New Basics: Queensland trials a curriculum for tomorrow

Ezette GraufEducation Queensland

In 1999 the Queensland Government launched a discussion paper that asked the questions:

What do we want State schools to be like in 2010? What will teachers’ work be like? How will learning occur? What support will State schools need from Education Queensland?

During the consultation process for Queensland State Education 2010, many teachers, parents, students and school administrators raised questions about the appropriateness of current curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. There was concern expressed that the world was changing very rapidly and that the current school curriculum was not keeping pace with this change.

Any significant changes to curriculum would need to focus not only on employment, but also on enhancing social cohesion and a sense of community and identity. For such a change to have substance, the key message systems of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment need to be aligned in ways that optimise learning opportunities for all students (Berstein, 1990). Recent innovations and initiatives throughout Australia (Herschell & Luxton, 2000) have tended to focus on each of these systems separately. That is, we see curriculum frameworks pulling in one direction, assessment approaches pulling in another, and pedagogy programs or professional development pulling in yet another.

In this context, the most likely winner is assessment, often at the expense of curriculum and pedagogy. While not suggesting that assessment completely drives curriculum choice and pedagogical practices, the opportunity for confusion and thus choosing the failsafe assessment option—when curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are out of alignment—is clearly increased, and further increases as the assessment stakes get higher.

The New Basics Framework

An integral component of Education Queensland’s response to these complex issues has been to develop the New Basics Framework. The New Basics is a framework for curriculum, pedagogy and assessment that provides opportunities for students to develop the skills and knowledges to survive and flourish in changing economic, social and technological conditions. It is a differentiated framework that encourages schools to make curriculum choices in negotiation with its community, while at the same time raising the intellectual quality of learning across the State.

The New Basics Framework provides strength and support for success by dealing with the three message systems simultaneously. The New Basics triad includes the New Basics (curriculum organisers), the Rich Tasks ( assessing performance on transdisciplinary activities) and Productive Pedagogies (employed for meaningful student outcomes). The New Basics Project works with teachers and schools as they focus on their core business of teaching and learning, but does so in a way that directly

confronts the challenges of these dramatically changing times. It is about dealing with new student identities, new economies and workplaces, new technologies, diverse communities and complex cultures. Community expectation for learning that prepares students for the complexity of modern life means that teachers must, to a certain extent, reinvent themselves. It is this cultural shift that the New Basics Project catalyses.

The work of teachers

At its heart the New Basics Project is about renewing our work as educators, returning to the basics of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, with a clear focus on improving student outcomes through increasing the intellectual rigour of their work. It is based on a commitment to teachers’ professionalism. It recognises their capacity for intellectual decision-making and their commitment to their students.

The New Basics Project also recognises the depth of good practice in schools and assists schools to share and develop that expertise. It aims to do this by facilitating a dialogue on pedagogy across 58 schools in the New Basics trial and encouraging innovation in those schools to form the basis for wider change in Queensland State schools.

This is a journey for schools and for Education Queensland. The trial involves four years of exploration and discovery. The first year focused on allowing the trial schools to prepare and, in conjunction with the New Basics Branch, to develop, test and refine tools and approaches. The first three-year span for completing Rich Tasks began in 2001 and will be rolled out year by year.

The New Basics: Reconceptualising curriculum categories

There are four New Basics categories and they have an explicit orientation towards researching, understanding, and coming to grips with the newly emerging economic, cultural and social conditions. These four clusters of practice are deemed to be essential for lifelong learning by the individual, for social cohesion, and for economic wellbeing, as described in QSE 2010.

Such conditions have intellectual, cultural, linguistic and social dimensions. The practices connected with the New Basics may draw selectively upon both traditional and modern knowledge categories (e.g. disciplines, subjects, KLAs, themes, topics, issues). The 4 New Basics are:-

Life pathways and social futuresWho am I and where am I going?

Living in and preparing for diverse family relationships Collaborating with peers and others Maintaining health and care of self Learning about and preparing for new worlds of work Developing initiative and enterprise

Multiliteracies and communications mediaHow do I make sense of and communicate with the world?

