creative and critical thinking victorian curriculum

Curriculum capabilities

​The Victorian Curriculum F–10 includes capabilities, which are a set of discrete knowledge and skills that can and should be taught explicitly in and through the learning areas, but are not fully defined by any of the learning areas or disciplines.​

The four capabilities in the Victorian Curriculum F–10 are:​

Our website uses a free tool to translate into other languages. This tool is a guide and may not be accurate. For more, see: Information in your language

• Help & FAQ

Critical and Creative Thinking: Developing metacognition and collaborative learning in the curriculum

• Crawford, Renee (Chief Investigator (CI))

Project : Research

Project Details

Project description, research output.

• 1 Other Report

Research output per year

Critical and Creative Thinking: Developing Metacognition and Collaborative Learning in the Curriculum: Critical and Creative Thinking Curriculum - Final Project Report

Research output : Book/Report › Other Report › Research

Handbook home

• Search the Handbook
• Undergraduate courses
• Graduate courses
• Research courses
• Undergraduate subjects
• Graduate subjects
• Research subjects
• Breadth Tracks
• CAPS Login - Staff only
• Teaching Critical and Creative Thinking

Teaching Critical and Creative Thinking (EDUC90974)

Graduate coursework Points: 12.5 On Campus (Parkville)

View full page

About this subject

• Eligibility and requirements
• Dates and times
• Further information
• Timetable (opens in new window)

Contact information

Summer term.

[email protected]

Please refer to the LMS for up-to-date subject information, including assessment and participation requirements, for subjects being offered in 2020.

Acquiring content or discipline knowledge is an important ingredient in teaching and learning, but it cannot tell the whole story. Knowing what to do with this knowledge and information when we exercise sound reasoning and creativity, whether it is within disciplines or outside of them, is equally important. As a complement to knowledge-centered approaches to teaching and learning, this elective introduces students to the critical and creative thinking competency in the Australian and Victorian curriculum. It will examine some of the strategies that have been presumed to foster critical thinking, in particular dialogic and other key pedagogies. Beginning with a literature review of key contributions to the topic of critical and creative thinking, a range of dialogic and other methods aimed at developing critical and creative thinking skills and dispositions in students will be examined; from 'Thinking' literature, Socratic discussions and inquiry-based approaches, to thinking tools and routines, as well as more recent philosophical approaches.

Intended learning outcomes

On completion of this subject students should be able to:

• Understand, explore and analyse key concepts, terms and divisions involved in the study of critical and creative thinking competency and in dialogic and associated pedagogies
• Identify, analyse and model a range of strategies used in teaching for thinking and evaluate their effectiveness
• Develop, implement and assess teaching programs with explicit attention to, and application of, thinking skills and dispositions
• Demonstrate continuous professional learning through teacher practitioner inquiry and research

Generic skills

• Clinical reasoning and thinking
• Problem solving
• Evidence based decision making
• Creativity and innovation
• Teamwork and professional collaboration
• Reflection for continuous improvement
• Inquiry and research

Last updated: 10 February 2024

Leadership for creative thinking in schools: How current research and innovation is putting creativity back into schools in England

• Published on: May 9, 2023

• Creativity |
• Curriculum |
• Curriculum design |

BILL LUCAS, PROFESSOR OF LEARNING, UNIVERSITY OF WINCHESTER, UK 

The curricula of both Scotland (Creative Scotland, nd) and Wales (Welsh Government, 2015) actively encourage creative thinking. In England, however, creative thinking is largely absent in the current National Curriculum. Recently, through the Creativity Collaboratives initiated by Arts Council England (Durham University, 2019), and arising from an intervention to evidence creativity in Australia (Lucas, 2021b), there has been greater emphasis on creative thinking in England. A pilot study by Rethinking Assessment and ACER UK is currently exploring ways in which teachers can evidence the development of creative thinking in pupils within the current English National Curriculum. This renewed interest is increasingly focusing on leadership (Lucas et al., 2021) and on the need to develop appropriate strategies for embedding creative thinking in schools.

Lessons for creative leadership

In a recent study for the Global Institute of Creative Thinking (Lucas, 2022) it was clear that, across the world, much progress is being made. Coloured dashboard indicators give a snapshot of this graphically ( Figure 1 ). They also reveal that, while the status of creative thinking, its place in the curriculum and our understanding of curriculum design and creative pedagogies is growing, it is not yet clear how best creative thinking can be assessed. For system change in England to be achieved, there will need to be a considerably enhanced understanding of the kinds of professional learning that are effective for school and system leaders.

