Educational improvement: Insights from policy, research and practice in the new zealand context, and implications for teacher education

t innovations 
being investigated, and learning with/from 
colleagues they had not had the chance to learn 
with/from before.
Many teachers reported that TLIF had provided 
the impetus for them to try new and different 
practices that were not part of their existing teaching 
repertoire. In many cases, the notion of ‘innovation’ 
was a relative one—the practices being investigated 
were new to the particular teacher or group of 
teachers, but not necessarily highly innovative in 
terms of pushing boundaries or revealing practices 
new to the field. In some cases, highly innovative 
approaches were explored, offering new insights 
that others could learn from.
Many teachers described attention to gathering 
student voice for insights into both teaching and 
learning that they had not previously paid so much 
attention to. While student voice data tended to 
focus mostly on their preferences or satisfaction 
(rather than data from students about the impact of 
particular innovations or the reasons for the success 
or otherwise of an innovation) the move to include 
1. Items were scored on an 8-point Likert scale ranging from ‘1’ for 
‘Strongly Disagree’ to ‘8’ for Strongly disagree (1); Mostly disagree 
(2); Moderately disagree (3); Slightly disagree (4); Slightly agree (5); 
Moderately agree (6); Mostly agree (7), Strongly agree (8)
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74 JOURNAL OF ETHNIC MINORITIES RESEARCH
data from students is commendable.
The TLIF initiative has revealed some project 
teams with considerable expertise in leading and 
carrying out inquiries, learning about the impact 
of innovations, and mobilising knowledge from 
their inquiries in a way that is relevant to others. 
These exceptional projects provide a resource for 
others, and a basis for sharing not only innovative 
teaching/classroom practices likely to be effective, 
but productive processes for collaborative inquiry.
Problematic patterns
Data confidence and capability stands out as 
the biggest issue facing teachers, teams and those 
supporting them. Teachers themselves reported 
much lower confidence in. their own ability to 
analyse data in ways that give important insights 
(6.18), than other aspects of their inquiry work. 
Those issues were also evident project reports 
where the quality of the data collected was often 
questionable, with typically generic descriptions of 
analyses and generality in claims about impact and 
causality. For example, claims like this one-“Overall 
the inquiry... has resulted in the uplifting of student 
achievement, particularly for our target students, 
and the teaching and learning of our teachers” were 
often left without evidence to support them, and no 
indication that data had been collected or analysed 
in a way that supported the claim of success.
As a consequence of the issues regarding data 
capability, there was often a lack of robustness in 
the claims able to be made about the impact of 
innovations on learners and uncertainty about what 
knowledge could be mobilised to others.
Overall, teachers reported lower impact on their 
skills (in particular data use skills) (6.22) or on 
students (6.30) than on dispositions (6.91), practice 
shifts (6.79) or knowledge and understandings (6.75).
Discussions tended to be more supportive 
(7.55) or collegial (7.50) than challenging (7.17) 
or rigorous (7.10). That finding is important since 
we found a robust positive relationship between the 
quality of project discussions (including rigour and 
challenge) and impact of TLIF. That is, the better 
teachers rated their project discussions, the stronger 
they perceived the impact of the project on their 
knowledge (r = 0.75**), dispositions (r = 0.64**), 
practice shifts (r = 0.67**), skills (r = 0.55**) and 
on students (r = 0.59**).
The finding that there was often an almost 
exclusive emphasis on success and very much 
less attention to any failures is problematic given 
the likelihood of failures being associated with 
innovation, the importance of attention to failure 
and its causes to puzzles of practice, and the role 
of fallibility and open mindedness as disposition^ 
conducive to high quality inquiry.
Attention to priority learners or target groups 
evident in proposals was nó| always carried through 
to the data, data analysis and reports.
Teacher confidence lower in relation to items 
about ability to collaborate witlf (and influence) 
other than items relating to own inquiry and practice.
Uncertainty about the robustness of claims about 
the impact of innovations! Most claims were quite 
general-they referred to increased achievement of 
student! without specifying which students were 
impacted, in what ways, or how much theif learning 
improved, and without sufficient supporting 
evidence. Some projects we| further, and specified 
details of which students improved, how and how 
much. But, v<n few provided robust explained 
claims where there was, in addition, clear, logical 
atg evidence-based explanations about how the 
innovation was related to improvements.
