 As part of Whangarei Boys High School's work with Team Solutions around culturally responsive and relational pedagogy, the school has focused on observation and shadow coaching as a lever for embedding and strengthening teachers, culturally responsive and relational practice. What we have implemented in some of the observation and coaching around the growth tool has enabled us to buddy up and observe in a tūakana taina environment where teachers are observing each other and giving feedback or learning conversations around what kind of practices that they are seeing. And so there's been a shift from the more traditional style teacher up the front to thinking about more culturally appropriate ways of engaging learners through interactive aqaw groups, the teacher perhaps being a learner, putting themselves in a position of a learner and learning from the students as well. The observations have allowed classrooms to be deprivatised and teachers to explore their own practice and think about it in terms of Māori concepts such as aqaw, wānanga, whanau ngatanga and what that might look like in the classroom and how they might just make modifications to ways that they are undertaking learning activities in the classroom. I think one of the things that we've undertaken is the rungi te hau, which is a process of surveys and observations. So whanau are surveyed alongside students and teachers and then their perceptions are compared. That data is put alongside the achievement information that they have and other feedback that they've gained from those three quarters and actions are planned to better engage whanau to help raise achievement and to better engage students as well. We've used an observation tool, an observation growth tool, which has enabled teachers to observe each other and give each other feedback. We've co-constructed a continuum of what it might look like in the classroom if culturally responsive and relational pedagogy is being implemented and integrated into the class. So this has helped teachers be able to observe and have learning conversations with their peers. Now this tool is a 20 minute observation and we just record what we see and hear in the class and that forms the basis of a learning conversation after the observation. The teacher has an opportunity to read and reflect on what's been observed and then the conversation comes out of that. The culturally responsive and relational lens is placed over that. So we look at each interaction to see what was going on and then what relationships can we recognise through that, through those interactions. We've tried to model CR and RP or Culturally Responsive and Relational Pedagogy ourselves in the way that we run our professional development. So we're working primarily with groups of six teachers at a time in a tūakana tāina role. So we support teachers to observe and then to have the learning conversation afterwards. We have to put aside our previous ideas around observations because this tool I think promotes more of an equal learning conversation and deep reflection rather than someone coming in and telling you, I saw this and this is what I saw and this is what I think you need to do. So what we're trying to do with this model of observation is to grow the capacity of teachers through a real interaction and deep reflection rather than telling teachers what they need to do to improve. I think one of the positives about the facilitators we've worked with is in the unpacking of the Culturally Responsive and Relational Pedagogy tool, the observation tool, there is some quite, I guess, high-level academic thinking behind that and this is all work that goes back historically to the work of Dr Russell Bishop, to Mary Berryman and others so that on the surface of it can look like quite a complicated analysis of what you're trying to achieve but in those PD sessions the unpacking of that has been really useful for staff to think, OK, that means about relating to boys. I can do that or I can do that better. So it's the, I guess, the unpacking of some of the academic language that's part of it. It's also being able to model how you would be a good observer or a good shadow coach. So that's been really positive in terms of once you've gone and done the observation, how do you then have that critical conversation with your coach about how to improve their practice? And as I said before, it's more about reflection but it requires a very non-judgmental approach. Often as teachers we see something in a class we think, ooh, they maybe could have done it that way. That's not the role. The role of the observer is not to interpret, it's just to present. It's that forced reflection at a deeper level that I feel creates sustainable change. I think the other thing too is about the observation tool. It very much looks at the Māori boys in your room and so it makes you more conscious to think, am I getting through to all the students in my class? And essentially I see this very much in that terms of personalisation of learning and when you look at critics like or theorists like Hattie and so on working in the field of education, he talks a lot about know thy student. It fits perfectly into that mould of know thy student. If you don't know who you've got in front of you, how can you possibly get the best outcomes for them?