and access eLearning sites. Digital technology lessons will be taught by a specialist teacher to Prep-Year 4 classes. The school will work with the parent community and staff to trial a Bring Your Own Device Program in Year 4 2023.
Teachers use a variety of teaching strategies in the implementation of
curriculum which include explicit teaching, higher order thinking
strategies, multiple intelligences, investigations and
inquiries. Kuluin State School is
strategically committed to the implementation of a wide variety of Kagan
Cooperative Learning Structures in the teaching and learning process in order
to maximise student engagement.
Cooperative Learning is a successful and thoroughly researched
educational approach in which small teams or pairs of students work together
towards a learning goal. The use of Cooperative Learning Structures
creates a classroom atmosphere of achievement where all students are actively
and simultaneously engaged in learning. Structures are simple, easy to
learn, step-by-step instructional strategies that are content free. Some
are designed to engage and develop specific types of thinking, others to engage
and develop specific social skills, others to develop different intelligences,
others to foster mastery of different types of academic content. All
Kagan Structures are designed to increase student engagement and cooperation.