Abstract:
Innovation has become an increasingly important theme in education. Improving student achievement through school-based innovations has been as challenging for New Zealand as many other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. There are few options for state imposition within the self-managing schools framework of New Zealand’s education administrative structure. After a period of attempting different approaches with limited success, one approach that is described in this chapter has proved highly promising. We call the approach ‘evidence-informed collaborative inquiry’. Rather than persuading or requiring target schools to adopt innovative programmes that have been developed by external experts, the approach involves those experts collaborating with teachers to develop their expertise to diagnose student achievement problems in their schools and to develop solutions to address those problems. Three case studies are described where this approach has been successful in significantly raising student achievement