 Teaches at Whangarei Boys High School worked with Team Solutions facilitators to develop a more relational and reciprocal focus to their teaching. Creating classroom environments where students and their teachers work collaboratively to develop their understanding of new ideas. We identified that we had a number of students who were not achieving as highly as we wanted to and we identified that the relationship between the student and the teacher was particularly important in this field. From a relational point of view it was really important to encourage the staff to give a little bit more of themselves so every staff member has their own pepihā that they use for their classes when they meet them. We talk about getting to know the students, not just the boy who's sitting in front of you but where they come from, who they're connected to, what their local knowledge is, what their New Zealand knowledge is so that we are learning mutually from each other. The student-teacher bond and the dynamic between student-teachers has changed a whole lot over the years. I feel that it's more so being that teachers are higher than the student is completely changed now that we're all equal and it's more mutual. When I was younger I was afraid of some of my teachers because I didn't want to go up and ask for help because I felt that I would get put down because I don't know but now that level has changed it's more that I feel more comfortable asking my teachers for help and talking to them. The more students centric so when we're walking into a class they're not standing up at the front of the class drawing on the board, they're sitting with the student and teaching the class from there. They're more open to roam around and help others instead of sitting at a desk and expecting the students to come up to them. They like to feel as if we're all one class, not divided into little groups that you're smart ones or ones that don't want to learn the teachers are pushing for everyone. It's more relatable to younger students. There's not a difference between a teacher and a student. There's that personal level that makes it a lot easier to relate to the teacher to teach us and for us to be learning from our teachers. In terms of other changes that we've noticed around the school we were in a situation where we had a high stand down suspension and exclusion rate for Māori boys and again that was an unacceptable status quo to be moving forward with. So what we're seeing is unsurprisingly as students have become more engaged in learning their behaviour changes around the classroom and that our relational approach rather than a punitive approach has paid dividends to changing those statistics. So we're in a much better place going forward with managing behaviour. Part of the work we've done with Kiki Panaku is around surveying our boys and our parent community and they've come back year on year to say with improvements in those spaces about how it feels to be Māori at this school that the boys have every opportunity they need to succeed right down to how you're finding lessons, how you're relating to your teachers and we're seeing a steady improvement. The great thing about that is there's a direct correlation between what the boys are telling us, what the families are telling us, what the staff are telling us and what the results are telling us. Chase is my son. He's definitely made a change from when he first started. He actually at one point said, I don't know, I'll find some of the teachers don't understand us or I find that they're not more encouraging to Māori students when he first started but the difference now, especially encouraging them for their academic achievement, that's been a really good one. It's really helped Chase to think differently that I can do it and thus supporting him, you know, when he does an assignment and they encourage him, oh, look for you to get a better grade, do this. And he's like, oh, right, and so they're getting alongside, I think, more encouraging and give them a little bit more self-worth that you can do it. We tend to have the mindset sometimes that us as Māori, we're not going to make it or we're not going to do well but over that time he's seen a difference to, you know, through our conversations that we've had. Oh, they're a little bit more encouraging, you know, a lot more respectful. They're starting to understand us well and that's a conversation that he's had with me, you know, because I always ask him that stuff like that and yeah, it's made a big impact on him and he's off to university next year. Yeah, to study. He's excited.