The elegant simplicity of using the Australian Curriculum v9.0 in the English classroom — ETAQ Early Career Conference 2025

Today's session is a recording of the key messages from the QCAA workshop, the elegant simplicity of using the Australian curriculum version 9 in the English classroom delivered at the ETAC Early Career Conference 2025.

The QCAA acknowledges the traditional owners and the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet today. We pay our respects to their elders and their descendants who continue cultural and spiritual connections to country and we extend that respect to Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islander people here today. We thank them for sharing their cultures and spiritualities and recognise the important contribution of this knowledge to our understanding of this place we call home.

The theme of the conference was small triumphs, big reasons, moments of joy, purpose, and possibility in the Early Career classroom. It's a theme that recognises the reality of beginning years in teaching where every day can feel like a mix of challenge and discovery. Those small triumphs and moments of joy are important in finding purpose in this valuable work.

In this session, we'll explore strategies that support these everyday wins while using the Australian Curriculum version 9 English to anchor teaching and learning experiences.

Today's learning goal is to understand how knowing the Australian Curriculum version 9 English can bring joy, purpose, and possibility into the early career English classroom.

At the end of today's session, you will know you are successful if you feel more confident to use the Australian Curriculum version 9 English to design learning experiences, can apply practical teaching strategies to integrate the English strands, and can identify and use QCAA resources when planning. Let's begin by exploring the curriculum and integrating the English strands.

On screen is the version 9 organisational structure of the English curriculum.

We may take a closer look at the English aims to guide our conversations around the curriculum and the strands.

These are our four aims in English. You may pause the recording at this point and read through the aims. The reason we have included this part of the English curriculum is because when we look at the three English strands, the four aims are represented.

There are three English strands. The Language, Literature and Literacy strands.

The language strand represents the knowledge of the English language and how it works.

The literature strand represents the understanding of the breadth and complexity of human experiences. It builds students' knowledge of the interreationship of language and culture and stimulates creative and critical thinking.

And the Literacy strand represents making meaning through application of skills and knowledge from the Language strand and developing an ability to interpret and create texts with appropriateness, accuracy, confidence, fluency, and efficacy for learning in and out of school.

Let's take a closer look at the organisation of the strands and sub-strands. The four English aims can be seen in the structure of the three strands in English. The Language, Literature and Literacy strands.

Aim one sits across all three strands. Aim two represents the Language strand. Aim three represents the Literature strand and aim four represents the Literacy strand.

The English curriculum tells us that teaching, learning, and assessment programs should balance and integrate the three strands to support the development of knowledge, understanding, and skills. The focal point for a unit of work or learning activity may arise from any strand. However, the intention is that units and activities draw on all three strands in ways that are integrated and clear to learners. By planning to integrate the strands, teachers are able to create learning experiences that are at year level and teach relevant English skills in context.

So how may we integrate the English strands?

We may do this by intentionally creating learning experiences and activities that integrate the strands aligned to the content descriptions for a particular year level. To illustrate this, we will use year 7 English as our example.

And while the intention is that units and activities draw on all three English strands in ways that are integrated and clear to learners, this may be considered across a year. For example, the Year 7 English curriculum and assessment plan sample on screen illustrates how each unit across an English curriculum and assessment plan may draw on the strands in a way that is authentic to the unit. For today's session, we will explore how we may integrate strands focusing on informative texts.

While we may include a focus of literary texts in such a unit, the activities demonstrated will focus on the depth of the English curriculum and so we will not integrate the literature strand.

As a result, we may make a decision that for a particular unit, we will create learning experiences from the selected sub-strands. language for expressing and developing ideas from the language strand and interacting with others and word knowledge from the literacy strand.

For year seven, we may refer to the content descriptions for language for expressing and developing ideas and see that language content description 8 states that students investigate the role of vocabulary in building specialist and technical knowledge, including terms that have both everyday and technical meanings.

The selected content description in the interacting with others sub-strand allows us to consider a learning experience in which students use interaction skills when discussing and presenting ideas and information including evaluations of the features of spoken texts. For example, in small groups, we may have students practice using gestures, turn taking to interact with one another.

