Balmoral School (TLIF 5-029) - Small village, loud voice Publications
Publication Details
Project Reference: Balmoral School (TLIF 5-029) - Balmoral School was concerned about the relatively low achievement of Pasifika students. The team that led this project wanted to explore the students’ experience of schooling. They theorised that by ‘amplifying’ Pasifika student voice they might provoke a sense of dissonance in teachers, reframing their narrative about what was happening in their classrooms and stimulating changes in practice that would better meet students’ needs.
Author(s): (Inquiry Team) led by Joanna Douglas and Jesse McBride, with Trish Cullen (deputy principal) in support
Date Published: February 2019
Overview
Through a series of cycles, the team developed the Small Village, Loud Practice Tool, an observation tool that incorporates questions to students about their classroom experiences. These sit alongside questions for teachers aimed at prompting critical reflection. Teachers were coached to use the tool in pairs, working through any discomfort elicited by the students’ responses and developing ‘statements of change’ about how they would modify practice to address the issues raised.
We’ve seen teachers and staff do great things in the classroom and in the school but now we need to be moving teachers and staff away from tokenism and to ethical acts of teaching and relationship building. … Tokenism doesn’t create racial equality. Listening, reflecting, confronting, and acting is where the change will happen.
Project leaders, conclusion to final report
The tool proved effective in uncovering aspects of the classroom experience for Pasifika students. By amplifying the voice of Pasifika students, it was possible to explore teacher practice in relationship to what the students identified as enablers or barriers to learning. Use of the tool succeeded in provoking dissonance for the teachers involved and supported them to identify necessary changes in practice. However, without targeted support most teachers were unable to make the changes they had identified. The team learned that ultimately, if the classroom culture is to change, the change also needs to be school-wide approach with investments in time and teacher coaching.
The inquiry story
This inquiry was led by two team leaders, with the school’s deputy principal offering support through collecting and sharing teacher feedback. Over time, it involved teachers and students in four more classes. In each class, it focused upon three students who were either Pasifika or marginalised for other reasons. Student voice was central to the project. The intention was that Pasifika whānau voice would also be collected and shared but, in practice, this was limited to the participation of one parent as the project’s critical friend.
What was the focus?
This project was a response to concern that Pasifika students were over-represented amongst the school’s lowest achieving students. Teachers wondered about the connection between this and how Pasifika students experienced and felt about school. What would happen if they ‘amplified’ Pasifika student voice, making it stronger through asking about their experiences, listening to their responses, and ensuring teachers heard their responses and responded through changes to practice.
The project leaders developed the following innovation statement:
We would like to know whether amplifying Pasifika voice based on their learning experiences will have an impact on the culture of learning in the class through a change in teacher practice in the way teachers relate and interact with students and allow students to relate and interact so that we have positive impact on Pasifika success (well-being, engagement, and academic success).
What did the teachers try?
The project commenced with the project’s external experts and critical friend interviewing groups of students from a range of Pasifika cultures about their experiences at school. This approach ensured that this baseline data, which they called ‘macro voice’, was free of any bias. The students were asked:
- What is it like to be a student at Balmoral School? What does that mean for you as a learner?
- What would you tell your teachers or school that would make learning better?
The findings from both sets of data were confronting, but useful. The experts organised what they heard into ‘enablers’ and ‘barriers’ at both relevant year levels. For example, an enabler included, “Respect is important” and a barrier included, “We are scared of presenting stuff.”
Three themes ran through these responses:
- Relationships from the student point of view
- Learning discourse: what is talked about and with whom
- Equitable challenges: whether students felt challenged in the classroom.
At a similar time, the school’s deputy principal interviewed individual students in the classes of the two project leaders. Three Pasifika students and three non-marginalised students in each class were asked:
- What have you just been learning?
- How do you know you will be successful?
- What are your next steps?
The data from these individual student interviews became part of what came to be called ‘micro student voice’ – the lessons learned from observing and interviewing students in class.
The information gathered in this early phase allowed the project team to begin the task of co-creating the ‘Small Village Loud Voice’ observation tool. This tool was intended to support iterative inquiry into how well teachers were amplifying Pasifika voice. Its use involved teachers pairing up to observe each other, recording the kinds of interactions they saw, interviewing target students, and then reflecting together to identify what needed to change in practice. Teachers were prompted to use what they had heard from their students to identify planned changes to practice in relationship to each of the three themes. The intention was that these would be reviewed and modified or replaced with each new cycle of inquiry.
In its first iteration, the questions for the target students were:
Relationships from the student point of view:
- How has your teacher helped you recently?
- How many times has your teacher spoken to you today? What did you talk about?
- Does your teacher know who you are? How do you know that?