Blending traditional and new communications media Making creative judgments and engaging in performance Communicating using languages and intercultural understandings Mastering literacy and numeracy

Active citizenshipWhat are my rights and responsibilities in communities, cultures and economies?

Interacting within local and global communities Operating within shifting cultural identities Understanding local and global economic forces Understanding the historical foundation of social movements and civic

institutions

Environments and technologiesHow do I describe, analyse and shape the world around me?

Developing a scientific understanding of the world Working with design and engineering technologies Building and sustaining environments

Thus the New Basics categories capture various aspects of the person in the world: the individual—physically and mentally, at work and at play and as a meaning-

maker; the communicator—active and passive, persuading and being persuaded,

entertaining and being entertained, expressing ideas and emotions in words, numbers and pictures, creating and performing;

the group member—in the family, in social groups, government-related groups, and so on;

part of the physical world—of atoms and cells, electrons and chromosomes, animal, vegetable and mineral, observing, discovering, constructing and inventing.

As curriculum organisers, the New Basics aim to help schools, teachers and curriculum planners to move beyond a defense of status quo knowledges to a critical engagement with the ongoing change that characterises new times. The New Basics are predicated on the existence of mindful schools, where intellectual engagement and connectedness to the real world are persistent foci.

To enhance and facilitate such a focus the New Basics do not exist in isolation.

If the above curriculum were not associated with assessment built directly from these organisers, then their impact on classroom practice would be greatly diminished. In this sense we need to tie this curriculum to richer assessment tasks.

The New Basics are “transdisciplinary”; that is, they draw upon the discipline expertise of teachers and community members working collaboratively to ensure connectedness to the world and the way it works. This is essentially different from an interdisciplinary approach that expects teachers to be experts across a range of disciplines (or, sometimes, generalists specialising in none). The New Basics

Framework closely aligns the assessable work of the students to the curriculum developed through the use of Rich Tasks.

Rich Tasks

Rich Tasks are the outward and visible signs of student engagement with the New Basics curriculum framework. They are the assessable and reportable outcomes of a 3-year curriculum plan that prepares students for the challenges of life in new times. Performances on the tasks are then assessed and reported to parents and the system at the end of Years 3, 6 and 91.

This is a reconceptualisation of the notion of outcome as a demonstration or display of mastery; that is, students are to display their understandings, knowledges and skills through performance on transdisciplinary activities that have an obvious connection to the wide world. The idea is that preparation for a Rich Task involves very detailed discipline input from a range of teachers, often well before the task is carried out. The Rich Task then provides a real-world context within which to extend, bring together and display high-level knowledge of various disciplines. No single Rich Task is to be completed by one teacher alone or within the four walls of one classroom. Rather it is a collaborative effort that has an end-point with validity in terms of its connectedness to the wide world.

The Rich Tasks require students to solve problems, be critical and analytical thinkers and use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in a variety of contexts in a variety of ways. The Rich Tasks also require students to associate new learning with that which is already known, to have a clear statement of expectations and realise that their knowledge can be transferred to new situations.

Rich Tasks have been drafted by teachers, school administrators, academics and Education Queensland staff. They will be scrutinised by the trial schools. The short titles for the existing tasks are:

For Years 1-3 For Years 4-6 For Years 7-9Web page design Travel itineraries Science and ethics conferMultimedia presentation of an endangered plant or animal

Narrative text Improving wellbeing in the community

Physical fitness Personal health plan The built environment: designing a structure

Read and talk about stories A celebratory, festive or artistic event or performance

Australian national identity: influences and perspectives

Historical and social aspects of a craft

Oral histories and diverse and changing lifestyles

Personal career development plan

Design, make and display a product

Opinion making oracy

1 The complete set of Rich Tasks for Years 1–3, 4–6, and 7–9 is available at http://education.qld.gov.au/corporate/newbasics/html/trt.html

Space futures PI in the skyInternational trade

As can be seen from the exemplar below, the tasks provide the impetus for high-level curriculum planning and implementation while, at the same time, allowing teachers and students the freedom for expression of local cultures and contexts. The tasks are designed to be the hard-edged outcomes of three years of schooling. They make explicit the sorts of activities in which students are to have engaged. They invite teachers to use their imagination and expertise and to work collaboratively in designing learning experiences for their students. And they are the publicly accessible statements about the kinds of learnings that societies value and schools transmit.

