High impact practices for designing a quality local curriculum
Using the high impact practices to design and review your local curriculum
This guide focuses on the key elements of designing and reviewing your local curriculum. It can also be used for ongoing review.
You can use it to lead conversations with:
It contains guidance, review questions, activities, examples, and resources that will help to enable good decision making as you design and review your local curriculum. The start of the year is a good time to begin conversations with your staff that can continue throughout the year.
The guide series is part of a package, including workshops and tools that will support schools to develop and review local curriculum.
Email [email protected] or contact your local Ministry of Education office for further support and information.
Download the guide (PDF)
Leading Local Curriculum Guide – Local curriculum (PDF, 858 KB)
Ko te manu e kai ana i te miro, nōna te ngahere Ko te manu e kai ana i te mātauranga, nōna te ao.
The bird that partakes of the miro berry owns the forest; the bird that partakes of education owns the world.
The New Zealand Curriculum is a clear statement of what we deem important in education. It takes as its starting point a vision of our young people as lifelong learners who are confident and creative, connected, and actively involved and includes a clear set of principles on which to base curriculum decision making.
See schematic view of the New Zealand Curriculum document.
Your local curriculum is the way that you bring The New Zealand Curriculum to life at your school. It should:
It’s your school and it’s your curriculum
It’s an ongoing process
A school’s curriculum is likely to be well designed when:
“You can’t just pick up what another schools’s done. There’s no recipe. What you might do will be different to us because of your community, your students, your location. The process of giving effect to the national curriculum is about making it work in your school.”
Principal
“The best thing we did was not say, “We’re finished”, as different aspects of practice were reviewed. Staff now see constantly evolving approaches as a hallmark of educational practice.”
Associate Principal
It can be difficult to know where to focus your attention when designing or reviewing your local curriculum.
These four high impact practices, taken from the Local Curriculum Design Toolkit, give you some ways to strengthen your local curriculum.
We will now explore the high impact practices in more detail – Enabling relationships for learning, Building coherent pathways, and Providing rich opportunities for learning.
For more information on "Strengthening collaborative inquiry", please see the Local Curriculum Design Toolkit.
Your local curriculum needs to reflect the intentions of The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). The NZC vision, principles, values, key competencies, and learning areas need to be expressed in your local curriculum in ways that build on the strengths and meet the aspirations of your learners, their families and whānau.
Review the ways your local curriculum plan integrates The New Zealand Curriculum and creates rich opportunities for all of your students. Look out for:
Example of integrating a local curriculum with the NZC
ERO – Focusing on the school's and national curriculum priorities
Leaders and teachers at Oratia School carefully integrated all parts of The New Zealand Curriculum with their own local values, while prioritising the principles or key competencies that delivered the most benefit to their children. From Keeping children engaged and achieving through rich curriculum inquiries (ERO, 2018)
To enable relationships for learning across the community, it is important to seek input from students, parents, whānau, iwi and hapū as you shape your local curriculum. This ensures that the interests and needs of learners, the values and aspirations of parents and whānau, and the ideas and resources of the wider community influence decision-making around teaching and learning. One way to start is to review the relationships you have and identify which ones are critical to the success of your local curriculum.
Use colour-coded flags or markers to identify different types of resources within your community.
Example of how school staff reflect their vision and work with community resources
Te Akau ki Papamoa School – Cultural inclusiveness
Staff at Te Akau ki Papamoa School place a strong emphasis on relationships between whānau, learners, staff, and their community. Their vision of "leading me to lead my learning" challenges students to take responsibility for their lifelong learning journey. Meanwhile, a philosophy of "know me before you teach me" inspires teachers to create a positive learning environment where all learners can celebrate success. The vision statement of Te Akau ki Papamoa School is illustrated in a mural that strongly reflects the school’s value of te reo Māori and tikanga Māori.
A local curriculum can enrich learning opportunities by ensuring coherence and continuity of progress for ākonga, both over the years and across settings, preparing them for lifelong learning. It can be used to describe the most important learning your community believes is too important to leave to chance, and can specify what this learning looks like at critical points.
Teachers can use the description of the most important learning to design rich opportunities for students to develop their conceptual understandings, competencies, and skills.
What’s valued by communities is often described in school visions. Using a school vision to identify the most important learning is one way to guide the development of a coherent pathway.
What could it look like for different year levels and/or learning area groups?
Example looking at monitoring children’s development in the key competencies to better understand progression
Monitoring the key competencies at Sylvia Park School
Leaders and teachers at Sylvia Park School looked at the ways they were monitoring the key competencies and understanding student progression – trying different strategies until they found a right fit for their students. This example prompts questions to reflect on such as "How could you involve your students when assessing key competencies?"
In order to provide your students with rich opportunities for learning, you need to know your learners – their strengths, identities, needs, and aspirations. This involves finding out as much as you can about them, listening to their voices and consulting with their parents and whānau. Once you know your learners you can then begin a deeper inquiry into the rich learning opportunities you are providing and possible areas for change.
At the beginning of a school year teachers often talk with students and their whānau about their goals, interests, and aspirations. Use that feedback in groups to discuss what you know about your students’ interests and aspirations. Make sure there’s enough information about all of your students and whether there are ways you can find out more about what their interests and ambitions are.
Example of how Papatoetoe North School designed a curriculum that connects their students’ lives
ERO – Using a spiral curriculum to build on children's prior knowledge
Leaders, teachers, and parents at Papatoetoe North School have designed a responsive curriculum that connects to students’ lives and builds on their prior understandings, cultural identities, and out-of-school experiences. From Keeping children engaged and achieving through rich curriculum inquiries (ERO, 2018)
Published on: 27 Nov 2019
