Aboriginal students’ characteristics and ways of learning:
Strategies for teaching Indigenous students:
How to be a quality teacher of Indigenous students?
Research shows that the following teaching practices worked well in encouraging Indigenous students:
Teaching them reading and writing:
Develop strategies for dealing with hearing loss Indigenous students in the classroom.
Intellectually gifted Aboriginal students:
Classroom management strategies
Working with Indigenous community:
Working with Indigenous workers:
- Many non-aboriginal students are motivated to learn by the thought of a better future, they believe that education will give them a job and make them better off in the long term. Aboriginal students are unlikely to believe a teacher who tells them that if they work hard, listen and do the right thing, then they will be successful in the future.
- Aboriginal students need to be able to see themselves in what they learn
- For many aboriginal children, knowledge at home is not something to be challenged – it is more likely to be repeated and passed on to others
- Problem-solving and inquiry-based learning are generally not successful strategies with Aboriginal children
- Most research suggests that Aboriginal children work better in groups
- Aboriginal students will not necessarily look at teacher while they are listening
- Non-compliance is often acceptable in Aboriginal communities as kids are encouraged to look after themselves and take on adult roles
- Aboriginal kids can be fairly slow in responding to your requests to do something
- Aboriginal people can be far more circumspect about issues of control and discipline of others. This makes what has occurred in Australian history doubly important.
Strategies for teaching Indigenous students:
- Positive teacher student relationship:
- Indigenous kids will not work hard because you have high expectations of them.
- Indigenous students may be more likely to work for you when they like you.
- Conversely they can drop out when they think you are a mongrel.
- Avoid asking Aboriginal students to explain why they were absent from class. Get the reason from their peers before you ask them directly.
- Low teacher expectations only serve to dis-empower Aboriginal people, and position in a discourse of deficit and disadvantage.
- Indigenous students’ identity:
- Many indigenous students can be more motivated to maintain their own sense of a coherent and stable identity than they are by the teacher's expectations (and trying to keep the teacher happy).
- As many indigenous students feel out of their depth in the classroom, a big part of maintaining this identity is hiding their feelings of fear and vulnerability by acting cool and unenthusiastic.
- This is to avoid being shamed in front of their peers.
- The fear of shame can lead to indigenous students being reluctant to have a good at the set work if they do not already know the answer. Importantly, even if the teacher has high expectations of them, this will not save them from embarrassment or shame if they are wrong.
- Furthermore, an indigenous student's identity and sense of self-worth will be governed by how relationships develop in the classroom and school, rather than from the teacher's own expectations.
- A child's sense of self is largely a result of the feedback he or she gets about himself or herself from others in the classroom (for example, through how he or she speaks), then all the kids will learn from this.
- Scaffold students to develop identity and belonging in order to improve students’ attendance, retention, and academic performance.
How to be a quality teacher of Indigenous students?
- To be a quality teacher of Indigenous children, you need to be able to listen and observe quality practice
- You also need to be able to avoid those who would tell you that a particular student will never be any good.
- One of the most important contributions that you can make to indigenous education from the very beginning is to get to know Indigenous people.
- Find out the children's reading age, spelling age, reading recovery level, and the programs they are involved in. What are their interests?
- If there is an Indigenous education worker in the school, make contact with him or her as soon as possible.
- Say something to the kids every day. This seems obvious, but sometimes it does not occur, especially in some classrooms with only few Indigenous kids.
- Teachers are extremely busy and they often do not have the time to do everything so they need to make a conscious effort to reach out to these students.
- Throwing in some humour will go a long way to engaging the students.
- Watch out for students who sit in the class doing nothing
- Avoid giving the students busy works rather give them interesting work that keeps them busy.
- Smartboards: A smartboard has lots of hands-on activities for all subjects and it is fun to play with (http://smarttech.com)
- Spend more time (than usual) on painting a picture (providing context) for the kids of what you want to cover at the beginning of the activity or unit.
- Give the big picture first rather than talking about bits and pieces.
- Indigenous students often need to know the context before learning about the detail.
- Be careful about asking Indigenous students to step outside their comfort zone and display their knowledge in public. Let them to do this privately at first.
- Avoid individual rewards. Opt for shared rewards instead.
- Provide positive feedback to students one-on-one, but usually not in front of others.
Research shows that the following teaching practices worked well in encouraging Indigenous students:
- Summarising and repeating instructions
- Explaining what is happening in more detail
- Encouraging children to help each other
- Maintaining 'best listening distance' where children sit close to the teacher so they can see the teacher's expressions and lips more clearly
- Encouraging children to work in small groups and watch other children
- Developing a close working relationship between the classroom teacher and indigenous education worker
Teaching them reading and writing:
- Reading and writing need to be taught explicitly to indigenous students who usually speak Standard English only at school.
