1. Planning a unit of work integrating:
Our Community
Planning a unit of work integrating:
History
Geography
English
Intercultural Capability
Welcome…
I would like to introduce myself. I am Monica Bini, Curriculum Manager for Humanities. With me today is Jacqueline Moore, Curriculum Manager for English and Pat Hincks, Curriculum Manager for History and Civics and Citizenship.
I will be leading the session today but Jacqueline and Pat will help to answer questions and Jacqueline will explain particular features regarding English of the unit of work that we have developed.
You should all have a copy of this unit of work in front of you.
We will speak to the powerpoint here and then take questions at the end. Please input your questions into the chat box and we will track them.

2. Objectives By the end of today’s session you will:
have an insight into how to plan a unit of work based on the Victorian Curriculum.
understand the relationship between content descriptions, achievement standards and learning activities and assessment.
Today’s session will focus on planning units of work based on the Victorian Curriculum.
We will use an example to show one way to plan a unit of work.
There are of course many ways that planning can be done and this is just one way.
As we discuss this process, we will draw attention to key building blocks that are useful no matter which process you use.
This session assumes that you have already been introduced to the Victorian curriculum in general and are now ready to start thinking about planning specific units of work.

3. Overview Our Community
A five week unit integrating:
History
Geography
English
Intercultural Capability
How did we get there?
The finished product is a five week unit on Our Community integrating selected content descriptions from across these learning areas and the Intercultural capability.
It begins by students exploring different celebrations or commemorations and goes on to have students complete an investigation of places in their local community.
Curriculum Managers for these areas and a specialist early years literacy teacher worked together as a team to plan this unit of work, just as you might work in an early years team within your school to plan units of work.
We would like to give you an insight into how we planned this so that you can go ahead and plan your own units, which might draw on completely different learning areas but use a similar process.

4. The Beginning Becoming deeply familiar with the curriculum
Reading across the content descriptions of different learning areas to find links
Key question:
Where are the natural synergies across different learning areas?
The very beginning is becoming deeply familiar with the different learning areas.
In our team, we each have deep familiarity with different learning areas due to our roles at the VCAA. Our specialist teacher has literacy expertise.
In due course as you work with the curriculum you will become familiar with all the learning areas and capabilities and gain deeper and deeper knowledge. This is hard to do from the get go and yet when you implement the curriculum from next year, this will obviously be easier to do with this familiarity.
One strategy of how to manage becoming familiar with the curriculum is to initially allocate responsibility for one or two learning areas and capabilities across your team. Their job is to become deeply familiar with it and act as a resource to help others while familiarity is built more generally. This could even be co-ordinated at a whole school level where one representative ‘learning area ambassador’ could attend PL to then back at school train others.
This might initially be more efficient than everyone trying to do everything at once.
So in our case we had a conversation together as a team using our deep familiarity with the our learning areas to quickly establish these substantial natural links. What we mean by this is that we only wanted to integrate in a way that is not token and where student learning will really be enriched through making these links. We also did not want to cover too much as it is better to do fewer things well.

5. Explicit teaching – broad decisions
Learning area
Broad selected focus
Overall learning intention
Students will investigate significant places, activities and events in the local community.
They will build skills in evidence collection and interpretation, including through primary source analysis and fieldwork.
They will build skills in interacting with others.
History
Continuity and change in the local community
Significant places, people and events
Using primary sources
Geography
Features and activities of the local place
Importance of places and how they change
Collecting and interpreting data and information
English
Texts in context
Expressing and developing ideas
Interacting with others
Initially we determined that there were good links across History, Geography and English and that we could broadly scope out a unit on Our Community.
It was only once we drilled down that we selected Intercultural Capability as a natural fit for our learning intentions. Initially we identified three learning areas and an overall intention.
We have highlighted here links that we identified and brought together to create a learning intention. A decision was taken at this point to take a walk through the local community. This was taken as a team.
The temptation at this point is to try to cover too much. Obviously ‘Our Community’ is wide open and we could have attempted to draw in The Arts or ‘Design and Technology or down the track other capabilities such as critical and creative thinking.
But the more diffuse you make it the harder it is to teach something explicitly and well. Each selected content description must be explicitly taught, not just covered implicitly as you go along. So by way of illustration, of course students think no matter what learning they are undertaking but it is not always going to be the case that you create explicit teaching points to intentionally study these thinking moves. Unless you are doing this you are not covering an area of the curriculum.
This is also the case for other areas of the curriculum. While it would be possible to integrate Visual Arts and Geography if doing field sketches of buildings in the community for example, we determined that in this case it would become unwieldy to explicitly stop and teach drawing techniques as well as all the other learning area content. But an alternative path would have been to do just that, but that means we would have to cut something else to allow for that deep learning focus.
On the other hand if students already have learnt these drawing techniques we can of course apply them in this unit and even gather more evidence for assessment of their drawing skills if we want to, but with an explicit teaching focus that is elsewhere. This is an intentional choice made at the planning stage.

