Background
Interviewing guest speakers
St Michael's is a primary school in Christchurch's city centre of with a roll of around 200. The school is divided into three syndicates - Junior (Year 0-3), Middle (Year 4-6), and Senior (Year 7-8), with one class for each year. The school doesn't have a designated Technology department and senior students have two hours of Technology education each week at the Christchurch East Technology Centre. The Junior and Middle syndicates are taught Technology units within their class/syndicate programmes alongside other curriculum activities.
Jo Clarke is the Year 4 classroom teacher at St Michael's and has over 20 years' teaching experience. Jo was a member of the Beacon Practice project, which she feels gave her invaluable insight into ways of implementing the Technology curriculum, allowing her to "introduce a new way of teaching Technology at St Michael's".
Jo came to St Michael's two years ago to a Technology teaching environment based around the old curriculum guidelines. Jo looked at an existing unit on sandwiches and decided to expand it in scale and scope to form a new 'Food to Go' unit for term 2. She knew that this unit would be a new step for the school, and a major shift for Elspeth Godfrey-Chatterton (Year 5) and Jon Russell (Year 6), the two other teachers she worked with on the project who form the Middle syndicate.
