Developing a framework to support Māori achieving success as Māori

Yvonne Nikora – Deputy principal, Waerenga o Kuri
When we first started considering what it actually looks like in our school for Māori to succeed as Māori, we had to be really brutally honest to be able to consider whether we were actually on that track because for every student success is different, their journey in order to get to that point is different. Doing the same thing is not necessarily going to make that happen for our students. What shifts did we have to make as teachers, as board of trustees, and as parents to be able to enable this change for our students to occur?

We came up with this rubric using the competencies, using the behavioural indicators, and the outcomes from Tai Tai Ako to guide us in, in compiling the rubric. This was a draft form, and, and from this draft we have since gone back and revisited it many times, slowly making it more pertinent to our school.

Pip Williams - Board of Trustees chairperson
The Māori achieving success as Māori document was really a collaborative process, ah, rather than a consultative process with the Board of Trustees. The board was there from its inception and this MASAM document evolved.

Richard  – Principal, Waerenga o Kuri
In our framework we co-constructed what each of the steps from non-supportive to highly supportive would look like in our school and what we would need to do to get to the next step.

Yvonne Nikora – Deputy principal, Waerenga o Kuri
As part of the process it was really, really important that we heard what our parents want as well so that the overall goal was that we would all have the same picture in our minds.

Richard – Principal, Waerenga o Kuri
I made a deliberate effort in getting out and communicating with parents not to use teacher speak and making the message very clear for everyone involved.

We’d actually created a PowerPoint presentation and actually had pictures of all their children involved in activities around the school depicting each step in the MASAM process, went through the rubric, and what it meant to them, and then had five questions for the parents to come back and address, mainly around how, what their children are learning, how they want their children to learn, and what they see as the most important things about school.

Mereana Wynyard – parent
They gave us the opportunity to ask questions. We got asked how we feel about our kids and their learning. We all agreed that as long as they’re happy and achieving at their best, life was great.

Yvonne Nikora – Deputy principal, Waerenga o Kuri
The self review tool has helped us formulate where we’re at on that journey of achieving our ultimate vision.

Pip Williams – Board of Trustees chairperson
We really, as a board, had to look at where we were at on the matrix and then where we would like to progress to in the area of being highly supportive for the Māori achieving success as Māori.

Richard McCosh – Principal, Waerenga o Kuri
Once we constructed our school MASAM rubric and where and, which steps we were going to then do, next we put that into our school action plan, based around that, and then from there went to our school charter, and then into our school curriculum, and now into the classroom learning programme.

Pip Williams – Board of Trustees chairperson
Technology has been a really important part of this process in helping to not only to develop the MASAM document but also to ensure that we actually are reflecting what we’ve said in the document and we’re doing that within our school. It was evident to us as we went through the document that in order for us to be in the highly supportive part of the matrix, that we really had to make sure that we had the technology to support this and the students’ learning.

Very much it’s become a partnership in learning too where students can actually access some of their programmes at home, share that knowledge with their parents and also they become part of the support network for their learning