Keynote - Part 5

Transcript

Dr Mere Berryman
Te Kotahitanga took a new look. Officially I was a Ministry person so you can see in the middle there the orange, that marked me as I’m part of this Te Kotahitanga, I’m part of this whānau but actually I’m not part of this whānau. That’s when Pete came into our lives, didn’t she Russell, she sort of smartened us up a bit, gave us the corporate look. And we have to acknowledge her for that because boy did Russell and I need somebody like Pete.

All the time we’re remembering that it is Māori at the very centre and our kuia and koroua keep reminding us of that. And the photograph down, here on this side, was the launching of Culture Speaks. We got sick of you know getting the photocopier, I’d hate to have thought if we didn’t have photocopiers if it was still the bander, sorry if you’re far too young to remember bander machines. You know we’d have to get ready for a, um yeah that’s right, we’d have to get ready for a hui, and what we’d have to do is actually photocopy the books. Well we fixed that up and we were about to hand them out when, and we’re at Huria Marae there, when our kuia koroua said “no, no, you just don’t hand them out, you’ve got to bless them, they’re a taonga, they’re going back out to the people”. And so to have that support, that cultural support of Russell and I, and Pete, is absolutely very important.

And I put the last photograph up there for two reasons. One is that there’s the person who Te Arani replaced, up there with another person that you’ll recognise on the Scaling Up Reform book, Dominic O’Sullivan and Titahi Tarawa. So many people have been in Te Kotahitanga and when you get touched by this you know you don’t just tick it off as something that you’ve done. This whole notion of culturally responsive pedagogy of relations, again that was in Culture Counts. Russell theorised about that before Te Kotahitanga came to being, and I guess again what we have learnt is how important each of those elements is and continues to be. One of the things that came out of Phase 3 schools was Anjali’s video. One of the things that’s going to come out of Phase 4 schools is another raft of teacher DVDs showing what culturally responsive pedagogy of relations, what the effective teaching profile looks like in practice.

File footage
(Teacher)

Where in here does it say I’m happy?

(Student)

The colours are zigzaggy.

(Teacher)

Thank you, yes, so you take the message…

(Teacher)

I walk into the classroom my movie is already playing, I’ve planned my lesson, I see my lesson , I know how my lesson is going to go, or so I think. I know what I want but what I wanted and what I was getting was two different things. I started to wonder why my teaching wasn’t effective; I was losing my students a lot of the time. My students weren’t engaged in what they were doing. They were getting restless and it was through talking with our Te Kotahitanga staff that I started to really think about what it was I was doing in my classroom. When I took on board some of the observations that were done on my teaching it was a wakeup call. I re-thought my lessons, I re-planned my lessons, dissected them and started to chunk them into what was more appropriate for my students. Because I knew my students well but I didn’t know me well. It wasn’t until I knew what I was doing that I could become more effective in what I was doing with the students. I realised that students have a attention span of about seven minutes of listening to a teacher ramble, so I had to watch my timing and it wasn’t until I actually effected that that my students actually started to ask me questions.
What are you trying to say to me?

(Student)

Like um the red doesn’t tell me what’s simple about the bobsled and the gold.

(Teacher)

They had the power to think but only when you put forward a question that feeds their mind and starts a little, a little flame and then the flame will grow bigger. When I question, if I get a yes/no answer I know my question’s not good.

(Teacher)

What colour, if you were going to ask them to change it …

(Teacher)

It’s delving into what they know. First finding out what they know, if they’re lost then I re-phrase my question, if they’re lost with that then I’ll re-phrase it again. They can ask me ‘well what is it that you mean fire’ and I can say to them, ‘well what do you mean?’ And then we suddenly both have a click moment and we both go ‘oh I see’ and they go ‘oh I see’, I’ve learned something and they’ve learned something. And I say to them ‘ if an employer came up to and said what is your strength, what can you say? What is your weakness, what will you say?’ When we’re working we constantly need to look at what we are doing and we need to appraise what we are doing, we need to reflect on what we’re doing, we need to say what we have done well or what we can do better.

(Student)

In the words blush, black and faun I like it because you made it stand out.

(Teacher)

If you’re pairing and you pair two friends together, sometimes it doesn’t work because the honesty factor falls out. I like to pair out of comfort zones. I have always discovered that when I do the cross-gender, the honesty factor works. When they can connect to the real world, that’s when you see achievement levels also start to shoot up. When they can see that what they’re doing has a purpose. A lot of the time students have said to me ‘oh why are we learning this?’ Now that we’ve made connections in our learning, they look at the world differently, they watch TV differently, they watch movies differently, they see the wider picture.

(VOICEOVER)

Principal Allan Liddle stops by just in time to see students bringing their own prior knowledge and experiences to their learning of spelling, in the form of the purposeful use of cell phones.

(Teacher)

Okay the word of the day is “static”, as fast as you can, must be the correct spelling, and GO!

(VOICEOVER)

The student’s expertise with cell phones also provide Patsy an opportunity to become a learner herself.

(Teacher)

Before I even get the second letter out, they’ve already done it. When we did the cell phone for spelling, they were not allowed to use predictive text; it had to be the correct spelling.

“I know you’ve finished but you’re not second in line.”

(Student)

P-R-O-C-E-S-S

(Teacher)

Yay another chocolate fish, well done Glen.