Figure 1: Creative thinking in schools across the world – a snapshot of progress (Lucas, 2022)

Research by Stoll and Temperley (2009) identified nine conditions needed for creative leaders promoting and nurturing creativity in others. They need to: 

• Model creativity and risk-taking
• Stimulate a sense of urgency to overcome inertia
• Expose colleagues to new thinking and experiences
• Self-consciously relinquish control creating an ethos favourable to risk-taking 
• Provide time and space and facilitate the practicalities
• Promote individual and collaborative creative thinking and design
• Set high expectations about the degree of creativity, pushing people to be imaginative and to think originally
• Use failure as a learning opportunity 
• Keep referring back to core values.

Taken together, these pointers form the agenda for the creation of a professional learning curriculum for school leaders.

Recently, with Louise Stoll and colleagues from the University of Winchester and from Creativity, Culture and Education (CCE; www.creativitycultureeducation.org),  we have drawn on research and promising practices from across the world to develop Creative Thinking in Schools: A Leadership Playbook (Lucas et al., in press). Given that creativity and creative thinking are largely invisible in the curriculum of schools in England, a critical first step is the development of a real understanding of creative thinking among school staff, as the Durham Commission (Durham University, 2019) showed. The Centre for Real-World Learning (CRL) framework, now in use in more than 30 countries across the world, lifts the lid on the abstract concept of creativity, showing how creativity can be conceptualised as five creative learning habits, each of which can be broken down into three sub-habits ( Figure 2 ).

Figure 2: CRL’s creative thinking framework, developed with CCE for schools in the north-east of England

A second key finding from our research is the reminder that school leaders wishing to embed creative thinking in their schools need to think not just about their pupils’ creativity but also about their staff’s. For some colleagues, this is a welcome revelation; for others less confident in their creative self-efficacy, it can require support.

The third conclusion we have drawn is that making schools creative places challenges school leaders and staff to rethink the purpose of school. If the goal of education is to grow young people who are deeply knowledgeable and skilled and who are routinely able to exercise their imagination, inquisitiveness, persistence, collaboration skills and discipline as learners, then, in the current system in England, this requires a degree of boldness.

The evidence we have gathered suggests that school leaders seeking to embed creative thinking in their schools need to have an explicit theory of change, recognise the importance of distributed leadership, cultivate a culture of creative innovation and risk-taking, and rethink their schools’ structures, systems and external partnerships. They will need a razor-sharp focus on curriculum design, pedagogy and assessment, all the while building a professional learning community of staff within and beyond school. The icons next to each of the five creative habits in Figure 2 are just one example of the way in which school leaders can consistently reinforce creative concepts across all aspects of a school’s life.

Above all, we are constantly reminded that the active support of headteachers is critically important in order for any significant change to happen in schools.

Learning from the Creativity Collaboratives

In 2021, eight Creativity Collaboratives, clusters of eight to 12 schools spread across the regions of England, were awarded significant funding by Arts Council England. The three-year programme is exploring how varied approaches to teaching for creativity, with a particular focus on inquisitiveness, support all pupils and contribute to school improvement in a diverse range of settings. It aims to build networks of schools to test innovative practices in teaching for creativity, sharing learning to facilitate system-wide change.

Already some key lessons are emerging. The first of these has already been touched on: the need for actively engaging a wide range of school and system leaders in the process. Other learning includes:

• There is a need to free up time for at least one member of staff to act as a creativity champion across the cluster of schools, proactively coordinating professional learning and the interchange of ideas.
• It is important to track impact against a theory of change from the outset to better understand how enhanced creative thinking is affecting staff and pupils (and also to provide Ofsted The Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services... More with data on how intent, implementation and impact are working in practice)
• There is great benefit in ‘split-screen’ or integrated curriculum planning – an explicit cross-mapping of what appears in the programme of study for a specific subject against the aspects of creative thinking being embedded. The metaphor of the screen suggests that, in devising curriculum content, teachers have an equal eye on the discipline and on the sub-habits of the creativity being taught. So this might involve developing the ability to challenge assumptions in a scientific investigation. A sub-habit such as crafting and improving work or giving and receiving feedback could easily map onto any subject, whereas one such as making connections might map well onto the use of metaphor or simile in English, for example.
• Signature pedagogies harness those teaching and learning methods that are most likely to produce the desired creative outcomes. These include techniques such as mantle of the expert, philosophy for children, problem-based learning and many other well-evidenced approaches(Vincent-Lancrin et al., 2019; Lucas and Spencer, 2017).

