The focus of this week's Five Questions is Russell Bishop from Waikato University. Mr Bishop visited Hawke's Bay this week to have a look at the Te Kotahitanga initiative, a programme running at William Colenso and Flaxmere Colleges, aimed at raising Maori achievement in schools.
1 Can you briefly explain what the Te Kotahitanga research and development programme involves?
The educational achievement of Maori students in mainstream secondary school classrooms is the main focus of this research and professional development project. If we want to make a difference to the worrying statistics of disparity, then we need to focus on this group, because it is only by focusing on the problem that we will solve it. This is the most pressing educational priority of today. The project itself developed in 2001 when seeking to find the causes of the educational disparities, we talked to groups of Year 9 and 10 Maori students about their school experiences. These experiences were used to help develop an Effective Teaching Profile; essentially what effective teaching for Maori students looks like in mainstream secondary school classrooms. Wealso spoke to their whanau members, their principals and their teachers, who spoke of the importance of relationships that promoted self-determination for all as being central to classroom success.
2 What results have you have found so far from your research? What are some of the benefits and positives you have seen in Maori education?
Many of their teachers also spoke of their being overwhelmed by the problems that Maori students present to them, and despite their having good intentions, they were frustrated and angry about their inability to reach and support the learning of Maori students. They felt isolated and unable to provide effective solutions. Therefore we developed a professional development programme based on implementing the Effective Teaching Profile. Currently there are 49 schools in the project with 43,000 total students, which includes 16,000 Maori students and 3300 teachers. These schools cover 27 per cent of Maori students nationwide. All schools are in the upper North Island including the East Coast.
3 What are some of the challenges the program faces?
The Te Kotahitanga Professional Development Programme provides teachers with an initial induction hui where teachers, using stories of Maori students' experiences of schooling, are provided with an opportunity to examine their own ideas about Maori students and how the way they relate to Maori students might impact upon student achievement. Professional development then takes place in the classroom with intensive and ongoing, in-class support and feedback. Further support is offered outside of the classroom for cross-curricular, collaborative analysis of patterns of student learning that leads to plans and strategies for improving Maori student participation and achievement. The iterative nature of the research and development has enabled the project to morph over time from its original focus on teaching change to become a more comprehensive school reform intervention which includes this pedagogic change as its central focus supported by a leadership intervention. This more comprehensive approach is proving to be more effective than the previous focus on changing pedagogic relationships and interactions alone. Flaxmere and Colenso College in Hawke's Bay were chosen to highlight the programme in schools.
4 Why these two and how have they performed?
From follow-up student interviews we learned that when Maori students have caring and learning relationships with their teachers, they are able to thrive at school. This involves teachers caring for them as Maori, caring for their performance, creating a well-managed learning context and using a wide range of classroom interactions and strategies, including using student outcomes to inform their future teaching. We find this evidence in most project schools, including Flaxmere and William Colenso. Follow-up teachers' interviews indicated that effective Te Kotahitanga teachers have undergone a philosophical shift in the way they think about teaching and learning. Essential to this shift is teachers believing in their own power to make changes for Maori students' achievement, their strongly believing that Maori students can improve their achievement and their building of caring and learning relationships in their classrooms. Quantitative and qualitative results clearly indicate that there is a positive association between Maori student performance across all curriculum areas and the implementation of the Effective Teaching Profile in the project teachers' classrooms. There is also evidence that more Maori students in project schools are gaining NCEA credits at all levels than Maori students in non-project schools. Overall, the research has shown that there is a marked difference between the educational experiences of those Maori students interviewed in 2001 and those whose teachers have been part of this programme. The programme has been nominated as a finalist for this year's World Innovation Summit for Education awards.
5 How do you and those involved feel about the global recognition?
All involved in the project are delighted that our project is one of 14 projects short-listed from over 400 applications from round the world.
Mateo Deveraturda died a fortnight after his flu-like symptoms deteriorated.