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102086 Designing Teaching and Learning Assignment 1

Introduction

Demirkasimaglu (2010, p.4050) states that teachers need to be “good at their job, fulfil
standards and achieve excellence”, these include all three of the key teaching and learning
foundation concepts within education, which are curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. Each of
these foundation concepts are interrelated and rely on each other to achieve the highest quality of
teaching and learning. In this essay I will be defining and exploring each of these terms, along with
teacher professionalism, in context and evaluating the importance of each component within
education and discussing how these concepts interrelate when addressing the specific needs of
gifted and talented students.

Teacher Professionalism

The definition of ‘teacher professionalism’ constantly changes “as a response to external

pressures, public discourses and scientific development” (Demirkasimaglu, 2010, p.2048).
Professionalism has been described as being “an activity for which one is paid as opposed to doing
voluntarily” (Demirkasimaglu, 2010, p.2048), however, it is also associated with the amount of
success that an individual achieves throughout that occupation (Demirkasimaglu, 2010) and has also
been defined as a semi-profession, “an occupation with some characteristics of bourgeois
professions but is less privileged and not self-regulatory” (Connell, 2013). The teaching profession is
often misunderstood and a very complex occupation, which comes with a few discourses from
society, for instance, teachers have an easy job because they work less hours a week and get three
times more holidays per year than the average occupation (Connell, 2013). Although these are facts,
they are severely misinformed. Teachers work significantly hard outside of the classroom with lesson
planning, modifying lesson plans to accommodate the diversity of students, marking exams and
assignments, and not to mention working on their own professional development (Connell, 2013).
During school hours’ teachers are not only looking after all students wellbeing but they are also
trying to deliver the content of their subject while trying to build positive relationships with the
students (Connell, 2013). Teachers have other various roles throughout the school which include
playground duties, keeping records, liaison with other teachers, parent teacher interviews,
discipline, organising excursions with external and internal agencies and organising and supervising
extracurricular activities and being year advisor, just to name a few (Connell, 2013; Demirkasimaglu,
2010). Admittedly, not every teacher does all of these things at one time, but majority of these jobs
will be completed throughout the week, term or year. Teachers have certain standards that they
need to adhere to, these seven standards are referred to as the Australian Professional Standards
for Teachers (APST) and were developed by the Australian Institute for Teaching and School
Leadership (AITSL). These standards involve:
1. Knowing students and how they learn,
2. Knowing the content and how to teach it,
3. Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning,
4. Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments,
5. Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning,
6. Engage in professional learning, and
7. Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community.
And are vital within the teaching profession (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership,
2011).

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Curriculum

The word curriculum has various meanings and can be interpreted in many ways depending
on the context. Curriculum in the educational aspect can be interpreted as the content or knowledge
that students should know in order to function within society (Egan, 1978). Curriculum often gets
interchanged with the word syllabus in education, however, syllabus refers to the content or topics
covered in a particular unit, whereas, curriculum refers to the overall content taught in an
educational setting (Egan, 1978; Connell, 2013). Australia has two sets of curriculums that need to
be addressed in schools, the first is the National curriculum which is developed by the Australian
Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) and the state curriculum, more specifically
syllabus, which varies between states, however, in New South Wales the state curriculum is
determined by the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA). The curriculum is based on the
scaffolding method where each consecutive year students ‘build’ on the content and knowledge that
they learned from the previous years (Alcorn & Thrupp, 2012), forming a scaffold of information. The
Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (2012) stated that:

The National Curriculum development work is guided by the Melbourne

Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians and that the

Melbourne Declaration emphasises the importance of knowledge, skills and

understanding of learning areas, general capabilities and cross-curriculum

priorities as the basis for a curriculum designed to support twenty-first

century learning. (p.4)

The National Curriculum has clear instructions about what is to be taught in schools, which
includes the cross-curriculum studies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures,
Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia and Sustainability and the “quality of learning expected of
students” across the different year groups (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting
Authority, 2012, p.8). The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (2012)
designed the National Curriculum to be flexible enough to accommodate the diversity amongst
students and teachers within schools and sets “high expectations and standards that are challenging
yet realistic” (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2012, p.8).