Culturally, perhaps the biggest hurdle still to overcome is the long-standing association between creativity and the arts. Here the challenge is to exemplify how creative innovation is equally at home in every discipline of the curriculum and in all aspects of life; it is ubiquitous.

Rethinking assessment (and curriculum and pedagogy)

Partly because of the examination debacles during the pandemic, and partly because of the emergence of new approaches to assessment in schools, the importance of assessing creative thinking has grown. The PISA The Programme for International Student Assessment, a worldw... More Creative Thinking Test 2022 (OECD, 2022) offers a proof of concept that it can be done – that an online one-hour scenario-based test of creativity can reliably evidence creative thinking. In the state of Victoria in Australia, pupils’ critical and creative thinking has been assessed for nearly a decade using similar but more extended approaches ( Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority, nd). Central to the Victorian model is the underpinning of clear scope and sequence documents, describing what progression looks like for pupils across the school system ( Victorian Curriculum, nd).

In 2022, Rethinking Assessment and ACER UK embarked on a professional learning intervention to explore ways in which teachers could learn how to assess pupils’ creativity. The study takes a version of the widely used CRL model of creative thinking, along with work undertaken by ACER in Australia (Ramalingam et al., 2020) as its starting point ( Figure 3 ). It requires four to six teachers working collaboratively in some 20 schools to split-screen plan a term’s curriculum across one or more of five subjects: English, science, history, art and design, and design and technology. Teachers then select appropriate signature pedagogies and use three assessment methods in which they have been trained: pupil self-reported questionnaires, their own judgment of progress against a learning progression, and the moderation of a portfolio of pupils’ work, again using the learning progression.

Figure 3: Rethinking Assessment and ACER UK’s draft model of creative thinking

Pupil questionnaires take the three creative habits and their three sub-habits as the starting point for a simple nine-item, age-appropriate questionnaire for pupils, which is used before, during and at the end of the intervention.

It is too early to say whether this innovation in curriculum design, pedagogy and assessment will fit easily and reliably enough into busy teachers’ lives, but early indications are that it does.

Being able to evidence progression in creative thinking is one piece of a larger jigsaw in terms of system innovation. The ultimate goal is for all young people to emerge from formal education with a digital learner profile – a much fuller description of what they know, what they can do, which learning habits they have securely developed and which learning experiences they have had, than can be provided by public examinations alone. Rethinking Assessment’s prototype profile is just one of a number being piloted across the world (Rethinking Assessment, 2022).

The kind of assessment innovation just described will feed into the 3Cs of success depicted in the profile – creative thinking, communication and collaboration – complementing the ‘Building Blocks’, or core literacies and numeracies, long referred to as the 3Rs (Rethinking Assessment, 2022). It is our hope that, as they were in the first decade of this century, schools in England will be known across the world for their rigorous, values-driven innovation in the area of creativity and creative thinking.

