FED Alumni Workshop: Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum

The Fogarty EDvance 3-year School Improvement Program continues to build leadership capacity to improve student outcomes in participating schools; however, the improvement journey does not end once schools complete their time in the program.

Teachers from Cohorts 4 and 5 recently attended the EDvance Alumni Workshop on the topic of a Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum. These schools, which commenced their school improvement journeys in 2017 and 2018, have established Professional Learning Communities and a whole school approach to high impact instruction.

The Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum Workshop builds on the work already commenced by the schools by ensuring all students are provided access to the same curriculum content in a specific course and grade level, regardless of their assigned teacher, and that this curriculum can be taught in the instructional time available.

During the workshop, presenters Georgie Wynne and Stacey Plaut identified the research base for weaving instruction and curriculum into school improvement efforts. A structure and process for extracting critical content from the Western Australian Curriculum and developing a fine grained scope and sequence was then modelled using exemple programmes across a range of learning areas.

The final session for the day provided ample opportunity for school teams to reflect on their existing curriculum documents and engage in collaborative disciplined dialogue to plan their next steps.