Earlier this term, MPF supported lead teachers Frankie Curtis and Jodie Hollands from Mornington Park Primary School, and Nic Esler MPF's Primary School Improvement Co-ordinator to attend researchED Canberra at the University of Canberra.
researchED is a teacher-led organisation that brings together teachers and researchers to bridge the gap between research and practice.
Nic says, "While the conference itself was incredibly valuable, so was the opportunity to go away and learn together. Some of the best conversations happened between sessions, over coffee and on the way home from the conference, pulling apart what we'd heard, questioning things and making connections to the work happening back on the Peninsula."
Nic provided the following reflection:
"Given the curriculum thinking happening at Mornington Park and the broader curriculum work I've been exploring for MPF, it probably wasn't surprising that curriculum became the thread running through much of our day.
Across sessions on the science of learning, curriculum design, fluency, implementation and writing, I kept coming back to the same question: how much are we asking individual teachers and schools to build for themselves?
We know much more now about how students learn and what effective instruction looks like. We also have access to some increasingly strong curriculum materials. But turning broad curriculum standards into a coherent sequence of what students will learn, when they will learn it, which texts and examples will build that knowledge, how it will connect across subjects and year levels, and how learning will be assessed is an enormous job.
One message from the conference that particularly stayed with me was that coherence doesn't have to mean rigidity. A strong curriculum can provide teachers with the architecture: carefully sequenced knowledge, rich texts, vocabulary, explicit instruction, opportunities for retrieval and practice, without turning teaching into following a script.
What was particularly valuable was being able to explore those ideas alongside Frankie and Jodie rather than bringing them home and trying to explain them afterwards. We could immediately ask: What might this mean at Mornington Park? What are we already doing? What could we do differently? What feels manageable?
That became quite tangible after the conference when Frankie and I sat down together and properly explored the OCHRE 5 to 6 English materials. Instead of starting with a blank page and asking, "What could we create?", we were able to ask much more useful questions. What's already here? Why has it been designed this way? What would this look like with our students? What might we need to adapt?
For me, that's an important shift.
Perhaps the best use of teachers' planning time isn't continually creating curriculum from scratch, but deeply understanding a strong curriculum, preparing to teach it well, responding to students and refining practice along the way.
And maybe that's the other thing I brought home from Canberra: improvement doesn't always need to start with something big.
Start with something strong. Try it. Learn from it. Refine it.
Then work out what comes next.
I'm really grateful that MPF continues to invest in opportunities like this. There is something incredibly valuable about stepping away from the day-to-day work to learn alongside colleagues. The conference gave us plenty to think about, but having the time and space to think about it together was probably just as valuable."