MAORI+MATTERS

The initiative that has gained a huge amount of traction has been Te Kotahitanga. Look at the observation templates and what the TK facilitators do when they observe good practice for Maori students. Interestingly enough what is good practice for Maori students is also good practice for all students. It is a win win situation.

//Ka Hikitia - Managing for Success:// The Māori Education Strategy 2008 - 2012 is the Ministry of Education's approach to improve the performance of the education system for and with Māori. It is a key aspect of having a quality education system where students are succeeding and achieving.
 * [|Ka Hikitia] **

This presentation is from Anne Milne who is the Principal of a school for Maori and Pasifika students in South Auckland. It is very provovocative and challenges a lot of sasumptions.


 * He Kakano**
 * [|He Kakano explained]**
 * A series of video clips that explain what He Kakano is doing**


 * [|Russel Bishop talking about relationships]**

Transcript
Leaders need to create contexts in their schools where teachers can more effectively relate and interact with Māori students. And it’s that ‘chain’, if you like, that creates the setting within which Māori students can improve their learning experiences. The plan of He Kākano is to engage leaders in co-construction meetings, where they’re going to be using evidence of Māori student performance at the school level, at a departmental level, at a classroom level, so that they can determine the best way they can go, by collaborative goal setting, by co-operative goal setting and determine the best way that they can actually change the way the school works, change the way that the departments work, and change the way the classrooms work so they become learning organisations. And so the focus at each of these levels in the school is on learning. The research from the States, particularly led by Richard Elmore and a number of other people in the States that have done work on structural change and or sort of top-down or bottom-up, which is the more effective? They found quite conclusively that schools that responded to bottom-up reform were the schools that made the most progress. And so changing policies and practices and structures and so on in schools, just for the sake of it, is not necessarily much use. For example, the whole ‘Tomorrow’s Schools’ programme is being shown by Kathy Wiley from NZCER to have had no impact upon changing student achievement because it was a top-down idea. And it changed schools, that was what it was about, but if you want to improve student achievement, you bring about change in the classroom, you support changes in pedagogy and then you change the school, the institutional structure - processes, policies and so on - to support what’s going on in the classroom. That’s what brings about, that’s what the research shows, brings about the most effective change for student achievement, improvement.
 * [|School engagement]**

Transcript
We have got a huge political will and we can understand that from Ka Hikitia. We only have to look at the national education guidelines, the national administration guidelines, our new curriculum, to show that there’s a massive will to look at things differently. And I think that what we have in He Kākano, with these schools that are putting up their hand, is saying that yes, we have a will, help us find a way. I think that part of it is about actually understanding and accepting that the answers do reside ultimately within. Professor Smith talked about the 25-year revolution and he was talking about what are the fundamental shifts that have actually happened in this country from 1982, which was the inception of, or at least the instructional embedding of, Kohanga Reo, through to 2007. And he said that the biggest shift was actually two inches and it was between our ears. Alright, and it was about a shift in belief, a shift in values. You can see evidence of that. People are prepared to actually look at a politics of discomfort in a way that they’ve not been prepared to look at before. And I think that what we’re seeing now is principals are for the first time saying that perhaps I don’t know all there is to know, and that sometimes when I say ‘I know’, it’s a very costly exercise because it shuts down the opportunity for other ‘knowings’. When we provide definitive answers, it closes us off to new learning opportunities. I think it is about suggesting to this group here that there is capacity that exists within each of those schools, but that as a leader it’s not just simply about being culturally responsive, it’s not just simply about looking out to what’s happening in the classrooms in these schools, with whānau themselves. There’s a close alignment between what the two groups want, and that is a better educational future for Māori kids. So, to try and facilitate some of those conversations together, so that the journey can be shared and can be taken in ways where the integrity of both is sustained. He Kākano, at the end of the day, we have to work ourselves into a position of being dispensable, not indispensable, because I think that if we continue to be needed in those contexts, in some ways we’ve failed. Because the schools here have a fundamental relationship that is embedded in the context of the communities in which they’re operating, and they’ve got to facilitate an institutional culture that recognises the ability to enhance and to embrace and to recognise diversity in ways that is embedded systemically.


 * wiki on Ka Hikitia**