Schooling for the future

This New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER) research project explores the ways five diverse secondary schools shaped their timetables to support innovation in teaching and learning. The timetable is often a taken-for-granted presence in schools even though it plays an important role in how teaching and learning are experienced. This report identifies key factors that schools may find useful to consider when making changes to their timetable.  

This report presents findings from a case study of Owairaka District School's collaboration with their community as part of the Garden to Table programme and other initiatives.

The term Education 3.0 is used to signal the shift from traditional schooling to more appropriate models for the 21st century. This work was carried out for Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu - the Correspondence School - to scope possible new metrics they could use to document student learning and teacher practice to support that learning.

The full report is available here.

This  2015 report updates the findings from a large multi-method study of environmental education in New Zealand schools, done in 2002-2004. The update report will be of interest to schools and environmental education providers and stakeholders who support schools.

This paper discusses challenges and issues arising from NZCER's future-focused programme of research. It takes learning itself as an idea worthy of critical scrutiny and addresses some of the tensions that differences in views about learning create for future-focused research. 

This exploratory study considers the feasibility of measuring the "international capabilities" of New Zealand students in Years 12-13. 

This article has been published in the journal Teachers and Teaching, Theory and Practice later this year. It reports on the factors that continued to sustain the initial commitment of a group of 57 primary and secondary teachers who had been identified early in their careers as individuals showing “promise” and who were predicted to make a significant contribution to teaching.

This report looks at how Year 9 students experience civic and citizenship education in the school curriculum, and the opportunities they have to develop citizenship competencies through participating and contributing to various aspects of school life. This includes co-curricular activities, which are those undertaken in the school environment but beyond formal classroom teaching and learning.It also includes decision-making about how things
happen in their school. The report also looks at the role of home and the community.

A new report by NZCER senior researcher Rachel Bolstad and chief researcher Jane Gilbert aims to set out a vision of what future-oriented education could look like for New Zealand learners. The work was commissioned by the Ministry of Education to inform its programme of work. and contains a foreward by the Minister of Education Hekia Parata. The report discusses new thinking and innovative practice in this field and synthesizes more than 10 years of research on  future-thinking in education.

This report documents the beginnings of a new senior secondary school, set up with the aim of doing things differently for the 21st century. It discusses four key aspects of curriculum innovation at the school and explores its approach to learning and problem-solving through the lens of complexity theory.