• Creative Scotland (nd) Scotland’s creative learning plan. Available at: www.creativescotland.com/resources/our-publications/plans-and-strategy-documents/scotlands-creative-learning-plan (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Durham University (2019) Durham Commission on Creativity and Education. Available at: www.dur.ac.uk/resources/creativitycommission/DurhamReport.pdf (accessed 21 December 2022).
• Lucas B (2021) A field guide to assessing creative thinking in schools. FORM. Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/19WiqUOHWgODLSxDID4RnMMD0-25dJa5F/view (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Lucas B (2022) Creative thinking in schools across the world: A snapshot of progress in 2022. Global Institute of Creative Thinking. Available at: https://uploads.strikinglycdn.com/files/f5005576-eb0e-4d24-b4a1-823147c95c34/GIoCT-Creative-thinking-report_Final%2017%20October%202022.pdf?id=3948255 (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Lucas B et al. (in press) Creative Thinking in Schools: A Leadership Playbook. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.
• Lucas B and Spencer E (2017) Teaching Creative Thinking: Developing Learners Who Generate Ideas and Can Think Critically. Carmarthen: Crown House Publishing.
• Lucas B, Spencer E and Stoll L (2021) Creative leadership to develop creativity and creative thinking in English schools: A review of the evidence. The Mercers’ Company. Available at: www.creativityexchange.org.uk/asset/223 (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2022) Thinking outside the box: The PISA 2022 Creative Thinking Assessment. Available at: www.oecd.org/pisa/innovation/creative-thinking (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Ramalingam D, Anderson P, Duckworth D et al. (2020) Creative thinking: Skill development framework. Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Available at: https://research.acer.edu.au/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1041&context=ar_misc (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Stoll L and Temperley J (2009) Creative leadership: A challenge of our times. School Leadership & Management 29(1): 65–78.
• Victorian Curriculum (nd) Critical and creative thinking: Scope and sequence. Available at: https://victoriancurriculum.vcaa.vic.edu.au/critical-and-creative-thinking/introduction/scope-and-sequence (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (nd) Assessment resources. Available at: www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/curriculum/foundation-10/resources/criticalandcreativethinking/assessmentresources/Pages/default.aspx (accessed 23 March 2023).
• Vincent-Lancrin S, González-Sancho C, Bouckaert M et al. (2019) Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking: What it Means in School. Paris: OECD Publishing.
• Welsh Government (2015) Creative learning through the arts – an action plan for Wales: 2015–2020. Available at: www.gov.wales/sites/default/files/publications/2018-02/creative-learning-through-the-arts-an-action-plan-for-wales-2015-2020.pdf (accessed 23 March 2023).

From this issue

Issue 18: Curriculum innovation and impact

Impact articles on the same themes.

• Original Research

Effective leadership practices and teacher wellbeing: A review of international evidence

• Perspective Article

Can a collaborative approach to curriculum development aid teacher retention?

Collaborative CPD as a means to improve teacher expertise and retention

Reframing ‘disadvantaged’ as ‘underserved’ in mathematics education professional development design

Promoting effective teacher reflection through collaboration

Could the development of teacher self-efficacy enhance teachers’ own mental health and wellbeing?

Effective professional development at scale

Subject communities: Grow, nurture, sustain

• Teacher Reflection

Building a strong foundation: A new head of department’s perspective on professional development for a diverse team of PSHE Educators

‘Being’ a teacher – the impact of teacher identity on self-efficacy and professional development across a career

Pears Pavillion Corum Campus 41 Brunswick Square London WC1N 1AZ

[email protected] 020 3433 7624

We have detected that your JavaScript seems to be disabled.

We recommend that you enable JavaScript in your browser to fully utilize the functionality of this website.

Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority

• Visual Arts
• Visual Communication Design

Critical and Creative Thinking

• English as an Additional Language (EAL)
• English Version 2.0
• Ethical Capability
• Health and Physical Education
• Civics and Citizenship
• Economics and Business
• Intercultural Capability
• Classical Greek
• Modern Greek
• Non-Roman Alphabet Languages
• Roman Alphabet Languages
• Victorian Aboriginal Languages
• Mathematics
• Mathematics Version 2.0
• Personal and Social Capability
• Design and Technologies
• Digital Technologies
• Level A (Towards Foundation)
• Level B (Towards Foundation)
• Level C (Towards Foundation)
• Level D (Towards Foundation)
• Foundation level
• Introduction
• Rationale and Aims
• Learning in Critical and Creative Thinking
• Scope and Sequence

Critical and Creative Thinking is organised into three interrelated strands: Questions and Possibilities, Reasoning and Meta-Cognition.

Achievement standards

In Critical and Creative Thinking, students progress along a curriculum continuum that provides the first achievement standard at Foundation to Level 2 and then at Levels 4, 6, 8 and 10. 

A 'Towards Foundation Levels A to D' curriculum is provided for students with disabilities or additional learning needs in this curriculum area.

Privacy statement Copyright statement Disclaimer

Version history

• Skip to content
• Skip to search
• Staff portal (Inside the department)
• Student portal
• Key links for students

Other users

• Forgot password

Notifications

{{item.title}}, my essentials, ask for help, contact edconnect, directory a to z, how to guides, education for a changing world, learning through creative thinking.

How can creative thinking support improved student learning? What does best practice in teaching and assessing creativity look like, particularly amongst diverse groups of students?

In this episode, we hear from Christine Cawsey, the Principal of Rooty Hill High School in Western Sydney, recently recognised as one of the 40 Most Innovative Schools in Australia. Christine is a life member of the NSW Secondary Principals' Council and the co-author of Learning for Leadership.

