Page 12 - Journal 2018A

I buy into arguments like these. They have been my professional guidance for over
a decade and are among the reasons for wanting my current job at the SACE Board. I have no doubt they align with all South
Australian teachers’ moral and professional purpose.
Leading South Australian educators have already started to map a pathway to the
kind of future that visionaries such as James Martin described. Their focus on student agency, critical and creative thinking, and metacognition demonstrate a belief that our students can be part of the ’revolutionary change’. Events like the International Astronautical Congress inspire students to engage in the agenda and see themselves as participants. These events also serve
to challenge educators to make sure that students will be ready to make the most of emerging opportunities in space industries, cybersecurity, arti cial intelligence, and whatever comes next. Completion of the SACE should position every student as an active architect of the bigger picture, although it seems that the pragmatism of maximising their ATAR can get in the way of this for some.
Science curricula and assessment processes create the framework for developing students’ conceptual understanding and adaptive reasoning.
“High-quality assessment processes should reveal students’ competence in deploying their knowledge and expertise to deal with unrehearsed situations.”
Teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and know how, and relationships with their students bring this to life, and in doing so shape each student’s intellectual identity and disposition towards science.
“There are many ways through which we might innovate
in science education. That
does not mean change for its own sake, but innovation as something that is (a) new, (b) valuable, and (c) can be put into practice.”
At the SACE Board, we play our part by developing science curricula and assessment practices that bring closer the vision
and optimism of thinkers like Martin, the opportunities revealed by future-focused events like the International Astronautical Congress, and the promise of your students.
“The ‘Science as a Human Endeavour’ task in our renewed science curricula is intended to assess students’ understanding of how science connects
to societal issues, and how science can effect change. Similarly, the Research Project was originally designed so
that students could explore possibilities in a new era of creativity.
In the future, I would like to see more transfer questions in our assessment. Such questions would demand that students can respond to unrehearsed situations. Assessments such
as these will give employers, universities, teachers, and the students themselves con dence that students can take their learning out of the classroom and use it in all kinds of creative ways. These changes cause discomfort but it would be remiss of us not to make them. After all, standing still as the world moves on is the same as going backwards.
Can we further improve our curricula and assessment, and the way they are put into practice? Of course we can! This is our joint challenge and I look forward to working with you to make James Martin’s predictions about our students come true.
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