Teacher resources – Year 7&8

The TrackSAFE Education high school resources are designed to help young people learn how to be safe, active, responsible citizens on and around the rail network.  Each unit of work takes a capabilities-based approach to rail safety.

We assume that every student has resources within them that can be used to manage safe outcomes for themselves and others on and around the rail network.  The unit of work is designed to be integrated into existing school curriculum programs and provide differentiated materials that:

  • identify prior knowledge, skills and/or attitudes;
  • help bring in new ideas, relate these ideas and then extend these ideas in ways that make a difference for others; and
  • provide feedback on learning through a student self-assessment and an assessment of Learning.

English

Students describe, analyse, and create multimodal texts and their effectiveness.

Read the teacher notes first for instructions and suggested learning pathways. You can then choose to teach all 3 lessons or select a few which suit your students best.

Students brainstorm everything they know about visual and multimodal texts and connect their ideas with hexagons. They discuss representational, interactive and compositional meanings. They then do a supported deconstruction of a visual or multimodal image, followed by an independent deconstruction of a visual or multimodal image, using the See Think Wonder strategy.

Students compare and contrast the similarities and differences between the visual and multimodal texts chosen in Lesson 1. They then analyse a text used to promote rail safety by interpreting the ideas, language and visual features used in the text, their purpose and their effect. They rank their different texts based on their effectiveness.

Students create an imaginative, informative and persuasive multimodal blog post about an important but controversial rail safety issue for local youth in their community. They create a persuasive text with an argument to justify a claim about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of a text in communicating a rail safety message.

Health and Physical Education

Unit of work – Promoting health, safety and wellbeing on and around the rail network.

Read the teacher notes first for instructions and suggested learning pathways. You can then choose to teach all 3 lessons or select a few which suit your students best.

Students brainstorm everything they know about the physical activity of people in and around the rail network using hexagons. They investigate risks to the health and wellbeing of people moving in and around the rail network in their local area and organise a ‘safety walk’ with members of a group in the community who might be at risk of injury near tracks, e.g. falls. They use a hazard checklist to help manage pedestrian hazards and write a report on the risks and hazards they discovered on their safety walk.

Students analyse reasons why people might act in unsafe ways on the rail network using ‘Dumb Ways to Die’ as a stimulus. They investigate explicit and implicit influences and the impact of emotions on their own behaviour, and use the plus, minus, interesting strategy to look at peer pressure situations.

Students then work in groups to develop a role play describing an unsafe behaviour on the rail network caused by peer pressure or bullying. They deliver their role plays and use the ‘Augusto Boal Forum Theatre’ technique to replay the scene, where a student in the audience jumps in to change the situation, managing the peer pressure or bullying in a way that keeps the student safe. They then analyse media reports on young people’s hazardous interactions with the rail corridor and explain how emotions, dispositions and decision making can affect outcomes for young people on and around the rail network.

Students explore how they can make a place on or around the local rail network safer for young people. They make a set of trading cards to help others manage peer pressure to act unsafely on and around the rail network. They make decisions about actions to help young people move safely on or around a place on the local rail network and choose the best solution. They write a proposal or action plan to help enact this solution and contact a youth advocacy agency to help take their proposal further.

The Arts

Students experiment with character and explore the ‘bystander effect’ to manage peer pressure and unsafe behaviours of other young people on the rail network. Choose suitable activities from 3 differentiated lessons.

Read the teacher notes first for instructions and suggested learning pathways. You can then choose to teach all 3 lessons or select a few which suit your students best.

Students use hexagons to brainstorm everything they know about peer pressure, bullying, and the ‘bystander effect’. They complete a reflection grid about a situation where they have acted in a certain way because of bullying, peer pressure or being a bystander. They create a storyline for a bystander effect scenario and experiment with character techniques. They share these techniques using Hot Seating or Freeze Framing.

Students tease out compelling stories from Lesson 1, conduct research and create a 60 second drama about bullying and the ‘bystander effect’. They make decisions about the nature of the crisis, and how the crisis is resolved. They then use an Augusto Boal Forum Theatre Freeze Frame technique to investigate the decisions made and how the actors are feeling. They use the See Think Wonder strategy to further refine the script and perform for their peers.

Students rework their 60-second ‘bystander effect drama into a drama to explore ways of managing peer pressure on the rail network. They experiment with their adaptation by adding mimed action, soundscape, narration and convention to build tension, belief and audience engagement. Their drama prompts the audience to think, “To what extent are we personally responsible for what we see happening around us?”