Pedagogy

Pedagogy refers to the way that content, the curriculum and syllabus, is taught or delivered to
students (Gore, 2007). Freire (2009) demonstrates that there is a ‘banking’ concept within
education, meaning that teachers deposit knowledge into the students’ brains and they simply have
to regurgitate the information back to the teachers. This pedagogy method does not work in
education today, it merely “alienates students and deprives them of connection and significance”
(Freire, 2009). There is no specific way to teach particular content to students, it is a trial and error
process, however, for pedagogy to be effective, it needs to be related to the Quality Teaching Model
(Gore, 2007). This method has three dimensions, each with six components:

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1. Intellectual Quality- which involves deep knowledge and understanding, critical thinking,
problematic knowledge, metalanguage and substantive communication.
2. Quality Learning Environment- which consists of student engagement and direction,
expectations, social support, student self-regulation and explicit quality criteria.
3. Significance- which includes background and cultural knowledge, inclusivity, connectedness,
narrative and knowledge integration.

Incorporating all of the components from the quality teaching model into every lesson is
difficult, although it is possible to incorporate majority of them each lesson and these will improve
the quality of teaching and learning being taught within education (Gore, 2007). By using the Quality
Teaching Model, teachers should attempt to make the content as relevant as possible to the
students, as every student learns at different rates and may have a preference of how to receive
information, therefore content should be delivered through multiple medias where possible to
accommodate the students’ diversity and learning needs.

Assessment

Assessments, whether exams or assignments, are not only a way to test the knowledge
retained by students but also a way that teachers can assess whether their pedagogical practices are
useful or not (Gore, 2007; Ford, 2013). Assessments can be a stressful experience for some students
therefore teacher have a responsibility to encourage and support students leading up to these tasks
in order for students to achieve well. Poor performance during exams has been linked to tests being
“culturally inappropriate” and seen to be “conceptually and linguistically foreign”, thus making them
difficult for ethnic minority students to interpret (Ford, 2013, p.81). Another contributing factor to
poor academic achievement would be low morale amongst students and teachers, due to low
quality teaching, dominant discourses such as academic achievement based on socioeconomic
status and student boredom within the classroom (Gore, 2007). Not only are there exams and
assignments within school to test students’ abilities but there are also national exams which
students must undertake. The most common exam is the National Assessment Program Literacy and
Numeracy (NAPLAN) test, which as the title states, examines the literacy and numeracy levels of
students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. NAPLAN was developed by ACARA to provide a snapshot of a
student's current reading, writing, language and numeracy skills at that point in their schooling,
however, NAPLAN has been turned into a competition and is believed to have “increased
competitive pressures between schools”, raising the national standard of results (Connell, 2013,
p.265). These sorts of competitions put tremendous pressure on students to achieve high results,
thus resulting in health issues like anxiety and depression. The Ramirez & Beilock (2011) study found
that the more a student worries or stresses about an exam, the student would perform poorly and
that the results that those students were achieving were not accurately demonstrating their
knowledge and understanding of the content. This study concluded that students who wrote their
feelings and emotions down before the exam had improved exam results than when they bottled
their feelings (Ramirez & Beilock, 2011). Writing reflections before exams could be a strategy to use
to help lower student anxiety before exams, and also improving teaching pedagogical practices and
engaging and challenging students within the classroom will also result in higher academic
achievement.

Gifted and Talented Students

Gifted and talented varies so much in meaning that some people see gifted and talented
students as extraordinary people like Da Vinci or Mozart or as someone with an IQ score of 130+,
although these are simple and easy ways to determine if some is gifted or talented, they are also
limiting in the fact that they only test certain aspects of someone’s ability (Goodhew, 2009;

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Manning, 2006). Goodhew (2009) demonstrates that any student with an above average ability has
potential to become a gifted and talented student with allowance from their environment. This is
demonstrated in Gagné’s Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (2003), where students are
deemed gifted and talented if they possess above average ability in one or more of the following
categories- intellectual, creative, social and physical, however, these are influenced by the
“opportunities and stimuli provided by the teacher”, hence the importance of pedagogy (Goodhew,
2009, p.2). There are many discourses that come with gifted and talented students for example, they
will always perform well in tests, they start their giftedness at a young age and they perform
exceptionally well in every subject but these are inaccurate (Goodhew, 2009). Gifted and talented
students may perform well in one subject area or even a component in a subject area, they may not
do well in tests because they have interpreted the question differently than what was required and
students may not experience their area of giftedness until a later age (Goodhew, 2009). There are
ways to determine which students classify as gifted and talented and these are through specific
“characteristics in the cognitive and affective domains which most commonly appear in general
classroom behavior and, therefore, may be observed by the classroom teacher” (Manning, 2006,
p.66). These characteristics may include, but are not limited to, preferring to work alone or when
working in groups displays leadership, ability to think critically and problem solving skills,
perfectionism and high standards of themselves and others, prefer complex or challenging work,
may want extra work on that topic and creativeness (Manning, 2006; Goodhew, 2009).

