Ua Aoina le Manogi o le Lolo: Pasifika Schooling Improvement Research - Summary Report

5. Case Studies

The Case Studies were designed to answer questions about effective practices with Pasifika students for achieving positive learning outcomes and by implication the barriers to achieving positive learning outcomes.

In-depth analyses of interviews with Principals and Literacy Leaders, observations of classroom instruction (3 lessons from two teachers in each school), interviews with students (a total of 57 students) and parent interviews (a total of 28 parents) were taken from four schools (two primary and two secondary). Additional interviews and observations were available from two further schools which had incomplete achievement databases. The four schools were well functioning schools in well developed Schooling Improvement clusters. The two further schools were not in Schooling Improvement but were chosen for ‘positive deviance’ (a term borrowed from the medical research literature to mean positive examples against the trend); that is they were very effective schools judged by achievement data and other educational indicators such as student engagement in the school.

Four general hypotheses were tested through the Case Studies. However, the schools were not compared directly, rather they were used to exemplify an emerging model of effectiveness and their individual and collective attributes were linked to the hypotheses. Given that for four schools there was achievement data over two years which provided evidence for both rate and level of students’ achievement, we have made judgements about the emergent model using the trends between the higher achieving schools and lower achieving schools (each of which were well functioning schools) to plot the pattern of development of the model. This ‘emergent model’ design is used to propose answers to the question of what works for higher achievement by Pasifika students, at a school and classroom level within schools.

5.1 What Works for Higher Achievement by Pasifika Students at a School and Classroom Level?

There were four hypotheses developed from the literature review (see the full report) on what works for higher achievement by Pasifika students at a school and classroom level:

• Hypothesis One: The presence of significant and wide ranging two way connections between schools and their communities
• Hypothesis Two: The presence of inquiry processes and collective efficacy coherently embedded into practices
• Hypothesis Three: The presence of high quality instruction that is culturally responsive
• Hypothesis Four: There would be attributes of Pasifika learners that would be related to achievement.

Hypothesis One: Two way connections between schools and their communities

The theoretical hypothesis was that effective schools will have well developed connections with communities and families. The connections would be reciprocal, that is, with considerable flow of information both ways, some of which are described below. In addition, consistent with the Pasifika Education Plan and the research literature, there would be a range of types of parent involvement, from volunteering, participating in decision making, and communicating with the school to active academic support including involvement with homework.

The Case Studies do, in fact, indicate that the four schools are developing such connections. They also show that greater effectiveness is associated with practices between schools and their communities that involve widespread sharing of knowledge and resources with a degree of reciprocity, with the specific outcome of increasing parent involvement, which may then impact upon students’ motivation and academic skills. Schools had developed, to varying degrees, strategies to involve parents. The more developed schools (in terms of the emergent model) had strategies for involving parents that went considerably beyond what might be described as ‘information dumping’. They viewed their parents and the community as essential resources for their children’s learning and success at school.

The more advanced primary school in this area (which had the highest levels of achievement, between stanine 4 and 5 in reading comprehension) had multiple well planned and monitored strategies which included all the types identified in recent reviews of parent involvement that impact upon motivation and academic skills, and have been related to academic achievement (Epstein, Coates, Salinas, Sanders & Simon, 1997). They included strategies for academic support at home and at school (the school has a community initiative around Parents as Reading Tutors (PART) which involves parents assisting as reading tutors using the pause, prompt, praise programme). This type of connection extended to parent involvement in academic skills throughout the school, for example, with struggling students. The school has an English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) programme for students struggling academically and employs parents from the community as teacher aides as part of the PART programme.

The information flow is designed so that it is usable by the parents. They have identified their key ethnic groups and harnessed the cultural and pedagogical expertise of their Pasifika teachers and leaders in their communities to communicate with parents, share the achievement data, and disseminate in their language strategies other parents can use to support their children’s literacy and numeracy development.

[We identify] key parent leaders, and then provide those key parents with strategies that we've focused purely around literacy and numeracy. So a few of the sessions were providing those key parent strategies that we use within the school around literacy and them being able to deliver that in their home languages to the parents. And… being able to do that has seen the school have more parent involvement because it's almost like the school is saying that we acknowledge that [they have a part to play]. [Principal: Case Study School 3]

The parents’ cultural resources are used through contributions to the development of topics in the curriculum planning. Pasifika parents are involved in more traditional ways too. For instance, their expertise is recognised and utilised to assist with cultural activities, arts and school sports.

