Exploring the Threshold Concepts of the NZC

Our aim Friday was to explore the core concepts of the New Zealand Curriculum to start focusing on what learning needs to occur next year.

The first major point of interest to emerge was how differently each learning area is organised within the curriculum. Many learning areas were organised by concepts but others focused on skills, dispositions or a mix of the three. Nevertheless we were able to help each other understand how to extract the threshold concepts from each of the areas.

By focusing on one learning area each and extracting the concepts from the curriculum, we soon got our initial impressions of the 8 Learning Areas. Then as a group we discussed what had been gathered during the first step. At the end of these discussions we had the core of what the learning area was aiming to achieve and the threshold concepts that learners need to develop to be able to achieve that core aim.

As an example of this Social Sciences has the core concepts of Society; Issues; Active Citizenship; and Relationship between Society and the Environment. The threshold concepts to reach this core were: Economy; Environment; Organisation and Systems; Biculturalism; Place; Change; Perspectives; Continuity; Identity; Culture; Sustainability; Community; Diversity; and Social Action.

This meant we ended the week with the threshold concepts of the entire NZC up on the wall of our “Hacking Cave”

NZC Threshold Concepts

There are some clear cross-overs that were noticed during the process and next week we will get to focus in on this aspect – where are the opportunities for authentic integration?