Gifted and talented students have quite diverse needs when it comes to education and
learning, according to the National Curriculum, teachers can maximise their learning potential by
adjusting the content so that it is “more complex, abstract or varied or it may need to be organised
differently”, focusing the learning on higher-order thinking, problem solving, and critical and creative
thinking and by ensuring that the content is based on real experiences and problems rather than
copying content (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, n.d). Teachers must
also adapt their learning environments to “ensure that it is complex and abstract, and also
encourages independence and intrinsic learning” (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting
Authority, n.d). Examples of these would be using more sophisticated vocabulary in questions,
allowing them to go more in depth with topics and giving them research questions relating to said
topic or even allowing them to help or guide other students during class time. Gifted and talented
students need to constantly be challenged and encouraged to think critically to maintain their
giftedness or they will become bored and disruptive to the other students, therefore as a teacher, it
is their responsibility to ensure that these students are being stimulated and challenged (Goodhew,
2009). If the needs of gifted and talented students are not being met there will be a decrease in
concentration and productivity which will reflect in poor academic results during assessments.
According to the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers, understanding how students learn
and meeting the specific requirements of the students across the full range of abilities, knowing how
to deliver the content through effective pedagogy, using various medias to convey the content to
students and setting high expectations for these gifted students and personalized learning are ways
that teachers can assist the gifted and talented students in their classroom (Australian Institute for
Teaching and School Leadership (2011).

Conclusion

As previously stated, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment are all interrelated and rely on
each other to achieve the highest quality of teaching and learning. If teachers do not understand the
content (curriculum) and/or do not know how to deliver the content adequately and effectively
(pedagogy) there will be an obvious decline in student academic performance (assessment),
therefore, it is the teachers responsibility to ensure that all of these concepts and the diverse needs
of students are being met within the classroom.

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Reference List

Alcorn, N., Thrupp, M. (2012). Uncovering meanings: The discourses of New Zealand secondary
teachers in context. New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, 47(1), 107-121.

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (n.d). Gifted and Talented Students.
Retrieved from http://www.australiancurriculum.edu.au/studentdiversity/gifted-and-
talented-students

Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority. (2012, April). Curriculum Development
Process. Version 6. Retrieved from
https://acaraweb.blob.core.windows.net/resources/ACARA_Curriculum_Development_Proces
s_Version_6.0_-_04_April_2012_-_FINAL_COPY.pdf

Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (2011, February). Australian Professional
Standards for Teachers. Retrieved from http://www.aitsl.edu.au/docs/default-source/apst-
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Demirkasimaglu, N. (2010). Defining “Teacher Professionalism” from different perspectives. Procedia

Social and Behavioural Sciences, 9, 2047-2051.

Connell, R. (2013). Teachers. In R. Connell (Ed.), Education, change and society (3rd ed., pp. 261-
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Egan, K. (1978). What is curriculum? Curriculum Inquiry, 8(1), 65-72. doi:

10.1080/03626784.1978.11075558

Ford, M. (2013). Achievement gaps in Australia: What NAPLAN reveals about education inequality in
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Gagné, F., 2003, Transforming gifts into talents: e DMGT as a developmental theory. In N. Colangelo
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Goodhew, G. (2009). Meeting the Needs of Gifted and Talented Students. London: Bloomsbury
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Gore, J. (2007). Improving pedagogy: The challenges of moving teachers toward higher levels of
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Manning, S. (2006). Recognizing Gifted Students: A Practical Guide for Teachers. KAPPA DELTA PI
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Ramirez, G., & Beilock, S. (2011). Writing About Testing Worries Boosts Exam Performance in the
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