For this school, parent involvement is not seen as an added extra or useful adjunct to core business. Parents are seen as a key resource and central to students’ achievement gains. Similarly, parents saw their role as one which should complement the school’s role. They understood the importance of the work the school is doing and their role in supporting the school in raising achievement for their children.

There are greater constraints in secondary schooling, such as multiple teachers with any one student and specialist content area teaching and learning that are challenges to high levels of interconnectedness. However, in the more advanced secondary school (Year 9 and 10 Pasifika students were on average close to the norm in reading comprehension) the Principal had thought strategically about involvement and close connectedness. This had come after a series of ‘hit and miss’ strategies with different literacy leaders at different times, where they had not been able to identify strategies that would encourage parents to participate. Her view was that this was because the initial focus was only directed inward - on strategies and programmes to be developed for achievement of students - and not on strategies to increase connection.

The particular strategies that we’ve used to meet the needs of Pacific Nations students have really developed over time. Because we really, I think we just didn’t understand how deeply we had to delve into this. I think people had been lulled into a false sense of security with the literacy across the, language across the curriculum that everyone used to do. And sort of thought that that was what it would be all about. [Principal: Case Study School 2]

In this secondary school there were several programmes designed to increase connections. For example, the delivery of information about asTTle to parents and the community extended to much more focused events during an informal barbecue. There were classroom-specific activities where Form teachers held term meetings with their parents in small groups, creating opportunities for parents to talk one-on-one about analyses of achievement and the focus for the following term. A wider community connection occurred in a yearly Fono at which achievement data were again discussed, with the help of a translator. There are mentoring schemes run by community members – one for Year 12 - 13 and one for Year 10 students. There was evidence that the parents felt they were not given specific information about how to help support their children academically or how the school could learn from the parents about cultural and linguistic backgrounds and resources.

The two other schools were working on more deliberate strategies. In both there had been a strong emphasis on parents being responsible for attendance – which for Case Study School 4 was a substantial problem in the upper levels. The provision of achievement data and the deliberate designing of more interactive fora to discuss this were stronger in the primary school, and the school had recognised that a unidirectional transmission model was not effective:

On the one hand we were saying, “We want to share with you and talk with you and invite you into the school,” and then in practice what we were doing was, “Yeah come and sit down and I’m going to tell you what happens and when I’m finished speaking you can go home and sort it out.” [Principal: Case Study School 1]

Given this realisation (which had come from the Home School Partnership model), school meetings with parents are now run by a group of teachers and parents who have a shared role. Discussion groups based on ethnicity are formed and the discussion is shaped by a set of questions. The Literacy Leader commented that some really good ideas have come from this change. The school is planning new initiatives. A new development is a group of parents who are to review how the school reports to parents.

Three conclusions are suggested by the Case Studies:

• Teachers have a role to play in fully informing parents about children’s learning. Parents’ understanding of information about their own individual child’s learning and achievement, both strengths and weaknesses as well as progress across time, can increase parental impact on motivation and skills. Parents expressed a need to have this information:
  

  [Translation] Teachers say to me that everything is alright with my child. He listens too. I hear too that he does everything he’s asked to do. He helps other children most of the time and helps other teachers with sports and the like. [But in terms of] the exact academic weakness [her child] there is no specific identification of that or in what subject… only that everything is alright. [Samoan Parent: Case Study 1]·

• Teachers are seen by parents as key informants about what parents might do to help their children’s achievements. Parents need guidance and advice on both motivational and academic involvement:
  

  It’s just that some parents say that teachers should be able to give examples of homework and how it should be done so that parents could follow it. [Pasifika Parent: Case Study 2]

• Parents are keen to receive advice and they have ideas about practices both at home and at school that could contribute:
  

  [Translation] I wish they [the school] could teach the children other words [synonyms] for maths concepts e.g., ‘minus’ for subtraction; ‘multiply’ for times and that sort of thing. Because when I say minus, he doesn’t even know what that meant. And he looks at me as if I’m stupid. [laughter] [Samoan Parent: Case Study 3]

While it is as yet unclear how these practices impact upon student achievement, they can be the basis of reciprocal information flow.

