Journal article

The website of the New Zealand Institute of Wellbeing & Resilience (NZIWR) states that it is dedicated to increasing wellbeing for communities and organisations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Within education, its mission is to build whole-school wellbeing. Set contacted NZIWR to help give our readers insight into the research underpinning its activities. Co-directors Denise Quinlan and Lucy Hone put forward their recommendations for how schools and individual teachers can work to improve levels of wellbeing across staff and students.

English-medium schools often find successful engagement with their Māori hapori and whānau challenging. This article endeavours to provide guidance to schools wanting to successfully and authentically engage with their Māori hapori and whānau. It suggests that adopting the pōwhiri ritual as the foundation of their whānau engagement strategy can considerably improve attendance at their hui. This article provides a framework which recognises the autonomy of schools to utilise the expertise of their Māori hapori to create a process that suits their particular context.

A sense of belonging and wellbeing at school influences educational and health outcomes. Here we widen the traditional focus of Assessment News to focus on the use of student wellbeing data in schools. We discuss the Wellbeing@School (W@S) toolkit that is freely available to support schools to self-review as they examine and monitor student wellbeing (including measures of bullying) from the perspectives of teachers and students. Key findings from national-level W@S data, plus other New Zealand and international studies, suggest areas that might be important for schools to focus on. We encourage schools to plan for a continuous improvement process that aims to build a stronger schoolwide climate and infrastructure around students.

There are currently very few resources available in New Zealand for teaching mental health education (within the Health and Physical Education learning area). Outside providers are, however, offering different programmes for sale to schools (in areas such as positive psychology, mindfulness, and growth mindset). These tend to be individualistic, not to mention expensive. NZCER Press has, however, just published a new comprehensive teaching resource to help teachers of Years 7–11 to structure programmes around identity, wellbeing, interpersonal skills, hauora and health promotion. This resource is ideal to help you design and teach mental health education in your school. This article outlines the thinking behind the resource and why it’s important to learn about both the individual and the social aspects of mental health.

This research study explores the notions of cultural concepts of giftedness and talent within a Samoan-specific context. The focus of this article is on Samoan teachers of children who were enrolled in a bilingual education setting. It presents the perspectives of Samoan teachers around Samoan giftedness and talent and how these perspectives might be nurtured through Samoan bilingual education. The strong connections between education, language, and culture are explored and discussed. This study highlights the components of Samoan cultural forms of giftedness and talent and how these may be transferred from the home domain into a culturally sustaining school learning environment for enhanced student outcomes.

This article outlines research in which six primary teachers were interviewed and asked to discuss their ability to identify giftedness in a range of domains. Teachers seemed more likely to identify giftedness in domains in which they perceived themselves to have a higher level of content knowledge. This small-scale study suggests that variations in individual teachers’ content knowledge may determine which students are or are not identified as gifted in a particular domain. Furthermore, knowledge of giftedness also seemed to support teachers’ confidence in identifying students. Finally, some recommendations for schools to consider are presented, including the suggestion that more collaborative approaches to the identification of gifted students could be beneficial.