Focus on Māori students
Challenging the dominant discourse of a focus on all students to a focus on students less well served by the education system has resulted in improved achievement for Māori and for all students.
Transcript
Transcript
“I’ve always found the, one of the biggest challenges in, in the schooling, ah, in getting schools to accept what we’re talking about has been this business of our wanting to focus on Māori students. Whereas the common mantra if you like or the dominant discourse has been that we treat all students the same, that we don’t single out one particular group of people and focus on them. Our emphasis has been upon well that didn’t work very well, it hasn’t worked very well for a long time, Māori students have been left behind by that discourse. So what would be really important is that we focus on those students who are least well served by the education system. So we’re saying to teachers, ‘Let’s focus on Māori students and trust us, because it won’t hurt anybody, it will actually, everybody will do well from it.’ And the great thing that’s now happened, we’ve now got the evidence again from our statistical analysis of the databases that we’ve been collecting for years, which now shows that when you focus on Māori students they do well, when you implement the effective teaching profile in your classroom they do well, and suits everybody else.”