Christine provides insight into how teachers can incorporate creative thinking into their pedagogies.

Credits: Recording and production by Jennifer Macey (Audiocraft), editing by Andy Maher, and voiceovers by Sally Kohlmayer. This episode was recorded in 2018. The views expressed in Edspressos are those of the interviewees and do not necessarily represent the views of the NSW Department of Education.

Episode transcript

Voice-over:.

Welcome to the Edspresso series, from the New South Wales Department of Education. These short podcasts are part of the Education for a Changing World Initiative. Join us as we speak to a range of experts about how emerging technology such as artificial intelligence are likely to change the world around us and what this might mean for education.

How can creative thinking support improved student learning? What does best practice in teaching and assessing it look like? In this episode, we'll hear from Christine Cawsey, the Principal of Rooty Hill High School in Western Sydney, which was recently recognised as one of the 40 most innovative schools in Australia.

Christine is a life member of the New South Wales Secondary Principals Council and the co-author of 'Learning for Leadership'. Drawing on her experience at Rooty Hill, Christine provides insight into how teachers can incorporate creative thinking into their pedagogies and foster creativity amongst diverse groups of students.

Christine Cawsey:

I'm Christine Cawsey, the principal of Rooty High School. We've been thinking about defining creative thinking for probably close to six or seven years now. In response to the ACARA benchmarks that talk about the importance of critical and creative thinking that comes straight from the Melbourne Declaration.

In our thinking, we've been really privileged to work with Professor Bill Lucas and his colleague Professor Ellen Spencer. And they've defined creative thinking in ways that we find very accessible in our school. They've defined five dispositions of thinking; the first two people easily understand as being creative thinking and that's to be imaginative and inquisitive.

Their research shows that that is supported by three other very critical features of creative thinking and one is to be persistent and to stick with it, in a sense to be almost critical of one's work. That's even further influenced by the need to be disciplined, which requires both critical and creative thinking.

And then, the last one that they define is to be actually collaborative, because genuine creation rarely happens on one's own and it requires approximations, so you can't teach creative thinking without critical thinking and you can't teach critical thinking without creative thinking, because they're entwined.

It's emerged more slowly than I thought it would but we're now there. At a juncture where we decide whether we want to have a more expansive education system because we live in a more expansive world or whether we want to narrow that system and to identify perhaps only one or two core skills that students need to be taught at school.

So, why do I think it's important? Because I actually believe thinking with speaking are the two fundamentals. Children obviously think before they can speak. The idea that people talk about doing teaching thinking in the wait 'til university I read recently, to me, it just seems to be completely denying the reality, that almost every parent and certainly all teachers know, is that every day is a thinking day.

I think, when we are thinking about problem-solving or reasoning or any thinking activity, they all are so interlinked with each other and skills like reasoning, they're just sort of fundamental fundamentals, and sometimes we try to separate them and say, "look there's this bank of skills we call problem-solving."

But problem-solving is a type of thinking. And it's often a very creative type of thinking and often doesn't have one answer. Part of the problem is if we deny that we're really just focusing on factual recall and it won't be enough, especially in an AI augmented world.

I have a fundamental belief, supported now by evidence that we can not only teach creativity but we're in a very lucky position where we now can also assess it. And we can assess it in a range of ways. When we think about whether creative thinking and critical thinking are domain-specific, the question that we come back to is, are there ways of knowing, doing and being specific skills and capabilities that are taught within each subject or domain that are not taught or learnt in other subjects?

And I think, there is a generic body of skill that everybody needs. For me the fundamental here isn't about curriculum, it's about assessment. And it's an area where I think we as a country not done as well as we could have.

The work that the VCAA has done is to, at the request of the Victorian government, to actually see whether creative and critical thinking can be mapped on learning progressions and students can complete assessment in relation that.

The strength of that, it's opt-in. The strength of that is that it's done by teachers in classrooms.

I'm actually in favour of us developing these kinds of assessments very much so, because they do give us a really strong formative base and they do show us development over time. What I don't want to see is us to take this as another opportunity to say, "Every student has to do it and do it on this day under these secure conditions."

Because actually, that's not how thinking works, and in my opinion also not necessarily how reading works.

One person cannot teach every student. One person even can't work with every teacher. The model that I prefer is for us to run very effective professional learning, registered and highly accomplished, where highly educated teachers solve the problem within their own subject and faculty of how to teach and assess.