6. Writing in the detail
Identifying the most prescriptive and most flexible learning areas
Tag teaming according to agreed process
Drafting initial structure and learning activities based on History
Adding Geography to History learning activities and providing additional activities
Refining learning activities to reflect identified English content descriptions
Further refinement to include Intercultural Capabilities
Formative and summative assessment designed iteratively
We noticed that history was the most specific of the three learning areas with Geography being a bit less specific and English the least specific.
So we decided to begin with History and then integrate the other learning areas to suit.
Our History learning area expert populated the unit with an overall structure and teaching and learning activities.
Our Geography expert then integrated Geography. This involved refining some of the teaching and learning activities that were written for History as well as adding some things in.
The draft then went to English so that literacy skills could be made more explicit in the teaching and learning activities.
We then integrated Intercultural Capability. This was chosen as it was evident when the content descriptions were being unpacked that here was a great opportunity for students to undertake explicit learning about cultural practices and cultural diversity. This could be done very easily without much extra time or planning.
We will now look at what we did to initially design and then refine learning activities and assessment.

7. Mapping the curriculum
Identifying the content descriptions which will be covered specifically in the unit of work
Identifying aspects of the achievement standards that students will demonstrate in completing the unit of work
Identifying aspects of the achievement standards that students may demonstrate if they are working beyond the level
You will notice that the front end of the Unit identifies the specific content descriptions that will be covered from each of the strands and sub-strands in the History and Geography disciplines, the English learning area and in the Intercultural Capability. For example a relevant content description from Geography is ‘natural, managed and constructed features of places, their location and how they change’.
It also identifies the aspects of the achievement standards (outlining the knowledge and understanding) that students will have the opportunity to demonstrate in completing this unit. It is also important to consider the achievement standards beyond the level – as some students will be working beyond the level.
The achievement standards themselves of course represent a developmental sequence of learning – so that achievement standards in F-2 link developmentally to Levels 3 – 4.
Mapping the curriculum focus of units allows you to document how much of the mandated Curriculum content is covered in your unit and which parts of the achievement standards may be demonstrated.

8. Designing teaching and learning
Use content descriptions and related achievement standards to craft teaching and learning to suit, for example History:
Content Description
Achievement standard
Teaching and learning activities
Identify examples of continuity and change …in the local area by comparing past and present
Identify the content features of primary sources
describe … a person, a site, or an event of significance in the local community.
Use sources to describe the significance of places and events.
As a class, look at photographs of a place in the local community, one taken from the past and one taken recently.
Suggest possible eras or dates when these photographs may have been taken.
Consider how they might find out how old places are.
In groups and using a template of a page with two columns labelled ‘Past’ and ‘Present’ students describe what has changed over time and what has remained the same.
In the unit itself, the teaching and learning activities are written out in more detail.
Here, some key features and how they link to the content descriptions and achievement standards are shown.
Designing specific activities begins with putting together the content descriptions and their achievement standards.
The content descriptions indicate what students have to learn and the achievement standards help to shape the difficulty of the learning activities. Of course there may be one learning activity or a series as students build up to be able to meet an achievement standard.
You can see that the primary source selected here is a photograph.
Then continuity and change is built in by choosing older and more recent photographs.
Note one of the teaching points that supports students to work with the features of these primary sources, that is, how we could tell how old they are.
The achievement standard involves description and so the learning activity supports students to build a description.
The student develops learning so that they are able to be assessed against the achievement standard.
This design process was undertaken for each learning area addition. This sometimes resulted in refinements to existing activities as well as additions.

9. Refining learning activities
Example one: adding in Geography
Original activity
Second draft – adding Geography
As a class, look at photographs of a place in the local community, one taken from the past and one taken recently
As a class, look at photographs of a place in the local community, one taken from the past and one taken recently.
For each photograph:
Work with students to identify and classify some natural features, for example, rivers or native vegetation; constructed features such as buildings or roads; and managed features such as parks or community gardens.
In pairs, students find any further examples of these kinds of features (this could be recorded in a table).
Ask students to suggest what activities were/are at that place, and to support their suggestions with evidence from the photograph.
The Geography team member went through the same process as the History expert, working with the content descriptions and achievement standards of Geography to link in with History.
Here you can see how students are taught to classify features in the categories of natural, constructed and managed.
They are also required to infer what activities might have taken place at these places within the photographs.
Geography and History support each other to drive towards really rich descriptions of the features of places and how they change over time.
They will be able to nuance their descriptions by using classifications of features and by intentionally thinking about activities that might have taken place there, not just the static description of what is in the photograph.
As the learning activity was refined, an opportunity for formative assessment was also noted. Are students able to classify successfully? This is key to being able to complete one of the summative assessment tasks later on.
We will now consider a second example to show how English was built in.

