“Within our Kāhui Ako we have our Early Childhood education as well as our High School working on this kaupapa as well as the Primary School. So, if we’re all on this journey together we need to be able to gather that evidence to see how we’re going towards our shared vision.”

Tātai Takuira-Mita
Kaihautu Kaiwhakaako Kura Auraki, Fairhaven School
Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke, Across-school Teacher

In this final video, the educational leaders from Te Kāhui Ako o Te Puke and Bethlehem College Chapman offer their reflections on their early experiences learning to use Rongohia te Hau.

Transformative change expertise

The Teacher Professional Learning and Development BES found external expertise to be crucial to deep change in teaching and learning. The educational leaders from Te Puke valued the evidence-based change leadership guidance of the Poutama Pounamu experts:

“… working alongside Poutama Pounamu and having that expert voice as well, it was very, very special.”

Leaia Pelesala
Within school teacher for Te Puke Intermediate

Racism: Taking those blinkers off

The Poutama Pounamu Blended Learning has enabled leaders and teachers to develop a much deeper personal and collective understanding of racism.

“It’s based on years of research but also it’s so well-crafted the way the information is organised and the activities and reflections that you do. And without even knowing it for us anyway, the modules seem to come in a really timely fashion. The first two modules, in particular, are where we spent a lot of time because that is about changing your mind-set, changing your thinking, taking those blinkers off and getting people to look. And it’s an emotional journey.”

Ange McAllister
Fairhaven School, Across-school teacher, Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke

The opportunity to ‘take those blinkers off’ matters for deep change. Shields and Bishop explained:

“…antiracist pedagogy fails because it does not explicitly require educators to confront their own complicity in the continuing educational disparities of minoritized youth. We posit that unless educators are willing to confront their own discursive positioning shaped by decades, often centuries, of societal and cultural assumptions, norms and practices, the deeper structures of disparity and inequality in our education systems will not change. As educators, it is critical to understand how pervasive images of unequal ability, dysfunctional behaviour, or inappropriate outcomes have shaped the ways in which we interact with and teach students from minoritized groups. Educators who recognize the inequitable power arrangements of the status quo begin to acknowledge that instead of finding ways to change the learners, the pedagogical context, or even the institution itself, they must start with themselves. They no longer adopt programs that attempt to address the learning needs of individuals or groups of students that do little more than make them feel better about themselves…”

Shields and Bishop (2006) p.315

Involvement of Iwi

Leaders within Te Kāhui Ako o Te Puke afforded priority to iwi engagement and advice.

“We’ve had people say to us that what makes our Kāhui Ako different to others they have been involved with around the country is the involvement of our iwi and the guidance from kaumātua from the very get go they have been part of building this.”

Tātai Takuira-Mita
Kaihautu Kaiwhakaako Kura Auraki, Fairhaven School
Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke, Across-school Teacher

Effective support for culturally responsive teaching

“It’s actually about getting deeply into the pedagogy to make a difference for the learner.”

Jill Weldon
Principal, Te Puke Intermediate School, Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke Leader

Rongohia te Hau has provided a direct pathway to develop culturally responsive teaching. Recurrent in the history of educational reform is the failure to resource transformative change in teaching. Teaching matters. As Professor Richard Elmore explains:

“…most educational reforms never reach, much less influence, long-standing patterns of teaching practice, and are therefore largely pointless if their intention is to improve student learning.”

Elmore, R. (1996). Getting to scale with good educational practice.
Harvard Educational Review 66 (1), 1-26.

Effective support for professional learning and development

Rongohia te Hau plays a critical role in the learning/unlearning processes to develop culturally responsive teaching.

“And then after that you start getting specific strategies and pedagogy and all the kind of things that you need to be doing to do this justice.”

Ange McAllister
Fairhaven School, Across-school teacher, Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke

Rongohia te Hau is a highly strategic tool because of its adaptive use across the curriculum.

When Rongohia te Hau is used as part of the wider high-impact change process demonstrated in Te Kotahitanga Phase 5, then teachers and leaders were able to access effective support. Such expert support is designed to improve teaching and learning for equity, excellence, belonging and wellbeing. Learner and whānau voice continue to inform quality teaching in changing times.

Effective support for pedagogical leadership

“This is a tool that’s going to help us measure that and be able to get better.”