- Explicitly support indigenous students to move from oral language to the written Standard English used at school
- Show explicitly how to construct paragraphs, sentences, phrases, words and syllables in Standard English
- Do not leave them on their own to learn these things
- Indigenous students will understand the task best when the overall concept of contextual meaning is presented before they begin to learn about the mechanics of the text, such as the sounds and words.
- Various approaches to reading should continue to be taught across all the subjects at secondary.
- Comparing the grammar of Standard English to that of Aboriginal English can help students to understand the difference between their way of speaking at home and how they are expected to speak and write at school.
- Help students to feel more at ease in the classroom.
- Show them (model) how language is constructed through structures and patterns
- Students contextualize lesson content within their own experiences to make the content meaningful.
- Students bring very different experiences with them into the classroom, and they interpret what is being taught according to their experiences.
- Scaffolding is particularly useful for kids from oral backgrounds.
- Spend considerable time telling stories to introduce the topic, and asking open-ended questions. This helps to create a shared experience between the teacher and student and it helps to alleviate the issue of different backgrounds and therefore different experiences to draw on in the classroom.
- Teacher shows children how to read. In a detail reading of a short passage, the teacher helps students to recognise and understand words and word groups within each sentence
- The teacher can write sentences (or a paragraph) on cardboard, and asks the students to read the sentence two or three times.
- Teacher points at each word and reads together with words. Students can cut off words from cardboard, read and put the sentence back together as a group. Teacher checks that children can recognise the words.
- Student practise spelling words and pronouncing letter patterns. Teacher shows children how to cut-up words into letter patterns like teacher, mother, or brother.
- Teacher can show students how to write letters and let them practice this many times, using small whiteboards so that they can easily rub-out their mistakes. Check that they can recognise words. Make sure that the weakest learner can do it.
- Students can re-write whole sentences on their whole boards.
- Finally, the teacher guides the class to write a new story using the notes from above, but in words that are closer to the level they would use themselves. Students then practice writing texts independently from notes.
- For Indigenous students, it is important to avoid big jumps and to build the story or text in smaller, graduated steps so that meaning is negotiated and clarified.
- The aim is to support the children so that they perform at a level in excess of what they could do on their own.
- Teachers should use very few direct questions to monitor progress; rather open-ended questions can be addressed to the class to allow time for students to respond.
Develop strategies for dealing with hearing loss Indigenous students in the classroom.
- Minimising noise in the classroom
- Seating children with hearing loss to the teacher
- Using a variety of teaching methods such as working one-to-one and in small groups
Intellectually gifted Aboriginal students:
- Intellectually gifted Aboriginal students are particularly at risk of becoming invisible underachievers
- Teachers who work with gifted Aboriginal students identify two key elements that impact on their underachievement. The first of these is low self-efficacy and the second is the forced choice that they often have to make, between excelling in an area of talent that is not valued by the peer culture and being accepted by the peer culture
- Successful programs for gifted Aboriginal children are characterised by some key factors, including holistic and culturally appropriate programs, opportunities for the students to meet other gifted students, appropriate recognition of each student’s ability in a sensitive way that does not lead to embarrassment or ‘shame’, the provision of teacher and mentor support, and appropriate support for children to become autonomous learners.
Classroom management strategies
- Be cool and calm. Avoid shouting.
- In Aboriginal education, quality of teaching is just as important as the quality of the teaching
- Avoid confrontations over authority and avoid backing kids into a corner
- Any attempt to personally denigrate a student plays into the hands of history. Put-downs from the teacher confirms the history of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations that most Aboriginal students bring with them to school.
Working with Indigenous community:
- Recognise and greet parents outside the school. Start by talking what you are doing with their children.
- You don't need to know everything about Indigenous cultures to be a good teacher, but you do need to understand your own culture and how it influences your teaching.
- Assume nothing - do not go into the community and trying to impose your values and experiences on others
- Listen to those around you - learn from the staff and locals
- Get to know the Aboriginal Education Assistant and other support people. They are the key to the community it needs and its ethos. They will provide the mechanisms and local knowledge.
- Make sure they are part of any unit of work from the initial planning stage to helping in the implementation and assessment of it. Learn from them - they have so much to give and share.
- Get to know the local community members and adapt your lessons to suit the local conditions
- Involve community in the learning process. If they feel uncomfortable with meeting at school, go and meet them in their family surroundings.
- Remember your learning does not stop once you start teaching. The process continues and the local Indigenous community has so much to offer.
Working with Indigenous workers:
- Develop a teaching relationship with the indigenous education worker where you talk and plan lessons together.
- Indigenous education workers do not want to be told at the last minute what they are supposed to be doing with the kids.
- They want to feel in control of the content too, and the best way to do this to plan lessons together.