10. Refining learning activities
Example two: adding in English
Original activity
Second draft – adding English
Use the photographs as a discussion starter to consider:
what the celebration looks like
what the celebration sounds like
how it might feel to be there
why we celebrate particular days
Use the photographs as a discussion starter and encourage students make links to their own experience of one or more of these days.
Students could use a graphic organiser, such as a Y chart or mind map to consider:
This is an extract from the beginning of the unit, where students study celebrations or commemorations in the local community.
Here explicit teaching on the expression of ideas is built in, as well as on context, in that teachers help students to identify similarities and differences to the student’s own experience.
Jacqueline, would you like to speak to the yellow highlighted components on the unit of work?
I have highlighted in yellow literacy tasks that can be linked to content descriptions within the English curriculum.
For example: describing and/or recording observations, writing questions, comparing, creating a collage (i.e. a text that uses both words and images – could be simple labelling of pictures but more able students could create longer pieces of text), working co-operatively in a group, listening to and respond orally to guest speakers or community members on a site visit, developing and presenting a short class talk and listening to/interacting appropriately with those presented by other class members.
This activity underwent further refinement to introduce Intercultural Capability.
This was chosen because celebrations and commemorations are cultural practices and contribute to cultural identity so it is a good opportunity to enrich learning further.

11. Refining learning activities
Example three: adding in Intercultural Capability
Second draft
Third draft – adding Intercultural Capability
Use the photographs as a discussion starter and encourage students make links to their own experience of one or more of these days.
Students could use a graphic organiser, such as a Y chart or mind map to consider:
what the celebration looks like
what the celebration sounds like
how it might feel to be there
why we celebrate particular days
Use the photographs as a discussion starter and encourage students make links to their own experience of one or more of these days, explicitly drawing attention to similarities and differences in student experience and what it might be like to experience different ways of celebrating.
Students could use a graphic organiser, such as a Y chart or mind map to consider….(etc)
The Intercultural capability at F-2 focuses on what is familiar and different and what it might be like to experience a different cultural practice.
This addition is not necessarily doing more, but rather providing some teaching direction to help shape the discussion. This supports responses to the dot points on what the celebration is like and builds student empathy.
Throughout this drafting and refinement process an eye was kept on formative and summative assessment.

12. Assessment Learning Intention: Summative Assessment 1
Students will investigate significant places, activities and events in the local community.
They will build skills in evidence collection and interpretation, including through primary source analysis and fieldwork.
They will build skills in interacting with others.
Summative Assessment 1
Example achievement standard links F-2:
Students choose a particular celebration about which to complete a poster or book eBook page.
Their page could include illustrations, words and sentences which describe a particular celebration or commemoration and explain reflections based on discussions from Activities 1 and 2.
On completion, teachers could provide students with opportunities to share their work with the class or a particular group.
History:
describe … an event of significance in the local community.
English (Writing):
… provide details about … events..
(Speaking and listening):
interact in pair, group and class discussions, taking turns when responding.
Intercultural capability:
Students explain how they might respond in different cultural situations.
There are two suggested summative assessments in this unit. The first one assesses learning in History, English and intercultural Capability and the second History, English and Geography.
The one shown here is linked to the study of celebrations or commemorations that begins the unit.
We have shown the learning intention here as we wanted to show how summative assessment is really considered at the start of the unit with the learning intention. This can be done quite broadly with refinements as learning activities are refined.
In the far right you can see some of the relevant achievement standards extracts from the relevant learning areas. There are more, but these are here to illustrate some of the links.
For example significant events became celebrations or commemorations and the difficulty relates to the achievement standard requirement to describe and explain as well as to interact.
When designing assessments keep one eye on the achievement standards as well as the content.

13. Differentiated learning
Where needed and appropriate:
Using the achievement standards as a continuum to design tasks that allow students to demonstrate understanding towards, at, and beyond the level
peer mentoring
templates for some tasks
The Our Community unit of teaching and learning described today offers many opportunities for differentiated learning. Depending on where your school is located your students may have several generations of their family still living in the area. Those students may be able to find ready connections to the history of the community and could pair up to help newer arrivals to learn more about it.
Lower literacy students will need more support and modelling of tasks. Examples of questions they could ask when on a site visit or listening to a visiting speaker would assist. They could also need clear templates with which to structure their presentations whilst more able students can be more creative with theirs.
On the other hand, other students may need to be extended, and the achievement standards can be used to do this. In this case, look to the achievement standards beyond F-2 to help determine the progress in difficulty that you can build into learning activities and assessment tasks.

14. Summary In a small professional team you will decide on:
a relevant topic for your school context
which learning areas are most relevant to the topic
which aspects of the Achievement Standards could be addressed
which Content Descriptions are most suitable
assessments needed to address aspects of the standards for each learning area
Small professional teams can work together to develop integrated units such as Our Community
Using a planning template like that used for Our Community you can develop similar integrated units of teaching and learning. If you follow this kind of process and you ensure that there are logical connections between the achievement standards and content descriptions from the different learning areas then you can create a very rich learning program for your students.

15. Contact details
Monica Bini (Geography) at Pat Hincks (History) at Jacqueline Moore (English) at
Here are our contact details.
We will now take questions.