Hypothesis Two: Inquiry processes and collective efficacy

It was predicted that effective schools would have robust and well developed inquiry processes operating which would have become core practice of the professional community (e.g., McNaughton & Lai, 2009). Interventions where inquiry processes have been central show improvement for their predominantly Pasifika student population with gains of up to one year in addition to expected national progress (Lai, McNaughton, Amituanai-Toloa, Turner, & Hsiao, 2009). A strong inquiry process is associated with a strong collective sense of efficacy held within the professional learning community.

Our hypothesis about developing inquiry practices that are evidence-based and outcomes-focused was well illustrated in the Case Studies. Each of the Case Study Schools was engaged in clusters of Schooling Improvement which focused on inquiry and it would be expected that these practices would be in place. But the schools varied in how deeply ingrained, extensive and coherent their practices were.

The patterns in the emerging model suggest that greater coherence in the practices (that is greater shared beliefs, goals, knowledge and ways of teaching and assessing) will be associated with greater effectiveness. Coherent practices matter: (a) between levels in the schools, across members of the school professional community, and between different instructional parts including teachers; (b) for new members of the system so that detailed induction as a member to share values and skills is important; and (c) so that all programmes – existing and new – are integrated into the inquiry practices and are ‘tested’ by the inquiry process. The two primary schools were particularly advanced.

We have cluster wide induction. A lot of it is around analysing the data… it doesn’t matter whether you are a beginning teacher or an experienced teacher… then our, they used to be called staff meetings, we now call them professional discussion forums – PDFs - also centre on building that, that kind of pastoral side or it but there’s also getting the classroom culture and the learning culture going… Then new teachers have their release, senior teachers are released a whole day a week to work with teachers and tutor teachers also get release time. [Literacy Leader: Case Study School 1]

I think the effectiveness comes from the fact that we participate in the PD [professional development], we participate in the clustering and then it’s brought back to school and it’s followed up, so we don’t just go to the PD, come back, that’s done, out of the way…what happens is we come back together, we plan and how that PD is going to be effectively implemented in our classrooms and it happens on a school-wide basis, so everybody is doing and saying the same thing. [Literacy Leader: Case Study School 3]

The coherence between teachers appears to be especially significant in the evidence so that there is consistency in pedagogical approaches as well as in focus and goals.

Hypothesis Three: Quality instruction that is culturally responsive

Our theoretical view was that in effective schools there would be evidence for generically high quality instruction. But we also had the view that a generic feature of high quality instruction would be that it was culturally responsive. That is, distinctively effective ‘Pasifika pedagogical styles’ would reflect the generic need to have culturally responsive features in instruction. In the case of Pasifika students, like Māori students, that would be reflected not only in the deliberate use of background knowledge and styles of interacting, but also in evidence for mutual respect and positive relationships. We make the point that Pasifika is a complex group of ethnic groups and that we do not attempt to define a pedagogy that is generic to all of the groups.

Within the schools there was ambiguity in how terms such as ‘cultural responsiveness’ and ‘Pasifika pedagogy’ are used, and there is a need to clarify more specifically what is meant by these terms. The schools, to varying degrees, taught using generically effective forms of instruction, but they also realised that they adapted them to be applicable to and responsive to different Pasifika learners. Quality measures of classroom instruction were all relatively high as would be expected from these schools and the differences between teachers were not related systematically to either rate of gain or level of achievement in individual classrooms. However, when averaged, there was evidence that the teachers’ measures of instructional quality and cultural responsiveness were associated with overall school achievement. The schools with the consistently highest scores for teachers had higher overall school achievement levels and moderate to high rates of gain. This suggests that coherence in instruction and cultural responsiveness in schools may be more important to a school’s effectiveness than individual teachers’ specific practices.

It is possible to identify elements of the pedagogical model that is emerging in the schools. Schools are effective to the degree that they use known features of quality instruction, such as explicit instruction for basic knowledge and strategies, high levels of elaborative talk and inquiry (more frequently observed in primary classrooms), a strong focus on the language needs including those for vocabulary and there are well developed forms of feedback. Running across these is the need to be clear about activities, and explain goals and needs for learning. On the other hand, specific dimensions of cultural responsiveness are clearly part of more effective teaching. The twin dimensions of positive relations and incorporating students’ resources were identified to varying degrees in classrooms.