- How do you know you will be successful in what you are learning at the moment? What are your next learning steps?
Equitable challenges:
- Tell us about the last time that you overcame a struggle? When was that?
- Does your teacher show respect and fairness to your whole class? How?
Learning discourse:
- Tell us about who talks to you about your learning? Who would you like to talk about it with? Why them?
The inquiry took a cascade approach. The first peer observations were of the project leads, who were coached by the project’s external experts. The tool was then presented to new teachers who also received coaching, so that finally, five teachers were involved. The school’s deputy principal observed the presentations to new teachers so that the lead team could work on improving this process, as well as the tool. Modifications to the tool over time included:
- Adding a student interaction box that enables observers to tally target students’ interactions with the learning environment; that is, when they were interacting with the teacher, independently, with one other peer, or within a group.
- Modifying questions for students to allow it to be used with students in junior classrooms.
- Adding reflective questions for teachers to press them to seek meaning from the data collected in the tool and use it to create their statements of change. “What did you notice? How would you explain that?” “What does this data suggest needs changing?” “What difference do you believe this will make, and for whom?”
- Assembling the tool into a booklet with pull-out pages.
The team also created a Small Village Loud Voice Teacher Practice poster on which teachers could post their planned actions in relationship to each of the project themes. These intentions were then posted on classroom walls to remind teachers of their intentions.
By the end of the project’s term, disrupted and extended by two pandemic lockdowns, the Small Village Loud Voice tool had moved through five trials and six drafts, and six teachers (including the leaders) had been coached in its use.
What happened as a result of this innovation?
In the first instance, Pasifika student voice was amplified through the focus group and individual student interviews held at the start of the project. The information that was fed back was confronting for the two project leaders whose students these were. It created a sense of cognitive dissonance as they recognised the gap between their espoused beliefs and the ways they perceived what happened in their classrooms and the lived reality for their Pasifika students. However, it galvanised them to invest in the process of designing, reviewing, and re-designing the new tool.
The experience of utilising the tool was similarly confronting for their colleagues. In their reflections, teachers often expressed disappointment and even sorrow that their perceptions were so different from their students. They recognised the need to change and made statements of change, specifying what they would do differently. For example, the realisation that students were following instructions but were not clear about the learning purpose told a teacher that he needed to be more explicit about this and the success criteria.
Analysis of the collated student and teacher voice data revealed that the tool was effective in amplifying Pasifika student voice. The project team identified the following enablers of Pasifika student learning, that they were able to use to code observation transcripts and look for improvements in teacher practice.
1. Relationships from the student point of view:
- Respect is important.
- We like teachers that get to know us.
- We have friends here for us at school.
- Strict Palagi teachers are good.
- Be honest with us.
- Help us if we get the question wrong.
- Have a welcoming teacher when you arrive at school in Year 7.
2. Learning discourse:
- We like teachers that push us to be better.
- Everyone is successful in their own thing.
- Some of us would like to learn more.
- We like helping other Pasifika students.
- Mistakes are good.
3. Equitable challenges.
- Get other students to buddy up and help us.
- It is easier to get help from your friends.
- When we work with our friends, we want to do the work more.
- Tell us what we need to work on.
- Be straight up with us, like our parents.
- We could focus more at school and at home on our learning.
- Some of us have experienced lots of feedback and that helps you to be better.
Unfortunately, when the leaders analysed their findings, they found that only one teacher had made significant improvements in practice. This was a teacher who realised that they needed to get to know their students better and understand the help they needed. Other teachers had been through the dissonance of hearing their students’ voices and had reframed their thinking from deficit to agentic theorising, recognising that responsibility for improved outcomes lay with them and their practice. However, they had not acted on their statements of changed practice.
What did they learn?
Through their iterative inquiry, the project team succeeded in developing a tool that gives teachers the opportunity to listen to Pasifika student voices, reflect on that voice, and be coached into confronting their deficit theorising around that voice. However, they hadn’t supported the teachers to make those changes. The leaders realise that the creation of the tool and the amplification of student voice was not enough. To achieve a significant and sustained impact on Pasifika student success, it is necessary to coach all teachers in use of the tool and to support them to make the changes in practice they identify as their goals.
Inquiry team
This project was led by Joanna Douglas and Jesse McBride, with Trish Cullen (deputy principal) in support.
Siliga Setoga (Balmoral School Pasifika Parents Group) was the project’s critical friend.
Laurayne Tafa (Cognition Education) was the external expert.
For further information
If you would like to learn more about this project, please contact the project leader, Joanna Douglas, at joannas@balmoral.school.nz
Reference list
Bishop, R. (2019). Teaching to the North-East: Relationship-based learning in practice. Wellington: NZCER Press.
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