What Does Teaching in Samoan Bilingual Classrooms Look Like？ Observations as Evidence-Based From a New Zealand Professional Learning and Development Perspective

Teuila Consultancy, Auckland, New Zealand This paper reports on the instructional practice of teachers who have similar language and culture as their students in a bilingual cluster (Cluster A) involving three schools and seven teachers in delivering the curriculum to year 0 (5-year-old) to year 8 (12/13-year-old) students. The 30-40 minutes baseline observations conducted on teachers’ instruction during a reading session were part of a Ministry of Education’s (MOE) professional learning and development project (in progress) to increase student achievement in English literacy in these classrooms through evidence-based in-class facilitation. We hypothesized that teachers in these bilingual classes were perhaps not making optimal use of children’s prior knowledge, particularly their linguistic and cultural strengths, to increase robust and in-depth oral discussions for understanding the texts during the reading lessons. The baseline observations were coded under exchanges known to enhance reading comprehension and specifically related to vocabulary, checking, incorporation, extended talk, awareness, and feedback, and were analyzed for the purposes of: (a) feeding back to teachers what their instruction looked like; (b) creating discussions around teachers’ strengths and weaknesses that had arisen out of the instructional and student achievement data; and (c) identifying professional development needs for teachers and their students. It was found that teachers and students’ discussions around a concept or word were limited and that students’ oral strengths were not fully optimized for understanding. We report here the first phase involving Samoan teachers teaching Samoan students in Samoan bilingual classrooms. The second phase is in progress with the last phase starting midyear. The findings from these two phases will enable some discussions to be made around shifts in instructional practice, if any, their impact on student achievement and how these might be sustained.