Interested in exploring a form of learner agency that moves beyond a focus on using it to get better results? This article explores what happened when Year 11 students in a cross-curricular course were granted full control of their learning, and offers three strategies for starting out on a creative-agency ...

The government of Aotearoa New Zealand has recognised the gravity of climate change by adopting a Climate Emergency declaration, passing the Zero Carbon Act (2019), and asking the Climate Change Commission to chart a pathway towards a carbon-zero future. The climate emergency necessitates transformation of the practices and visions of ...

Maths games are fun and engaging, but what messages do these games send to the students in our classrooms? During mathematics lessons children learn more than just mathematics content; they also come to understand what it means to be a learner of mathematics. In this article I discuss the concept ...

School principals were required to engage in crisis leadership throughout New Zealand’s first COVID-19 Alert Level Four lockdown that began in March 2020. Eighteen school principals from a range of secondary schools were interviewed about their experiences and the findings of this study are discussed in relation to the leadership ...

The contributions partial-immersion Māori programmes offer to the wider educational landscape of Aotearoa is essential to Māori achieving as Māori. In this article, partial-immersion settings are defined as Level 2 immersion (51%–80% te reo Māori instruction) and Level 3 immersion (31%–50% te reo Māori instruction). While lower levels of immersion ...

Service is a fundamental value for the teaching of Pacific-heritage learners. This article describes educators’ perspectives of the value of service, one of the values foundational to Tapasā. Findings from interviews, talanoa, and teaching observations show that service is demonstrated and nurtured differently by Pacific and non-Pacific educators, and therefore ...

In this article I explore a challenge identified by teachers involved in a recent research project on curriculum integration. Teachers described this challenge as how to balance the need to “cover” The New Zealand Curriculum with the need to support student agency. I describe how teachers saw this challenge, and ...

Learning in maths is complex because it is a process that involves cognition and the affective domain. Indeed, learners experience many emotions during maths, both positive and negative, which influences their learning. In addition, the learner can believe that one’s capacity to do maths is static and cannot be changed ...

Problem solving is at the heart of mathematics, and is known to support learning for a diverse range of children. However, challenges can be encountered when teaching mathematics through problem solving. This article provides insights from research literature into (a) the nature of the challenges, and (b) some ways that ...