Effective Teaching  practice 

The recipe for success

"It is the positive interaction between these two variables that creates the conditions within which Māori students are able to  become successful learners" (Bishop 2023:p7) 

These teachers are located in the North-East of the scatterplot; they score high in both successful relationships and employ effective pedagogies. 

 As per the image above, in his work on the Te Kotahitanga project, many teachers were located in the South- East; that is they were able to have successful relationships with students but not implement effective teaching pedagogy with fidelity. 

Bishop makes this point - it is not a dichotomy  - we need both high levels of observable caring and learning relationships (whanaungatanga) AND high levels of effective pedagogies (effective teaching practices). 

Now in Leading to the North-East (2023), he demonstrates how North-East leaders ensure teachers are able to implement and sustain the North-East relationship-based pedagogy with fidelity by- :

• - setting goals for equity, excellence, and cultural sustainability 

• - implementing a pedagogic approach that ensures these goals are realised

• - implementing in-school support systems that ensures the pedagogy is implemented with fidelity over time—these systems include infrastructure, leadership, inclusion, and evidence

• - taking ownership of the approach by planning, resourcing, and reviewing teaching and school-wide leadership practices to ensure support systems work as intended, over time

The book includes three case studies that demonstrate how this process of reform was able to successfully raise Māori student achievements to match that of their non-Māori peers, enable Māori students to do so “as Māori”, and benefit other marginalised students.

Key areas to plan for 

Bishop (2023) identifies some key areas to ensure embedded effective pedagogy: 

• ensuring formative assessment is part of explicit teaching delivery (Explicit instruction does have more likelihood  due to much more student responses able to be used for feedback loops, in fact explicit teaching methods are designed with assessment built in) 

• providing on-going PLD support for teachers to implement with fidelity (more likely now the MOE is providing training but crucial that resourcing is given to this by schools) 

• moving beyond the teaching of the mechanics of literacy practices to the use of these for learning (this is more likely if students are able to be fluent in the mechanics first and teachers teach right across the reading and writing ropes) 

Implementation fidelity is likened by Bishop to the Māori concept of tikanga. Tika being the right or correct way to do something.