Tēnā koutou katoa. My name is Graham Aitken. I'm a member of the Curriculum Coherence group.

On the release of the English and Maths learning areas many were asking what has happened to UKD? Understand, Know, Do and it's a fair enough question. The interwoven strands diagram and the colourful UKD progress outcomes had gone. So why did this happen? UKD originated in the design of the Aotearoa New Zealand Histories curriculum. The use of a small set of overarching big ideas. The understands worked well for that curriculum,as did the framing of the do's around the practises of thinking like an historian at a firm. For me, the value of UKD as an organising framework for Curriculum O. When, as a member of Ohu Arataki became involved with the refresh of other learning areas, I was committed to retaining the UKD structure.

But even in those early days, as we began to work with other areas, we found it hard to disentangle the understands and the nose. We retain the UKD framing, but it was becoming apparent that what had worked for a single subject, History, was not as easily or meaningfully transferable to learning areas comprising multiple subjects, strands and elements.

The Understand, Know distinction was especially challenging. The writing teams during the initial refresh certainly wrote big ideas about each learning area, but to keep them at the high level and distinct from the know, they became more expressions of the nature, purpose and value of the learning area than conceptual framings that are characterised Aotearoa New Zealand histories. As a member of the Curriculum Coherence group for the new curriculum, I was keen to continue to work with Understand, Know, Do, the UKD structure, but I found the same challenge as emerging that we experienced in the refresh, especially writing understands at the learning area level. Consistent with what we learned in Aotearoa New Zealand histories, we found that the understands carried more meaning when expressed at the strand, in other words the subject level.

So you will still see some of them retained within the learning area structure section of the new curriculum. For example, in mathematics and statistics, algebra develops students understanding of how patterns and relationships can be represented using symbols, graphs and diagrams. But even these are at a high level.

It is really through the interaction of the Know's and the Do's that the most meaningful understandings emerge, not in their prior determination at the overarching level of the learning area.

Which brings us to Know, and to Do.

Each learning area sets out a year by year teaching sequence, organised around knowledge and practises.

The knowledge is clearly the former, now shifted from a separate box at the start of each phase and organised instead in a year by year sequence within the strands and elements of the learning area.

These nodes incorporate both factual content and content at the level of broader understanding.

But why change Do to practises? There are two main reasons why this happened. First, as we found with Aotearoa New Zealand histories, the subjects or disciplines that contribute to each learning area are characterised by particular ways of working and thinking. So for example, working and thinking as an artist, a musician, an athlete, a scientist, a mathematician and so on. These ways of working are more than isolated acts of doing, they are connected practises and so we felt the idea of disciplinary practises was a more accurate representation than could be captured by the word do. We were also concerned that the word do naturally generated an 'I can' outcome stem, that frame the curriculum in assessment terms what students can do rather than teaching terms what teachers need to teach. So in summary, while the visibility and convenient shorthand of the UKD structure is not as apparent, the underlying idea of knowledge and practise interacting to develop student understanding hasn't changed. It is just that the iterative process of working with all the learning areas over a number of years has led to a reorganisation to locate the understanding, knowledge, practise relationship at the level of the teaching sequence, the level at which most teachers work.

What happened to Understand Know Do?

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Understand, Know, Do