THE KIWI TEACHER

In the search for best practice, we need to reconsider our assumptions, re-evaluate our opinions and rethink our answers.

Imagine if learners were given the freedom to explore, interact with and even modify their learning.

We need to liberate our pedagogy. When we do, we will see more creative, reinvigorated, and equitable practice.

I chat with Atama Cassidy (of Teachers Trove) about how to be culturally responsive and know your learners and their whanau.

We have ability to remove obstructions and create the conditions for work, that’s where our agency lies.

Now more than ever, we need creative responses to constraints.

I chat with Jeremy Downing (Ako Mātātupu: Teach First NZ) about systemic inequity and changing the education landscape in Aotearoa.

If they receive nothing else from us, let our students hear the message that they are loved and have the capacity to love.

If we can begin to enhance the agency of our staff and students, we have some hope of disrupting power structures.

A classroom where we give students space to express through both the silence and the sound is the one that will learn.

What we need are critical consumers and impassioned creators.

We espouse that we don’t want students learning in a framework defined by individualism and competition, so let’s stop teaching in one.

We need to find a way to reclaim TeacherSpeak and reframe jargon through both critique and the discovery of meaning.

If “the limits of our language mean the limits of our world”, then we must reshape our language in order to reshape our world.

The educator’s role, like the political leaders, is to somehow unite disparate identities under a common vision.