A research project in this early childhood centre investigated the (school) key competency relating to others. The teachers were particularly interested in this key competency because relationships, and the empowerment of children and families, had always been key concepts for the centre. In order to research their understanding of relationships ...

In Europe and the UK there is lively debate about when children should start school and what kinds of curriculum and pedagogical approaches are most effective in the early years. Caroline Sharp of the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) considers some of the most recent research evidence and draws ...

Effective professional development can provide strategies, tools and resources that motivate teachers to make changes for the benefit of children’s and teachers’ learning. This article considers a model of professional development based on distributed leadership. Characteristics that teachers found valuable in enabling them to practise distributed leadership, and the impact on their teaching ...

It was her own three-year stint as head of The University of Auckland’s School of Education that really sparked Viviane Robinson’s interest in leadership. “That sort of experiential, gut-level feeling for it gave me a much stronger sense that there was more to be said about what leadership involved.” Professor ...

The introduction this year of the draft key competencies (paralleling the five strands of Te Whāriki) brings an exciting new development to the early childhood as well as the primary and secondary sectors. This article discusses learning dispositions and their relation to the key competencies, and suggests three ways ...

The editor of Curriculum Matters invites interested people to submit articles (essays, literature reviews, research reports, scholarship and critical comments) in the field of curriculum. The main audience groups for these articles are teachers, teacher educators, graduate students of education and curriculum theorists.

This year, 2020, has been an extraordinary year. It has seen the escalation of COVID-19 to global pandemic status, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Aotearoa New Zealand election in October (delayed by a month due to the COVID-19 pandemic) and the US Presidential election in November. These events highlight a range of issues ...

This article provides an overview and critical analysis of The English Language Learning Progressions (ELLP) (Ministry of Education, 2008). Identifying main themes through critical policy analysis, this review seeks to place ELLP in context through a comparison with The English Language Learning Framework: Draft (Ministry of Education, 2005) and English Language Learning Progressions (ELLP ) ...

In 2018, a research project funded by New Zealand’s Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) explored the impact of online citizen science (OCS) projects on the science education of primary school children in New Zealand. This article provides an in-depth case study from this project in order to share ways in which one teacher ...