With, Not For: a community event unit for VCE VM Personal Development Skills
Unit 2, Area of Study 3: Engaging and supporting community (Outcome 3)
Community engagement sounds like the easy area of study. Then you try to run it. Students have to design, implement and evaluate a real activity. You need individual evidence out of group work. And if you teach it at the end of the year, you might have three or four weeks to get it all done.
What usually happens is one of two things. The unit is so scripted that it isn't really the students' project. Or it's so open that the event drifts, half the class coasts, and there is very little to show an auditor at the end.
With, Not For sits between the two. Your class chooses the community, the cause and the event. The structure is already built: the lesson sequence, the mini lessons, the planning templates and three assessment stages.
How it runs
Week 1, Find the idea. Students map their community, research local issues, ask people what they need and choose an event that responds to it.
Week 2, Get approval and organise. Teams pitch to school leadership for permission and funding, then choose roles, line up partners and promote.
Weeks 3 and 4, Run it and reflect. Final checks, the event itself, a debrief and an event record. These weeks are planned together because the event date sets the timing.
It is written as a 3-week unit of 12 lessons, with room to stretch to 4.
What's included
A3 curriculum planner mapping every lesson to key knowledge, key skills and the Approaches to Applied Learning
Student project log in three booklets: Week 1, Week 2, and Weeks 3 and 4
Teacher Delivery Guide with a page for every lesson, a briefing note and feedback form for your leadership panel, and an event idea bank
Teacher S/N checklist
Assessment rubric
Everything in Word, so you can edit it to suit your cohort
What your students get
Real choice: the event, their project, their role in the team, and how they present it (portfolio, presentation or poster)
Short mini lessons that teach the theory at the point they need it
A real pitch to real decision-makers
An event they designed and ran themselves
What you get
By the last lesson, your students have run an event they came up with, and every student has their own evidence at three stages: the pitch, the event, and a record and reflection. S/N is decided for each student, not each team. The Teacher Delivery Guide shows where every key knowledge point and key skill is taught, so the mapping is done before anyone asks for it.
Who it's for
Year 11 VCE VM Personal Development Skills teachers and VM coordinators. It works in any school and with any class size, because your class sets the scale of the event.