Characteristics of Effective TLIF Projects
Insights from the various data sources suggest 
that the following characteristics are associated 
with more effective TLIF projects. By effective, 
I refer to the TLIF purposes of a positive impact 
on outcomes for teachers (their knowledge and 
understanding, skills, dispositions and practice), for 
students (their learning experiences, relationships, 
and achievement), and the generation of new 
knowledge, understandings and learning that can 
be mobilised to others. These characteristics both 
increase the likelihood that innovations teams tty 
are successful and, equally important, the likelihood 
that teams will determine, in a timely manner, when 
and why they are not successful where that is the 
case. The characteristics are:
Unrelenting commitment to and focus on 
improvement-improvement of both teaching and 
learning;
Levels of risk-taking and innovation appropriate 
to the capacity of the teachers and contexts involved;
High quality collaboration-well-established 
collaboration routines and norms, that are regular, 
involve deprivatised practice and occur over an 
extended duration;
High quality data and data analysis relevant to 
the logic of the innovation;
High quality discussion—supportive and collegial 
and simultaneously challenging and rigorous;
High quality expertise from internal sources 
(teacher leadership) and external sources (relevant 
quality research, and external experts whose 
expertise aligns with team needs).
Enablers and barriers
The extent to which project teams were able to 
carry out high quality inquiries into their innovation 
was influenced by a range of barriers and enablers, 
KHOA HỌC, GIÁO DỤC VÀ CÔNG NGHỆ
75Volume 8, Issue 2
summarised below:
Barriers Enablers
Logistics and project 
administration (including 
time, release issues, personnel 
changes)
Collaboration time
Resistance Inquiry orientation
Data capability
Knowledge-building 
opportunities
Reporting demands
Contribution of external 
expertise
Leadership support
Summary of Key Messages
With a focus on the purpose of the TLIF 
evaluation to inform continuous improvement of 
TLIF’s design, implementation and monitoring, 
the following figure presents a summary of key 
messages, the current ‘story’ of TLIF as it were. 
These messages, derived from the evaluation 
evidence are key because, if attended to, they hold 
much promise for next steps in improving the 
initiative overall. Some of these messages represent 
problems to be solved, but there are strong grounds 
and good conditions for solving them, given the 
widespread endorsement of and regard for TLIF, 
the establishment (or strengthening) of relational 
conditions conducive to inquiry and innovation, 
and the presence of some exceptional projects to 
learn from.
Implications for initial teacher education
Curriculum, inquiry and collaboration 
initiatives of the sort outlined above bring with 
them important considerations for initial teacher 
education Where such initiatives prompt new and 
different roles for teachers, they also prompt new 
and different emphases and approaches for initial 
teacher education. In the New Zealand context, this 
has led to calls for a quite new emphasis for the 
accreditation of initial teacher educator providers, 
one that makes more prominent attention to the 
quality of assessments of graduating teacher 
capability than to the inputs of teacher education 
programmes.
The capabilities required of teachers working 
with curricula that promote responsive pedagogies, 
student agency, competencies and partnership 
require not only different knowledge, but different 
skills, attitudes and values of those who are being 
prepared to teach such curricula. Similarly, systems 
that promote teacher inquiry, and particularly 
those that promote collaborative inquiry need to 
pay attention not only to the vast potential of such 
approaches, but the quite particular demands such 
approaches have on the capabilities of teachers, 
including the capabilities to work in and strengthen 
social networks, and to interact effectively with 
others in ways that solve problems of practice 
and generate through rigorous inquiry, deep 
understandings about the priorities for learners, the 
approaches most likely to address those priorities 
and the impact of teaching on learning. Such 
demands have implications not only for the content 
of initial teacher education, but the processes 
involved in programme design, teaching, learning, 
practicum and assessment.
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CẢI CÁCH GIÁO DỤC: NHỮNG HIỂU BIẾT TỪ CHÍNH SÁCH, 
NGHIÊN CỨU ĐẾN THỰC HÀNH TRONG BỐI CẢNH GIÁO DỤC 
TẠI NEW ZEALAND VÀ ẢNH HƯỞNG ĐỐI VỚI VIỆC ĐÀO TẠO 
GIÁO VIÊN
Claire Sinnema
Đại học Auckland, New Zealand
Email: c.sinnema@auckland.ac.nz
Ngày nhận bài: 4/5/2019
Ngày phản biện: 8/5/2019
Ngày tác giả sửa: 25/5/2019
Ngày duyệt đăng: 12/6/2019
Ngày phát hành: 21/6/2019
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25073/0866-773X/303
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