In Case Study School 2 there was a deliberate focus on Pasifika learning and achievement. The Principal believed that a distinctive pedagogy was developing comprised of an amalgam of elements: a new inquiry focus drawn from Te Kotahitanga (Bishop, et al., 2003) and explicit instruction in literacy content and features, such as main ideas and use of text structure (and this was borne out in the observations in classrooms). It was in part content-based drawing on text resources such as having Pasifika writers coming to read their published works. The push in reading included buying many new books and short stories that had a Pacific nation focus for SSR. Other prongs of the coherent set of strategies included a Literacy Leader visiting every Year 9 class to read a book in Samoan, explaining how she worked out some meaning from her limited knowledge of Samoan as a means of modelling how to get the gist and making an ‘informed guess’. Other strategies included group-based work to shared knowledge and an understanding of the socialisation of Pasifika girls.

Similarly in Case Study School 3 the selection and use of particular texts enabled background knowledge and cultural resources to be incorporated and built upon. The two teachers observed drew on familiar artefacts (e.g., colour of the Tongan flag) and experiences (e.g., a barbecue at beach with Church) to activate and build vocabulary, background knowledge and thematic understandings in both poem writing and reading comprehension. In addition, observer notes included comments on how positive, respectful, and reciprocal the relationships were. Teachers were very accepting but not at the cost of being uncritically affirming.

Importantly, each of these elements was echoed in the students’ comments which in the following quote include explicit and personalised instruction.

She can help us in many different ways like if we’re stuck on a maths problem, she tells us different ways to solve it or a faster way to solve it, and writing, we always stick in worksheets, like a structure, and then when we look at our work and we don’t know what to do, we just flip back to the structure to look at it. [Student: Case Study School 3]

The dimensions also were identified strongly by secondary school students, both positively (when referring to liked teachers) and negatively. In the latter case students referred to limited use by teachers of the students’ own knowledge, to not finding topics interesting because their teachers don’t relate to things that interested them, to not having their opinions listened to, and to needing more elaborative and inquiry oriented talk.

The emerging Pasifika pedagogies also include a strong emotional relationship which, together with the instructional attributes, has elements of being both rigorous and challenging as well as being respectful and empathetic. The former includes encoding of the high expectations and the latter a Pasifika sense for the students of education being service-oriented and, from the teacher, positive affect expressed with devices such as Pasifika-oriented humour. The sense of teachers being like family and being able to balance rigorous and challenging instruction with having fun was universally referred to by the students.

In some regards (e.g. wanting high expectations, mutual respect, and an inquiry orientation) the secondary Pasifika student voices were very similar to those of the Māori students from the Te Kotahitanga project (Bishop et al., 2003) but the adaptations suggested in this study include a need for teachers to provide a strongly supportive base enabling the students to take risks, and be critical and engaged. The evidence here supports previous research showing Pasifika learners to be generally highly motivated to succeed and to learn across the schools, particularly at primary level. Students were more consistently positive and motivated at primary schools as illustrated by students at Case Study School 3 who liked being at schoolbecause it was connected with their family life: “you can learn heaps and go home and tell your parents about it”, “you learn [even] more than what you learn at home”. One student said “I don’t like to miss school even if I’m sick. This school makes me feel safe and I love the school more than my family.” Another thought school is “very cool, cause you get to learn lots of good things. You get to know other things that you didn’t know before, make new friends.” She said she is happy to come to school because if she were to stay at home she believes she would “have nothing to do”.

Hypothesis Four: Pasifika learner attributes

The students themselves are sources of variance in achievement (Hattie, 2009). That is, attributes of the students including their own beliefs and values, as well as cultural and linguistic resources influence teacher ability to engage in effective learning and instruction. Given the limited amount of existing evidence, however, our predictions were deliberately open-ended.

Looking at language status from the point of view of achievement, there was no evidence for the Case Studies that having two or more languages is an impediment to high success either at primary or at secondary. The patterns of achievement over time may look different for those students with a Pasifika language or both a Pasifika and English language background in the earlier years, compared with English only students. But from the middle and upper primary and into the secondary years the sense is that bilingualism may (under important conditions not tested here, such as level of bilingualism) lead to similar outcomes as having a strong English-only status, and in a wider sense confer other advantages. There is perhaps an obvious suggestion in the data that more familiarity with the New Zealand education system is advantageous and we take this to mean that there is a need to have very explicit induction and support to develop the knowledge and skills required for success in the New Zealand education system and in local schooling, especially for newly arrived students.

As noted above, some differences between students’ motivation at primary school and secondary school were found, and this reflects a general finding (Paris & McNaughton, in press). Like the more general need, Schooling Improvement will need to consider how to increase engagement and emotional connection at secondary levels.