An education “achievement gap” that exists between students from the majority cultural group and indigenous Māori students in New Zealand, reflects a wider issue of cultural minoritisation that is increasingly common around the globe. This paper discusses the implementation outcomes of Te Kotahitanga, a long-term, iterative, research and development reform programme. This reform works with secondary-school teachers and leaders to improve the conditions within classrooms and schools in order for more Māori students to experience education success.

Te Kotahitanga commenced in 2001 by talking with groups of Years 9 and 10 Māori students, members of their families, their principals and teachers, about their experiences of being Māori at school. From these interviews, a series of narratives of experience were developed (Bishop & Berryman, 2006). In contrast to the majority of their teachers who tended to dwell upon the problems that these students’ deficiencies caused them, students clearly identified that the main influence on their educational achievement was the quality of their in-class relationships and interactions with teachers. They also explained how by changing the ways they related to and interacted with Māori students in their classrooms, teachers could create contexts for learning in which Māori students’ educational achievement could improve.

From these interviews, an Effective Teaching Profile (ETP) was developed that emphasised the rejection of deficit explanations about Māori student performance and promoted agentic discursive positioning and caring and learning classroom relationships and interactions by teachers (Bishop, Berryman, Tiakiwai, & Richardson, 2003). The ETP then formed the basis of the Te Kotahitanga professional learning programme that seeks to promote an educational system where power is shared between self-determining individuals within non-dominating relations of interdependence;  where culture counts; learning is interactive, dialogic and spirals; and participants are connected and committed to one another through the establishment of a common vision for what constitutes educational excellence (Bishop, Berryman, Cavanagh, & Teddy, 2007). It seeks to do this by engaging teachers of indigenous students in discursive repositioning (Davies & Harre, 1990); strategic goals and action planning; the implementation of culturally responsive pedagogies (Gay, 2000); the re-institutionalisation of the decision-making processes within the schools; the inclusion of the indigenous community (Durie, 2006); and the schools’ leaders using evidence of student achievement to effectively own and  solve their own problems (Coburn, 2003). We have termed this response, a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations (CRP of R). A recent analysis of the effect of the implementation of the CRP of R in Phase 3 and 4 schools showed that when implemented most effectively, Māori student schooling experiences improved dramatically with attendance, retention, engagement and achievement all showing very positive gains in relation to a comparison group of schools (Bishop, Berryman, Wearmouth, Peter, & Clapham 2011).

This paper focuses on the successful teacher-student relationships and interactions that were developed as a result of the school-wide professional development from 2009 to 2012 when Phase 5 schools were in their third year of programme implementation.  These understandings can contribute to other settings where cultural minoritization of students is occurring.

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