Journal article

Multiple motivation factors work together to influence how students learn and achieve. Motivation can be enhanced by instruction that supports learning-related expectancies of success and strengthens perceptions that learning is useful. It also helps to keep in check students’ beliefs that learning involves unreasonable effort, emotional, or opportunity costs. This article provides a set of strategies that teachers could use in their instruction both to strengthen students’ confidence in their abilities and their utility/relevance beliefs, and to reduce their perceptions that learning requires incurring significant costs. These strategies, which are based on insights from both conceptual and empirical research, including our own research, could also help teachers reflect on their pedagogical practice.

This article explores the power of picturebooks through key ideas supported by research from New Zealand and around the world. A range of picturebooks are used to exemplify points made, including the power of picturebooks to increase awareness of languages, expand our vocabulary, allow us insight into the lives of others, reflect who we are, and reflect and develop our national identity.

Teachers who read for pleasure can enable their students to become readers as they consciously and unconsciously model the knowledge, practices, values, beliefs, and language (that is, the discourses) associated with being a reader. Such teachers are in the unique position of being able to talk with students about what they are currently reading, why they like it—or do not, what is puzzling them, and why. Such conversations open the space for students to do the same in relation to stories shared in class and stories they choose to read in their own time. In other words, teachers who are readers can engage with their students as fellow readers, not just as teachers of reading. In doing so, these teachers can teach their students not just how to read, but how to be a reader.

Twice-exceptional (2e) students face many barriers to learning opportunities due to their combinations of giftedness and learning disabilities. If 2e students are referred to special education teachers such as resource teachers of learning and behaviour (RTLB), challenges may be encountered when RTLB lack
knowledge of twice-exceptionality. This article provides insight into the barriers RTLB face when identifying 2e students, and how RTLB provide learning programmes that promote and strengthen 2e students’ talents while scaffolding support for their learning disabilities. It draws upon a small exploratory qualitative study of RTLB knowledge of 2e concepts, how they identified these students, and the common intervention approaches used when working with 2e students.

A wide research base in general Pacific education literature supports active learning activities that encourage students to work collaboratively. Many schools engage Pacific students in group-based learning together with other pedagogies to increase their achievement. Despite this, the education of Pacific origin students in Aotearoa New Zealand is not delivering equitable results and requires revision. Fijian Indian students are a relatively unexplored population within the Pacific education umbrella, and attention to their learning is not well represented in literature. This research used talanoa, a Pacific research method, to explore the perception of Fijian Indian students regarding group work. The findings revealed that students perceived both benefits and limitations related to engagement in collaborative learning. This discussion of group work plays a part in addressing New Zealand’s education system’s inequities for Pacific students, and it encourages teachers to consider what effective group work means for Fijian Indian students from the lived experiences of the students themselves.