I do believe that creativity, critical thinking, ICT platforms, whatever it is, reading, should be taught within subjects by teachers who know how to adapt whatever materials and tools are available to the best learning intentions and success criteria for their own classes.

So, in terms of critical and creative thinking, but particularly creative thinking, we think you can teach it across the curriculum, so it is a platform at Rooty Hill High School. But we also think that some areas of the school emphasise some types of thinking more than others. So, problem-solving is seen more often in some subjects than it is in others. Really critical reasoning that's based on deep deconstruction of text, predictive behaviours with text to say, "Well, what's likely to happen next," those are more likely to be seen in the humanities and that skill of really developing that deeply.

Obviously, in the sciences there's a range that include not only hypothesising, which is quite a creative skill but then experimenting, testing, approximating.

So, science is potentially one of the most creative subjects in the curriculum. So, I suppose that the short answer is, there certainly are generic creative and critical thinking skills, but there are very particular ones that you see emphasised in different subjects, particularly as you progress through the secondary school.

I don't see creative thinking as being part of a crowded curriculum any more than I see reading as being part of a crowded curriculum. In secondary schools, you read to learn, you can't do any subject unless you can read it. So, it's a fundamental underpinning. So is thinking. They're not 'either, ors'. We call it the weft in the weave, the capabilities, literacy, numeracy, critical thinking, use of ICT, they are the weft on which the weave of each subject is threaded. And we feel very clear that it is never going to be either, or. A curriculum crowded with using skills to de-construct content to me is a great curriculum.

There is some evidence from some research done about eight to ten years ago that the pedagogy in some disadvantaged schools focused more on factual learning and more what we would call the sort of traditional work-sheet based learning.

I don't think that research holds up as much now. There are many schools and disadvantaged but also very affluent schools that are so worried about the testing regime that they have turned the curriculum into a way to beat the test. Some really hard decisions have to be made by principals of schools and their teaching teams, and also the community, about whether you narrow the curriculum to do the test or whether you expand it, so that students have the general knowledge, have the creative thinking, have all of those skills to be able to undertake whatever assessment they are doing.

I went to school at a time when we were moving from a very structured learn it, repeat it academic curriculum to one where we were really being asked to think for ourselves. I am delighted that I was taught by great teachers of the 1970s who came into our schools and they actually encouraged you to think outside the box, to think more creatively, to find your originality in your answer, there is room always to be thinking, room always to take an intellectual approach to the work, room always to encourage students to do the same, to be creative and critical thinkers, not just for school but for their lives.

And having been at Rooty Hill for so long now and looking at where our ex-students are, many here have taken that advice on board and done some amazing things with their lives.

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Edspresso series. You can find out more about the Education for a Changing World Initiative via the New South Wales Department of Education's website.

• Teaching and learning

Business Unit:

• Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation

The VCAA has developed resources to support the delivery of curriculum learning areas. Planning resources can be found under 'Planning resources' and teaching resources, including units of work, can be found under 'Teaching resources'.

STEM (Science, Technologies, Engineering and Mathematics) education comprises the specific knowledge, understandings and skills in each of these learning areas as well as the interrelationship between each of them. STEM education acknowledges that there are opportunities for learning to be delivered in an integrated manner that facilitates greater engagement in each of these learning areas. This approach enables skills such as critical and creative thinking, collaboration and communication to be deployed in a rich and authentic way.

STEM education in the Victorian Curriculum includes the following learning areas: Science, Design and Technologies (including Engineering principles and systems), Digital Technologies and Mathematics.

Erin Wilson Curriculum Manager - STEM tel: + 61 3 9059 5157 email:  [email protected]

Teachers associations

STEM X Academy

Run in partnership with the Australian Science Teachers Association and Questacon, STEM X Academy is teacher professional learning experience designed to tie the national STEM curriculum to high-end research underway in Australia's research sector, and place inquiry-based learning at the heart of both teacher development and classroom practice.

For additional links to teacher professional associations, please explore each of the individual learning areas.

Science and Mathematics Specialists Centres

Victoria's six specialist science and mathematics centres offer a unique insight into new technologies and research through onsite and outreach education programs for students of all ages and professional development activities for teachers.

The centres are:

• Gene Technology Access Centre
• Quantum Victoria
• Victorian Space Science Education Centre 

DET Tech Schools

Victoria's ten Tech Schools are centres of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) excellence.