What next?
Barbara Knight:
The biggest thing I’ve learnt this year is to only ever do two major projects in any year level - if you want to do good tech practice, you can't rush it. You need to allow learning to go where it wants to sometimes … the unexpected becomes more important than what was planned.
Barbara's experience in 2005, particularly with the extension of the Te Papa project to twice its projected length, led her to restructure Technology project planning for 2006 at all levels.
Instead of three cycles for the Year 7-9 programme, there are now two. Only two major units of work for each of the Year 11,12,13 Materials Technology courses are being taught, with several achievement standards and unit standards combined into the respective units of work as appropriate.
Barbara Knight:
It took me a while to come up with a course for this Year 12 class. Originally I was going to start off with a conceptual design unit, but then, since they didn't get to do any 'fashion' last year, I thought we'd start off with a special occasion type project that they can do for themselves or a selected client, one that they can do really beautifully, so they get that out of their system.
These changes have been put in place to help ensure there is less stress on hand-in dates, more time to spend on practical skills and more time to develop in-depth work.
Of the 22 Year 11s, 14 continued into the 2006 Year 12 class. Two major units were planned for this year: the first a project designing and implementing a clothing item, entitled "What's the occasion?"; the second a conceptual design project that will have a class client, connected to an outside business or organisation.