“While the lead team pulls some bones together and everybody took it out, every staff member in every school got to have a say about the different dimensions and then the different levels of practice, right down to the wording of some things. You know, a single word change that they felt more comfortable with, that got debated and came back to the table… And then the across-school teachers kind of took that and framed it.”

Jill Weldon
Principal, Te Puke Intermediate School, Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke Leader

Rongohia te Hau strategy supports leadership learning and capability to take a strong community-connected pedagogical leadership role; the leadership roles that can have most impact on valued educational outcomes.

Building collective efficacy in culturally responsive teaching across the educational community will, in turn, support leadership.

“The feedback that we’ve got, not just from our within-school leaders but from staff in all our schools was fantastic. We didn’t need to try very hard to get buy-in or ownership because they all helped make it, and right to the very end of the process where there were still little words getting changed and suggestions were taken on board, taken seriously, that was really appreciated. As a Te Puke community we’re all on this journey together.”

Tātai Takuira-Mita
Kaihautu Kaiwhakaako Kura Auraki, Fairhaven School
Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke, Across-school Teacher

Conditions of sufficiency

“We’ve come such a long way but there’s so far to go, and probably if we were going to nail what it is that we’ve achieved in the last two years is actually probably really only the surfacing, the awareness, the recognition and the willingness to go, ok, so we’ve got to do something different.”

Jill Weldon
Principal, Te Puke Intermediate School, Te Kāhui Ako ō Te Puke Leader

In late 2020, Te Kāhui Ako o Te Puke leaders are checking in with their learners, their whānau and their teachers through Rongohia te Hau to inform next steps.

Te Kotahitanga Phase 5 demonstrated exceptional change for Māori enjoying and achieving success as Māori to scale. From school leaders and communities who went on to win education excellence awards, we learned about the conditions for ongoing improvement. The collaborative R & D model of Te Kotahitanga enabled ongoing improvement through understanding what did and did not work, resourcing the conditions of sufficiency for deep change, and listening and responding to tamariki, rangatahi, whānau, teachers, kuia and kaumatua in real time.

In the Summary of Our Education Reports for Māori the Auditor General recommended that:

The Ministry of Education identify and target resources to support the activities that have been the most effective in putting Ka Hikitia into effect.

Office of the Auditor General (p.30)

In times of extraordinary change, listening and responding effectively to learners and whānau in education, matters even more.

Nōreira, atawhaitia ngā rito, kia puāwai ngā tamariki.
Ako i ngā tamariki, kia tu tāngata ai, tātou katoa.

Therefore, cherish and nurture the shoots, so the children will bloom.
Learn from and with these children, so that we all can stand tall.

Berryman, M. (2008).

Find out more

Berryman, M. (2019). Not one generation more. Poutama Pounamu Research and Development Centre.

Berryman, M. (2008). He Mihi. Repositioning within indigenous discourses of transformation and self-determination. (Doctoral dissertation). The University of Waikato, Hamilton.

Berryman, M., Lawrence, D., & Lamont, R. (2018). Cultural relationships for responsive pedagogy: A bicultural mana ōrite perspective. SET: Research Information for Teachers, SET 1.

Berryman, M., Nevin, A., SooHoo, S., & Ford, T. (2015). A culturally responsive framework for social justice. In K. Esposito & A. Normore (Eds.). Inclusive practices for special populations in urban settings: The moral imperative for social justice leadership (pp.143-164). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishers (IAP).

Corlett, M. (2020). Building the moral imperative to do better by Māori students: A Pākehā teacher’s reflection. Set 2. Wellington, New Zealand: NZCER.

Office of the Auditor General. (2016). Summary of our Education for Māori reports. Wellington: Office of the Auditor-General.

Shields, C. & Bishop, R. (2006). Overcoming disparity: Repositioning leadership to challenge the conceptual underpinnings of anti-racist education. In Ross. W. (Ed.), Racism and anti-racism in education (pp. 301–318). Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.

Wearmouth, J., Berryman, M., & Glynn, T. (2013). Culturally responsive approaches to challenging behaviour of minority ethnic students. In T. Cole, H. Daniels & J. Visser (Eds.), The Routledge International Companion to Emotional and Behaviour Difficulties (pp. 280-287). Oxon, England: Routledge.