Year 7 IST

Throughout this semester, Year 7 IST students have been exploring the concept of ‘Survival’. During each weekly session they have been provoked to make tangible interdisciplinary links of inquiry across HASS, Science, English and Math. Teachers used the IST planning template to put forward and provoke student ideas that built deep conceptual understandings of their changing world and developed dispositions that enabled students to recognise their talents and collaborate in meaningful ways to reach their full potential.  Core and Disruptor teachers approach both the planning and teaching in flexible, adaptive and immersive ways to foster student’s creativity, agency and intrinsic action.

Students kick started the unit with a Mystery Island challenge where they were put through both physical and mental challenges, which relied heavily on trial and error and the full collaboration of the group to ‘survive.’ A subsequent question storm session with the students revealed that the concept of survival was in fact multifaceted and complex dependant on the context of inquiry. Students delved deep, firstly into personal survival, quickly discovering that the cohort’s combined chances of making it through a week in the bush proved to be limited. This  prompted them to ‘Ask the Expert’ (Paramedic) where they participated in first aid scenarios and considered multiple perspectives to solve real world problems. The students are currently investigating stories of survival from the perspectives of true life and fantasy.  Where will they take this, you’ll have to watch this space……..