We may then drill down into the details from the content description that relates to the sub-strand word knowledge in which students understand how to use spelling rules and word origins. For example, Greek and Latin roots, base words, suffixes, prefixes, and spelling patterns to learn new words and how to spell them.

Let's imagine that the selected topic of this Year 7 unit is on orangutans. Perhaps we are teaching a unit that will culminate in students writing a persuasive text about orangutans.

Vocabulary cards are an example of a strategy that could be used here to group students while getting them to engage in this particular English unit.

Teachers can make sets of cards different in color, words, and numbers. They may then group students by word, color, or numbers depending on the purpose of the activity.

For example, teachers may begin by grouping students using the words on the vocabulary cards and then ask them to discuss their words by referring to the numbers on the cards.

Then teachers may ask students to regroup themselves using the colour of their card.

Students may then refer to the word on their card and share a description of the word and perhaps the persuasive topic in which the word may be used.

An additional activity could be where teachers then have students consider which words are critical to the persuasive nature of the topic and why.

This allows students to really focus on the vocabulary introduced to them. For example, if we had to introduce students to the word deforestation, we may immediately have taken a piece of writing about orangutans and made it more persuasive.

The activity we have explored is one that could be created for year 7 using those selected content descriptions. On screen is an illustration of the language content description 8 and how it progresses across the year levels. Take note of the detail and how the content description may inform the integrated strand learning experience or activity.

It is worth noting that when we look at the three strands and subsequent sub-strands in English, we remind ourselves that the English curriculum is recursive and cumulative. Recursive meaning that in order to ensure students are increasingly more competent communicators, teachers may revisit concepts, skills, and processes several times. At the same time, as students are taught and learn each year, they build concepts, skills, and processes cumulatively. Students will learn about and practice the skills highlighted in the three strands and sub-strands aligned to their particular year level. We can use the visual cue of steps to help us remember the recursive and cumulative nature of the curriculum.

To help with this, we may refer to the QCAA sequence of content descriptions resource to obtain the specific year level content description detail from those strands and sub-strands.

The QCAA sequencing resources can be helpful in following the progression across year levels. Take note, there is one available for Prep-Year 6 too.

Let's take a look at how the QCAA resources may continue your work in teaching English. If you head to the QCAA website and in particular go to the Prep-Year 10 landing page, you can select different learning areas. In this case, Prep-Year 10 English.

The first tab includes helpful English resources such as the sequence of achievement standards, sequence of content descriptions, achievement standard aligned to content description resources.

The second tab planning includes resources such as planning templates, resource to guide conversations about range and balance of texts in English, sample curriculum and assessment plans and multi-age resources.

The third tab, assessment, includes resources such as assessment templates, English standards elaborations, and techniques and conditions resources.

The fourth tab, PD resources, includes resources such as the prep tier 6 reading presentations and familiarisation and planning video series as well as the 7 to 10 presentations familiarisation and planning for version 9 English.

The QCAA P-10 Planning app is also a great resource that provides teachers with the following features.

You can design year level and band plans either for the same year level or for multi-age classes. Once sent for approval, your assessment templates will populate, ready for you to design the assessment tasks. A template for a marking guide will also populate, allowing you to edit the standard elaborations to create a task specific marking guide.

Having a consistent look and feel of assessment templates across the school reduces the cognitive load for students and builds confidence in parents about transparency in how assessment is created. All review and approvals processes occur within your school. No one outside of your school can view anything you have developed. Once these documents are approved, the data feeds through to the data summaries tab. There is a specific role that allows you to view and print various reports that provide you with data to support curriculum decisions across your whole school or for heads of curriculum who may be looking across at the faculty or year level.

As we get to the end of today's session, you may choose to pause this recording and share how you can bring more joy, purpose, or possibility into your English classroom using what you have learned in the session.

Hopefully, you find yourself more confident to use the Australian Curriculum version 9 English to design learning experiences, can apply practical teaching strategies to integrate the English strands, and can now identify and use QCAA resources when planning.