Responsive Practice

Domain 4: Indicators and examples of effective practice

The curriculum is enabling and future focused and is intended to promote self-efficacy. This requires a learner-centred approach, where teachers choose contexts and design learning opportunities in discussion with their students, and support them to work collaboratively on challenges and problems set in real-world contexts.

Responsive curriculum incorporates connections to students’ lives, prior understandings, and out-of-school experiences. It draws on and adds to parent, whänau, and community funds of knowledge. Student identities, languages and cultures are represented in materials used in the enacted curriculum. Cultural and linguistic diversity are viewed as strengths to be nurtured.

Seven core principles for designing learning environments that support the opportunity to learn:

1. the learner is at the centre, active engagement is encouraged and learners develop understandings of themselves as learners
2. the social and often collaborative nature of learning is recognised and well-organised; cooperative learning is actively encouraged
3. learning professionals are highly attuned to learners’ motivations and the importance of emotions
4. opportunities to learn are acutely sensitive to individual differences including in prior knowledge
5. learning is demanding for each learner but without excessive overload
6. assessment for learning with a strong emphasis on formative feedback is used
7. horizontal connectedness across areas of knowledge and learning activities, as well as to the community and the wider world, are strongly promoted.

Quality of teaching is a major determinant of outcomes for diverse students: what teachers know and do is one of the most important influences on what students learn.

In New Zealand, education environments that reflect a Mäori worldview and ways of working (for example, with respect to whanaungatanga and ako) offer significantly enhanced learning opportunities for all students. By observing effective teachers of Mäori students, initiatives such as Te Kotahitanga and Kia Eke Panuku have been able to identify the dimensions of practice that create a culturally responsive classroom or school.

Te Kotahitanga effective teaching profile:

Effective teachers of Mäori students create a culturally appropriate and responsive context for learning in their classroom. They do this in the following observable ways:

Manaakitanga: they care for the students as culturally located human beings above all else.

Mana motuhake: they care for the performance of their students.

Whakapiringatanga: they are able to create a secure, well managed learning environment by incorporating routine pedagogical knowledge with pedagogical imagination.

Wänanga: they are able to engage in effective teaching interactions with Mäori students as Mäori.

Ako: they can use a range of strategies that promote effective teaching interactions and relationships with their learners.

Kotahitanga: they promote, monitor and reflect on outcomes that in turn lead to improvements in educational achievement for Mäori students.

Quality teaching for diverse (all) learners:

1. focus on valued student outcomes – kia arotahia ngä hua äkonga uara nui
2. use knowledge, evidence, and inquiry to improve teaching – ko te mätauranga, te taunakitanga me te uiui hei whakapai ake te whakaako
3. select, develop, and use smart tools and worthwhile tasks – ngä taputapu ngaio me ngä mahi whaikiko – whiria, mahia
4. ensure sufficient and effective opportunities for all students to learn – rau te ako, rau te mahi tötika, rau te hua
5. develop caring, collaborative learning communities that are inclusive of diverse (all) learners – he piringa tauawhi, he piringa mahitahi, he pringa tauakoako, he piringa äkonga rerekura (katoa)
6. activate educationally powerful connections to learners’ knowledge, experiences, identities, families, whänau, iwi, and communities – whakatere hono äkonga torokaha, äkonga tü kaha
7. scaffold learning and provide appropriate feed forward and feedback on learning – te ako poutama
8. be responsive to all students’ learning, identities, and wellbeing – me aro ki te hä o te äkonga
9. promote thoughtful learning strategies, thoughtful discourse, and student self-regulation – takina te Wänanga
10. use assessment for learning – te aromatawai i roto i te ako

Alton-Lee, A.(2012)

Effective teaching requires deep and flexible knowledge of subject matter, how students learn, and curriculum-specific pedagogy. It is this knowledge and expertise that enables teachers to use formative assessment effectively to improve learning and to develop students’ capacity to evaluate their own and others’ work.

Effective use of formative assessment can have a significant influence on student outcomes so it is important that teachers ‘see their fundamental role as evaluators and activators of learning’.

Teachers need to be data literate:

Data literacy for teaching is the ability to transform information into actionable instructional knowledge and practices by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting all types of data (assessment, school climate, behavioural, snapshot, moment-to-moment, and so on) to help determine instructional steps. It combines an understanding of data with standards, disciplinary knowledge and practices, curricular knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, and an understanding of how children learn.

They also need to be sufficiently knowledgeable about and confident with current technologies to be able to use them effectively to support innovative teaching and create new opportunities to learn.

Hattie describes feedback as one of the most powerful factors in academic learning and achievement. It is associated with an effect size of 0.73. The average yearly effect or gain from a year’s schooling is 0.40.

Adaptive expertise

To be able to promote the wellbeing, achievement and progress of all their students and prepare them for living in the world they will encounter as adults, teachers need adaptive expertise.

Adaptive expertise is a fundamentally different way of conceptualising what it means to be a professional. Its defining characteristic is the ability to respond flexibly in complex contexts:

Adaptive experts know when students are not learning, know where to go next, can adapt resources and strategies to help students meet worthwhile learning intentions, and can recreate or alter the classroom climate to attain these learning goals.

Adaptive experts apply deep conceptual knowledge to problems not previously encountered and develop new solutions and approaches. This flexible, innovative application of knowledge is what lies beneath their ability to learn and refine their understanding on the basis of continuing experience. Being able to work in a collaborative environment enhances the development of adaptive expertise.

Adaptive experts engage in ongoing inquiry with the aim of building knowledge. This is the core of professionalism.