You're my favourite class, too

A New Plymouth councillor has recently been widely criticised for his comments about Te Reo and questioning whether there is value in promoting it. This condemnation is not surprising. We expect the councillor, as someone in a public role, to have greater sensitivity and awareness of cultural matters and their importance to New Zealand. Within the classroom, teachers should show daily their understanding of indigenous knowledge and cultural responsiveness. There continues to be a disparity between Māori and non-Māori students. Savage et. al. (2011) attribute this to the domination of Pākehā culture and western practices in the education system. Culturally responsive pedagogy means contextualising learning to meet students' "cultural forms, behaviours and processes" (Savage, et.al., 2011, p. 2). Likewise, Bishop et. al. (2007) identify culturally responsive teachers as being those who "care for students as culturally located individuals" (p. 11). The adapted...

My parents both worked two jobs to make ends meet and while I was aware of this struggle growing up, they made every effort not to let our financial status impact on my education. I can only imagine the late night budgeting and hair pulling my mother went through to make this happen for me and my brother. Although my parents sheltered me, I'm very aware that family income does come into play when we talk about student success and engagement, and that there are students in front of me every day whose family find school expenses difficult to meet or whose income affects their learning outcomes. Our school's culture is influenced by " its history, context and the people in it" (Stoll, 1998). I teach in a Decile 6 school. According to the Regional Economic Activity Report,  in 2015 the average household income was $81,867, which is $10,000 less than the average of all of New Zealand. The Environmental Health Indicators New Zealand  break this down further, and show t...

My cultural perspective is undeniably Pakeha-dominated. My parents (and their parents, and their parents' parents) were working class of European descent. Although I am empathetic towards issues of cultural bias, I know that will always benefit from 'white privilege'. Likewise. my children, whose whakapapa traces back to Hoturoa, commander of the Tainui waka, will also know that privilege due to their blue eyes and pale skin which scream Pakeha. At least two of the Practising Teacher Criteria  explicitly refer to showing commitment to and working within a bicultural context. My school does make concerted efforts to incorporate Maori culture into our teaching practices, including the use of te reo, references to Maori world views and cultural practises. There is room to develop our multiculturalism, though. How does our school culture reflect the growing numbers of Filipino students or our Chinese fee-paying students? There is great value in diversity. Within...

My junior classes (Year 9 and 10) have been doing creative writing the past week or so. The focus for both classes has been to start with describing a place and then put a person into the scene, describing how he or she got there and feels about where they are. It's the first formal (as in assessed) piece of writing that the Year 9 class have done, but the second time round for this Year 10 class. Their first efforts were mixed, and I really wanted to lift their use of language techniques to create a more authentic-sounding and evocative piece of writing. The structured and tiered writing response has worked really well, and I can see a significant lift in the sophistication of language and sentence structures. The Mindlab sessions using Scratch have had me thinking more about how I can incorporate digital storytelling into my classes, so doing creative writing has been excellent timing. Students will be recreating their written description as a visual text, using Scratch. I...

Do you think of yourself as someone who can programme a computer? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jRREn6ifEQ In this TED Talk, Linda Liukas discusses the poetry of programming.  A couple of years ago I had a go at the Python coding challenge through Grok, alongside several students in the school.  I didn't see poetry in the programming. I saw lots and lots of numbers and symbols that I had to arrange in a very precise way in order to make things work and on top of that I had to use mathematical formulas to solve problems and that really threw me. Thinking about it now, of course, I can see the parallels. There is a synchonicity and precision required to write both programmes and poetry and there As frustrating as the process was, though, it was exciting when those algorithms worked and I could make the computer do something that I had instructed. It's been the same when I've experimented with Scratch - but probably more exciting because of it's visual na...

I've seen growth mindset discussed at various times in forums such as Twitter. The concept interested me so I had done a wee bit of research on what it was, although that was admittedly as far as I went. The traditional view of intelligence was that it is innate and there is nothing you can do about it, no matter how hard you work. I see this attitude reflected at various times in my classroom by students who think that they, for example, find creative writing difficult and so put little effort into producing finished work, or they struggle with aspects of grammar but don't try to figure out the rules and apply them to their work. I have been guilty of a similar attitude towards Maths, and have caught myself making comments along the lines of I suck at it, therefore someone else solve the problem for me. With the Maths thing, though, I've become more conscious of what I say because I have a daughter who I want to encourage into STEM and I realise that how I role mod...