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Introduction
Our New Connect with Maths Community - Engaging All Students
This new Connect with Maths online professional learning community focusses on personalised and differentiated learning. The Engaging All Students community is an umbrella community which shares ideas about pedagogies to challenge students for deep learning and caters for the diversity of students who come from different backgrounds and learning experiences. We all know that within one class of students the range of skills and mathematical understanding can vary. The challenges that students face in learning are matched by those facing teachers in their efforts to plan and design curriculum that can provide extension and support for all learners in the classroom.
This community is a network for teachers to support each other in developing challenging mathematics curriculum and strategies for all students - who include
- English as an added language or dialect students
- High achievers and gifted students
- Students who have special needs and
- Students at risk in keeping up with their learning
The Australian Curriculum
The Australian Curriculum promotes equity and high quality teaching for all students. We want our students to appreciate the value and usefulness of mathematics, and to be confident and intrinsic users of mathematics in their lives. This community calls upon teachers who have an interest in this area of professional engagement.
Important drivers of the Engaging All Students community:
1) The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA, 2008) (Melbourne Declaration) provides the policy framework for the Australian Curriculum.
It includes two goals:
Goal 1: Australian schooling promotes equity and excellence.
Goal 2: All young Australians become successful learners, confident and creative individuals and active and informed citizens.
The way in which the Australian Curriculum has been designed to address these goals is detailed in The Shape of the Australian Curriculum Version 3 (ACARA, 2012). The propositions that shape the development of the Australian Curriculum establish expectations that the Australian Curriculum is appropriate for all students. These propositions include that:
- each student can learn and the needs of every student are important
- each student is entitled to knowledge, understanding and skills
- these provide a foundation for successful and lifelong learning and participation in the Australian community
- high expectations should be set for each student while teachers take into account the current level of learning of individual students and the different rates at which students develop
- the needs and interests of students will vary, and schools and teachers will plan from the curriculum in ways that respond to those needs and interests.
The Melbourne Declaration emphasises the importance of knowledge, understanding and skills from each learning area, general capabilities and cross-curriculum priorities as the basis for a curriculum designed to support 21st-century learning.
The Australian Curriculum is formed by these three dimensions, and it is the relationship between these dimensions that provides flexibility for schools and teachers to ‘promote personalised learning that aims to fulfil the diverse capabilities of each young Australian’ (MCEETYA, 2008, p.7).
2) Australian Curriculum Assessment Reporting Authority (ACARA) Student Diversity and the Australian Curriculum
This document identifies the students who come from different background and learning experiences, providing a guide for teachers to consider teaching and learning strategies that will bring out the best in student learning.
