Professional Learning

Pedagogy

The following provides a range of pedagogical approaches which can be used in all Arts lessons. 

Bloom's taxonomy organises thinking skills into six levels, from the most basic to the more complex levels of thinking. Learning at the higher levels (eg mental abstraction) is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels (eg recall and fact recognition).  

Blooms Digital Taxonomy (devised by Andrew Churches) focuses on using digital tools and technology through a ‘power verbs’ lens.  This taxonomy can be used for a range of purposes including, curriculum mapping, lesson planning and formative and summative assessment.

SOLO taxonomy aims to capture the quality of a student's learning rather than levels of thinking, as with Bloom's taxonomy. Judgement about the quality of a student’s learning is made on the assumption that a student’s responses show increasing complexity as a student learns more.

Design Thinking is a creative and innovative problem solving approach that can be used to address a range of challenges and problems schools, educators, students and communities identify. There are a number of stages involved, starting with prototyping ideas, that participants follow to iterate ideas and design solutions to solve the identified problem.

Project Zero – Harvard Graduate School of Education

Visible Thinking is a flexible and systematic research-based approach to integrating the development of students' thinking with content learning across subject matters. Visible Thinking has a double goal: to cultivate students' thinking skills and dispositions, and to deepen content learning.

Artful Thinking Project helps teachers use works of visual art and music in ways that strengthen student thinking and learning in the arts and beyond. The artist's palette is presented as a central metaphor and comprises six thinking dispositions which strengthen students' intellectual behaviour. These dispositions are developed through Visible Thinking Routines (as above), which are easy to learn and can deepen students' thinking in the classroom.

The 8 Cultural Forces that Define Our Classrooms is a framework developed through Harvard’s Project Zero, outlining eight different ‘forces’ that all educators should consider when designing learning experiences and interacting with studentsLevel 6 – Years 9 and 10

Assessment

A selection of assessment frameworks, resources and methods are available when considering student assessment of skills and content.  

Graphic organisers for assessment includes a description and explanation of how, why and when each should be used. Some examples of how schools have successfully used a graphic organiser in the classroom are provided. 

Assessment strategies are collected in a Scoop.it curation of resources and articles on assessment strategies for teaching and learning across a range of contexts.

Teachers guide to assessment is designed to develop teachers' understanding about assessment and to support teachers to ensure they are using the best expertise in their assessment practice.

Types of Assessment – (Sydney Uni) provides a succinct one-page outline of different assessment practices.