Demonstrating how I meet the Professional Standards of
Criteria a.1 and a.2Since my appointment to the staff of The Hills Grammar School I have been responsible for the maintenance of Stage 5 History Programs and Stage 6 Modern History Programs. These are living documents and have been through many revisions over the period of my stewardship both as a result of changes to Syllabi and because of my own understanding of, enthusiasm for and engagement with the content of these areas. The most recent programs may be accessed here for Year 9 Australian History, Year 10 Australian History and Year 12 Modern History. In addition I was recently given the responsibility to update the Stage 5 Elective History program and introduced a new program in Year 10 in 2001. That program resulted in an increased number of students enrolling in Stage 6 Modern and Ancient History and three of those students continued on to achieve Band 6 marks in the Higher School Certificate Extension History Course. The Year 9 Elective History course has undergone modification again this year to meet the change in Syllabus which comes in formally in 2005. By beginning this course now I have been able to develop preliminary units of work for the new syllabus in time to revise them for other staff to use them next year.
As a member of the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Dural and District Historical Society I am able to maintain my own professional development in Australian History by reading journal articles and research papers related to both national and local issues. As a subscriber to History Today, Teaching History On Line and History on the Internet I am also able to maintain my professional involvement in developments overseas.
Since 1998 I have been involved in the implementation of the Discovering Democracy program for schools firstly in a pilot study generated within the school and lately in the development of WebQuests for the Association of Independent Schools, Discovering Democracy team to be placed on their website for other teachers to use. These WebQuests cover a variety of topics from Federation to Migration in Stage 5 History and Roman Government to William the Conqueror in Stage 4 History and may be accessed through the Teachers Section of the HSIE Website.
I have been a marker for the Discovering Democracy Essay Competition. I attended the 2002 Discovering Democracy National Forum in Canberra as a guest of, and representative of, the Department of Education, Discovering Democracy Team, New South Wales. I delivered a paper at the Best Practice in Civics and Citizenship Conference, held at the New South Wales State Parliament House, in October, 2002 and in 2003 and 2004 encouraged other staff members to become involved in the Discovering Democracy program.
For three months in 1999, whilst on long service leave, I traveled extensively through Central Asia, Russia and Eastern and Western Europe to visit places about which I teach but had never been to. As a result of these travels I now have a greater understanding of Russia, Germany, France, Belgium and the World War One Battle sites.