A Rich Task is a culminating performance that is purposeful and models a life role. It presents real, substantive problems to solve and engages learners in forms of pragmatic social action that have genuine value in the world. Each task demands that students engage in solving particular problems of significance and relevance to their world, community, school or region. The problems require identification, analysis and resolution and require that students analyse, theorise and intellectually engage with that world. In this way, tasks have a connectedness to the world outside school.

Each task is presented in detail thus:

The task specifications are given as an annotated and embellished flowchart. The flowchart is complemented by a written synopsis of the task. This task

description appears in the upper centre of the flowchart under the task identifier. Text in the top left-hand corner gives the New Basics referents. Text in the bottom left-hand corner gives the targeted repertoires of practice (and

operational fields of knowledge). Text in the top right-hand corner gives ideas, hints and comments relating to how

the task might be woven into the curriculum plan and how students might be set up to undertake the task.

Text in the bottom right-hand corner gives the task parameters in order to clarify and enrich the Rich Task’s function.

Each task is accompanied by a statement of “desirable features”. These are the task-specific properties of student work that demonstrate achievement in the targeted repertoires of practice and other aspects signaled within the diagrammatic representation of the task. The desirable features, therefore, contribute to the determination of the grade awarded to the student for that task. They include statements outlining evidence of high-quality performance and for acceptable performance (i.e. successful task completion).

Productive Pedagogies

We now come to the heart of the matter: The New Basics Framework is essentially about pedagogy. Rich Tasks, when associated with the New Basics categories as curriculum organisers, are specifically designed to encourage and support pedagogical reform. But, in order to focus on pedagogy, teachers need the space to be able to extend and draw upon a range of teaching practices. Neither a narrow curriculum nor a crowded curriculum provides this space. In the first instance, teachers’ pedagogical options are limited to the scope of the curriculum and assessment whereas, in the second, the demands for coverage provide limited space for deep intellectual engagement with the curriculum.

For many years, teachers, teacher educators and researchers have searched for “correct” or universally effective approaches to teaching. Contenders have ranged from “focused instruction” to “constructivism” and “integrated teaching”. Yet generations of teachers see such approaches come and go with variable effects. If there is one thing that the researchers on teaching over the last three decades would agree upon it is this: Different approaches to pedagogy have variable effects on teaching different things to different groups of students. However self-evident and mundane this might sound, it is an insight of value to the New Basics Project.

The School Reform Longitudinal Study (SRLS) (Luke, Ladwig, Lingard, Hayes & Mills, 1998) coined the term “productive pedagogies” to describe the art of teaching as a broad repertoire of teacher strategies. The claim made in the New Basics Project is that teachers need an expanded and flexible array of strategies to employ in classroom teaching. They then need to be encouraged to make principled decisions about what strategies to deploy based on the curriculum to be taught and the backgrounds, styles, interests and capabilities of their students.

To complete the New Basics Framework triad, the New Basics defines pedagogical reform in terms of teachers’ engagement with Productive Pedagogies—the collection of 20 teaching strategies (see later), and organised around four broad domains:

intellectual engagement connectedness supportive classroom environment recognition of difference.

These four domains are considered (Luke et al., 1998) to be the necessary, but not on their own, sufficient conditions for Productive Pedagogies.Productive Pedagogies are classroom strategies that teachers can use to focus instruction and improve student outcomes. Of course, opportunities for professional development in these strategies need to be provided to support teachers’ work in different professional combinations and with different groupings of students. Some strategies are more suited for teaching certain knowledges and skills than are others. Therefore, when making use of Productive Pedagogies, teachers should:

consider and understand the backgrounds and preferred learning styles of their students;

identify repertoires of practice2 and operational fields of knowledge to be targeted;

evaluate their own array of teaching strategies and select and apply the appropriate ones.

The following table identifies the major strategies within Productive Pedagogies and also lists focus questions that provide a basis for dialogue.

