Week 2: Syllabus Implementation and Project Outline

This week focused on syllabus implementation and how important it is for beginner teachers to have a good understanding of the TAS syllabus, as well as having a wide repertoire of useful teaching methods.

Key concepts learnt this week were:

• Curriculum Development which is the process of creating teaching and learning pedagogies using a variety of strategies and techniques and teachers should implement this using the syllabus
• Project Base learning which involves student centered learning activities.  How can this be used in teaching Food Technology? By organising group work for students to design their own project and solve the problem on their own. This enhances critical thinking, social skills, high order thinking, research and inquiry.
• Interactive Teaching involves student centered discussion and drawing upon student experiences, through case studies and discussions. It is important as it challenges students and puts a practical shape to concepts.
• Critical and creative thinking and its relation to syllabus implementation. Critical thinking is to link concepts logically, systematically solve problems and to analyse and justify ideas. Creative thinking is brainstorming and generating new ideas from their own knowledge and experiences to get more than one answer. Using both creative and critical thinking can enhance student learning and teaching.

The major goal for this week was to build teamwork and this was achieved by the teaching strategy, "Jigsaw". 
We got split into teams, decided on what topic we would research and then got split up again into the research sub groups.

Our sub group worked on Problem based learning strategies. We researched through many sites to get a better understanding of the strategy. We noted down the answers to the questions, and went back into our major groups to collaborate our findings. 

A Power point presentation was designed to show our findings. 

Curriculum Support

A unit from curriculum support was downloaded to review and incorporate the above into the unit.

• Unit 3: Nutrition: Preliminary 
• Project based learning could be incorporated into the lesson, by doing more group work, its student focused. They could get into teams and discuss the food nutrients, or design their own menus and diets and analyse the menus. Also they could prepare the food.
• Add more creative and critical thinking strategies into the lesson, by not providing all the outcomes to the experiments. Let the students discuss and predict what happens. Analyse the food nutrients in their diet plans. Generate different ideas and solutions to nutritional deficiencies and come up with nutritional plans
• Include more interactive teaching by incorporating more case studies, discussions and group work
• More group work should be included in the lessons to enhance student learning

Project Outline- Nutrition

A unit within our group was chosen and a project outline was made up as highlighted below.