Te Kotahitanga is a research and professional development project that aims to support teachers to raise the achievement of New Zealand's indigenous Maori students in public/mainstream classrooms. An Effective Teaching Profile, developed from the voices of Maori students, their families, principals and some of their teachers, provides direction…

Professional learning communities among teachers and schools have been envisioned as a mechanism for development, knowledge building and implementation. However the formation of an effective learning community is more complex than giving teachers a project and asking them to share a room. This paper reports a synergistic interaction between a…

This article describes a school improvement initiative involving five primary schools (ages 5-11 years) working in partnership with each other with support from a university department of education. It provides evidence of the benefits to be gained from teachers sharing and developing collective knowledge through participation in school-based…