Table 1. Heuristics on Categories of Productive Pedagogies

Strategy Focus questionsHigher-order thinking Are higher-order thinking and critical analysis occurring?Deep knowledge Does the lesson cover operational fields in any depth, detail

or level of specificity?Deep understanding Do the work and response of the students provide evidence

of depth of understanding of concepts or ideas?Substantive conversation

Does classroom talk break out of the initiation/response/evaluation pattern and lead to sustained dialogue between students, and between teachers and students?

Knowledge as problematic

Are students critiquing and second-guessing texts, ideas and knowledge?

Metalanguage Are aspects of language, grammar and technical vocabulary being foregrounded?

Knowledge integration Does the lesson range across diverse fields, disciplines and paradigms?

Background knowledge Is there an attempt to connect with students’ background knowledge?

2 The cognitive and cultural, social and linguistic skills that students need to develop.

Connectedness to the world

Do the lesson and the assigned work have any resemblance or connection to real-life contexts?

Problem-based curriculum

Is there a focus on identifying and solving intellectual and/or real-world problems?

Student direction Do students have any say in the pace, direction or outcomes of the lesson?

Social support Is the classroom a socially supportive and positive environment?

Academic engagement Are students engaged and on-task?Explicit quality performance criteria

Are the criteria for judging student performance made explicit?

Self-regulation Is the direction of student behavior implicit and self-regulatory or explicit?

Cultural knowledges Are diverse cultural knowledges brought into play?Inclusivity Are deliberate attempts made to increase the participation

of students of different backgrounds?Narrative Is the style of teaching principally narrative, or is it

expository?Group identity Does the teaching build a sense of community and identity?Active citizenship Are attempts made to foster active citizenship?

Source: School Reform Longitudinal Study (SRLS) Report, October 1999, p. 10

It has become clear that “dumbing down” (McGaw, 1996) is essentially a pedagogy issue. As has been stated, unless there is a clear systemic focus on broadening the array of pedagogical practices then the scope and intellectual depth of the curriculum can only be dealt with superficially. Likewise, serious pedagogical reform can only be achieved if teachers have space to uncrowd the curriculum so that students study fewer things but in much greater depth. Within the New Basics Framework this is achieved through fewer but more connected curriculum organisers and fewer but deeper outcomes. This is why none of components of the New Basics are stand-alone. They are part of an interlocking triad of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. In the New Basics one of them cannot exist without the other two.

New Basics

Rich Tasks Productive Pedagogies

Implications for school organisation

Two fundamental principles of the New Basics Framework are impacting on school organisation in different ways in different schools. First, in schools using a New Basics curriculum framework, students can only complete their work by venturing into the world outside the school environment.

Second, teachers need to work collaboratively, across disciplines, to achieve the desired outcomes for students. Many schools already encourage teachers to do this others are just beginning the process of developing Teacher Professional Learning Communities to assist with professional development and professional support (Education Queensland, 2000a).

This agenda is a courageous attempt to focus on education futures, new citizenships and to up the bar intellectually for all students whilst facilitating a reinvigorated professional accountability and understanding. It provides a powerful linking mechanism to integrate the three message systems of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

REFERENCES

Bernstein, B. (1990). The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Routlege & Kegan Paul.

Education Queensland. (2000).Queensland State Education 2010. Brisbane: Author.

Education Queensland. (2000a). New Basics Project Technical Paper. Brisbane: Author

McGaw, B. (1996). Their Future Options for Reform of the Higher School Certificate. Sydney: NSW Department of Training & Education Coordination.

Hall, S., & Jacques, M. (1990). The Meaning of New Times. New Times: the changing face of politics in the 1990s. New York: Verso.

Herschell, P., & Luxton, P. (2000, March). A Curriculum for the Future. QTU Professional Magazine. Supplement to the Queensland Teachers’ Union Journal, 2–7.

Luke, A., Ladwig, J., Lingard, B., Hayes, D., & Mills, M. (1998). School Reform Longitudinal Study (SRLS). St Lucia: The University of Queensland.

NB. This paper was presented by Ezette Grauf of the New Basics Branch, Education Queensland. It draws upon the many publications of the Branch and therefore also contains the work of Ray Barrett, Kirran Follers, Neville Grace, Ken Gray, Paul Herschell, Ray Land, Allan Luke, John Martin and Gabrielle Matters.

Ezette GraufNew Basics BranchEducation Queensland