Pre-planning
Jess's final solution – see workbook
Annie and Jo had both become concerned that Technology teaching, especially in the senior school in their schools, had become too driven by the needs of the assessment system rather than the learning needs of their students. Much student practice appeared to be a contrived exercise in disjointed 'hoop jumping' that did little to encourage real understanding or appreciation of the technological process.
The 'Tell us what we are making' approach, as Annie describes it, had several drawbacks: "There was no real understanding of the links between key factors and specifications, as there was not a lot of time to explore issues in any real depth. Students were being asked to identify needs and opportunities without the necessary foundation knowledge."
Students seemed to have little idea of how to go about locating stakeholders and working with them to achieve the best possible results. Solutions were often produced that had only a tenuous connection with the initial issue. This meant that the student practice was frequently misaligned with needs of stakeholders.
Jo and Annie both believe learning cannot be forced, but should occur through a process of "doing, experimenting and evaluating". They wanted the acquisition of technological skill and knowledge to be a natural result of good technological practice so that students discovered things for themselves, rather than through formal lessons where students were hampered by a lack of context or experience.
Despite the different focus of their teaching – Annie's main teaching area is Materials Technology and Jo's is Food Technology – they reasoned they could combine their experience and ideas to design a generic unit that that would address their common concerns. The differences in teaching focus are less important than the underlying pedagogy, technological practice and philosophy, Jo and Annie say. "We are teaching a process."
Jo and Annie planned the unit so that a predetermined set of learning outcomes would reveal themselves naturally as a result of student activity, as would the evidence required for assessment. The challenge was to identify the knowledge and skills students needed, and to build these into the structure of the unit as learning objectives. Jo and Annie then planned a series of activities that aligned with their desired learning outcomes.
After planning the unit, they overlaid the learning outcomes (brief development, ODE, and PP) and identified the assessment evidence required. As a result, says Jo, the requirements of the achievement standards were there "without having to drag them out".
Annie and Jo wanted to structure their unit so it provided a lot of broad knowledge and experience up-front. By doing this they hoped to improve student understanding of technological practice by slowing what they saw as the usual rush to define project briefs.
"We felt that often there was no real understanding of the links between key factors and specifications as there wasn't a lot of time to explore issues," says Annie. "Students were being asked to find needs and opportunities without the necessary knowledge."
Their aim was to have students moving from a wide range of introductory experiences through to a focus on the development of a specific project brief. They figured the wide front end of the unit should consist of a broad, but relevant, range of activities, including trips to local industries and school visits by local experts.
Carefully planned learning experiences with a broad group of activities are a good way to begin a unit, Annie says. This is because under the conventional approach students often didn't have the appropriate experiences to know what to research. They could not see the relevance or see how things fitted in with their own practice. Offering a broad range of activities up-front serves to widen students' experience of their own backyards and increase the stock of experience they could call on as their projects progressed.
Jo and Annie figured that like any other teaching challenge, an important key to making the unit a success would be to make it engaging. And the key to doing that, they believed, was to set the unit in an authentic rather than contrived context, and one to which students could relate. After discussing a range of possibilities, including the agriculture and horticultural industries, Jo and Annie decided to set the unit in the context of the local tourism industry. Tourism is a major contributor to the local economy and is a big employer both directly and indirectly in the region.
The unit is based around the concept of 'memory catchers' – mementos of time and place and people. Because they range from simple souvenirs (a pebble lifted from a beach) to the more complex (food and beverage and art and craft), 'memory catchers' as a concept is ripe with possibilities for both Materials and Food Technology projects.
Both Annie and Jo provided a course overview at the beginning of the year and planned checkpoints along the way for self-assessment and time management purposes. They agreed that time is an essential part of the learning process, "ideas have to steep for a while and this needs to be planned for," they say.
The two teachers took slightly different approaches to delivery of the unit, reflecting their differences in teaching styles.
