(Duration: 4 minutes 25 seconds)

[Music]

Christie

The impact of teaching the new curriculum in K-2 has been absolutely amazing to see the growth in all of the students and how being taught conceptually has really enabled them to be able to transfer their learning and knowledge across all of the KLAs.

Cheryl

I could see that my Year 1 students were just learning so fast, I couldn't keep up with how quickly they were acquiring new sounds and learning to blend them in their reading.

Justine

They became more engaged with their actual activity and they developed the confidence that if they made a mistake, that was okay, and their stamina is amazing.

Christie

Here at Rollands Plains, we engaged in research provided by the department from the research toolkits. We also used the teaching advice embedded in the new digital syllabus to really get a deep understanding of what we were teaching, so that we could implement that in our classroom.

Megan

Using the syllabus and understanding the content and the research behind the content in the syllabus has really worked with our team, because we wanted them to have a solid understanding of what they were teaching, but also why they were teaching those units.

Christie

Make sure that you contextualise the resources from the Universal Resources Hub, so that it fits in to get the best you can for the students in your school.

Katie

In our school, we ensured we had regular checking points to see how the implementation was going, and of course, correcting as needed to make sure that we were staying true to the syllabus, but also catering to the needs of each of our students.

Christie

We used the syllabus, the syllabus tags, and the advice to really plan specifically and explicitly for every student.

Megan

Working with the whole school in implementing the syllabus and the units has been beneficial. Even though the syllabus are only K-2 documents at the moment, we understand that these syllabus documents have a strong foundation for early literacy and numeracy skills, so we wanted all of our staff to have that background knowledge.

Natalie

Another useful strategy was that our APC&I team worked with our support team and they were upskilled and on board with what we were doing, so it was very easy for us to rely on them when we needed support with our decodables, they were able to help implement our phonics lessons with their group that they would take out as well, so it was very useful for us to have them all on board.

Corrie

Collaborating was really essential, so my APC&I created a teams drive, which we used with the other early adopter schools, we collaborated shared resources, spoke about what worked and what didn't work.

Katie

The most important thing that I would suggest is to give your staff time, the time to implement this slowly at a sensible pace, but time to work together and collaborate with either in schools or across schools.

Cheryl

Making time to reflect is really important if it's gonna be implemented with success, so having chance to take work samples and sit together and look at them as a team and reflect on what worked and what didn't, being prepared to say that sometimes, "Well, that didn't work, that's okay." I maybe was the limit on what was happening before, because I didn't realise how far they could fly by trying a different emphasis, a different approach.

Alyson

Everything that we've noticed is just a complete change from the start of the year, and it took a little bit of time, but trusting in the process, trusting in all of the focus areas of the new curriculum, they work and it's what the kids need.

Natalie

So the expectations that we initially thought were so high, the kids got, and they met their learning goals and they surprised all of us in the end.

[End of transcript.]

The department would like to acknowledge and thank staff at Rollands Plains Upper and Blacktown West Public School for their participation in this video.