Professional experience

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Cover detail with Assessment caption

Assessment objectives

  • Gather evidence on your relationships when you are on professional experience.
  • Provide a 500 word professional reflection on your experiences (including what you found challenging and rewarding) in applying the listed characteristics of effective culturally appropriate and responsive relationships. The professional reflection contains your responses to Section C of Assessment guides.

Introduction

Bishop, et al. (2003) argue that culturally appropriate and responsive teachers of Māori students demonstrate the following understandings which they have called the Effective Teaching Profile:

  • They  reject deficit theorising as a means of explaining Māori students’ educational achievement levels; and
  • They know and understand how to bring about change in Māori students’ educational achievement and are professionally committed to doing so.

These understandings can be observed in the following ways, summarised as follows:

  1. They care for the students as culturally-located human beings above all else.
  2. They care for the performance of their students.
  3. They are able to create a secure, well-managed learning environment.
  4. They are able to engage in effective teaching interactions with Māori students as Māori.
  5. They can use strategies that promote effective teaching interactions and relationships with their learners.
  6. They promote, monitor and reflect on outcomes that in turn lead to improvements in educational achievement for Māori students.

Assessment

Assessment guides

  1. Read the section on the Effective Teaching Profile (pages 96-116) of the report which describes each characteristic in detail. In this book, the researchers designed an observational tool which corresponds with the understandings and characteristics outlined in the Effective Teaching Profile. (Bishop, et al. 2003)Assessment
    http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/7532/te-kotahitanga.pdf
  2. The observational tool can also be used by you as a way of reflecting on the evidence of effective relationships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in your class whilst on professional experience.
  3. Whilst on your professional experience choose a time or series of times that you will reflect on your ability to develop effective culturally appropriate and responsive relationships.
  4. Provide examples/evidence for each for the following aspects in the Observational Guide.
  5. For every negative response to the six-point categories suggest an action to develop culturally responsive relationships in your professional experience context.

Observational guide

  1. Caring for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students: evidence of caring for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students as (culturally located) individuals.
  2. Caring for the performance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students: evidence of having high expectations for the learning performance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
  3. Behaviour expectations: evidence of having high expectations for the behaviour expectations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
  4. Management of the classroom: evidence of providing a well-managed learning environment.
  5. Culturally appropriate context: evidence of providing culturally appropriate learning context for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.
  6. Culturally responsive context: evidence of providing a context where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students can bring their own cultural experiences to their learning.

References

Berryman M, Bishop R 2011, ‘The Te Kotahitanga observation tool: Development, use, reliability and validity’, Waikato Journal of Education, vol. 16, no. 3, pp. 81–94.

Bishop, R, Berryman, M, Tiakiwai, S, and Richardson, C 2003, Te Kotahitanga:The Experiences of Year 9 and 10 Māori Students in Mainstream Classrooms, Ministry of Education, Wellington.

Image: Public Domain