Educational innovation – Teaching & Learning Research Initiative

An architecture of ownership

Introduction This project set out to explore how completely new schools, occupying completely new classroom spaces, create themselves as schools. At its inception, a new school has only its buildings; everything else must be developed. In particular, the school must develop its vision for learners, and how this is reflected through school culture, routines, values, practices, and interpretations of curriculum and assessment. We wanted to know what the experience was like for both teachers and students as they found their way and developed their identities as members of the school. To that end, the project examined how teachers and students at Hamilton’s Rototuna High School (RHS), an innovative learning environment (ILE),

Designing knowledge building communities in secondary schools

Introduction With the emergence of globalisation and the knowledge economy, it has become a priority for economically advanced countries to increase and democratise the innovative capacity of their citizens. In New Zealand, there is an urgent need to develop young people’s capacity to work creatively and innovatively with knowledge (Ministry of Education, 2007). This presents a huge challenge for teachers, who will be required to shift their pedagogical beliefs and practices from supporting students to reproduce knowledge, to “actively interact with it: to understand, critique, manipulate, create, and transform it” (Bolstad & Gilbert, 2008, p. 39, emphasis in original). A knowledge building communities (KBC) model developed by Scardamalia and Bereiter (2003)

Shifting conceptualisations of knowledge and learning in the integration of the New Zealand Curriculum in teacher education: A meta-ethnography

Introduction The Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project Shifting Conceptualisations of Knowledge and Learning in the Integration of the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) in Teacher Education comprises a collection of case studies and a meta-analysis across the contributing case studies. The case studies describe individual teacher educators’ personal journeys as they engaged with ideas relating to epistemological understandings and the NZC and their reports on pedagogical initiatives and associated practitioner research that they undertook in the context of their work in initial teacher education (ITE) and teacher professional learning (TPL). These case studies are reported separately as part of the project research portfolio. The meta-analysis across these case studies is

Building students’ inferential reasoning: Statistics curriculum Levels 5 and 6

This report summarises the research activities and findings from the TLRI-funded project conducted in various schools entitled Building Students’ Inferential Reasoning: Statistics Curriculum Levels 5 and 6. The project was a 2-year collaboration among two statisticians, two researchers and nine teachers. The project team designed innovative approaches to develop students’ informal inferential reasoning and sought evidence that these innovations had a significant effect on improving students’ statistical reasoning in this domain. Key findings Students initially used descriptive approaches to boxplot comparisons and expressed everyday conceptions of sample and population, but later moved towards thinking inferentially. Designed learning trajectories can lead students to “discover” a rational basis for making claims when comparing