Te Kotahitanga is a project that seeks to improve the educational achievement of Māori students in mainstream schools. Through interviews with Māori students, their teachers and whānau, the authors learnt about the characteristics of teachers that made a difference. They have drawn these together into the Effective Teaching Profile.

This is one teacher’s story of how connecting her science teaching to the cultural background of her Māori students increased their motivation and enthusiasm. By linking a topic on forest ecology with the students’ existing interest in the school’s new tuata (carved ceremonial post), she was able to develop a ...

This article presents Te Pikinga ki Runga: Raising Possibilities, a framework for teachers and special-education practitioners working with Māori students who are presenting with challenges. It draws on the work of leading Māori educationalists to offer a kaupapa Māori approach that can be applied in practice.

There is little research about the experiences of students in Māori-medium education learning mathematics. This article reveals what these students see as their teacher’s role, and the advice that they’d give to other students making the transition to secondary school.

Sometimes a test can be too easy for some or all of the test takers, resulting in a large number of perfect or near-perfect scores. When this happens the test results are sometimes described as suffering from a “ceiling effect”. Although it can compromise the usefulness of a set of ...

Male teachers, school fires, science education, raising possibilities for Māori students, John Hattie on teacher effectiveness—these are all part of the rich smorgasbord of articles in this issue of set: Research Information for Teachers. There are plenty of research “calories” here.

The feature section on Māori Achievement, while not offering ...

Three key messages:

1. The more leaders focus on the core business of improving teaching and learning, the bigger their impact on student outcomes.
2. The self-managing school model should not be treated like a sacred cow—it needs to evolve to meet current needs.
3. Effective school leadership resides in the leadership team ...

It’s normal for children approaching adolescence to experiment with sexual behaviour. With a small proportion of children, though, this behaviour is inappropriate or even disturbing. This study explores the experiences of Years 7 and 8 teachers in identifying and dealing with inappropriate sexual behaviour, and asks what additional support teachers ...

Starting teaching in a new country and a new culture is like being a beginning teacher again. If you come from a Confucian culture where teachers are automatically respected, the New Zealand classroom comes as a shock. How do teachers from Japan survive, adapt and thrive in New Zealand schools ...

Assumptions about disability play a key role in how disabled students are treated at school. Using a case study as a focus, Bernadette Macartney argues that every child has the right to be viewed holistically, because taking a deficit view creates barriers to their full participation at school.