Indigenous Student Success requires strong school leadership willing to create conditions that foster the holistic development and well-being of First Nations, Inuit and Metis learners. The following are key strategies in creating environments to ensure success:

• Ensure that the school community is familiar with the goals of the Aboriginal Education Enhancement Agreement (AEEA) – and fosters the development – of  Belonging, Mastery and Culture and Community
• Relationship building between the Indigenous community (Elders, traditional teachers, parents and community members, etc.) and public school system (administrators/educators) in all aspects of education
• Developing partnerships with Indigenous Education department members who can share their culture and can identify with Indigenous students and vice-versa
• Creating a school culture based on respect where Indigenous students experience a positive sense of belonging
• Understanding and incorporating Indigenous perspectives of learning that is: holistic; lifelong; experiential in nature; rooted in Indigenous languages, cultures, spirituality; community based involving family, Elders and other community members

Best Practices for Teaching Indigenous Students

Identity: Knowing who you are and where you come from

• The importance of relationships in forming connections with Indigenous students is foundational for Indigenous educators.
• Understanding the relationships with human beings and with all living and non-living things. Knowing who you are in the Indigenous culture means knowing your community, and knowing where you come from is based on your connection with the earth.
• Best practices with Indigenous learners are grounded first in relationships.
• Important for Indigenous learners to find a sense of place and belonging within schools.
• Space can also be created in the ways that a teacher approaches subject matter in the class. 
• Re-naming can create spaces of belonging within the curriculum: sharing conversations, versus public speaking, leadership versus at-risk student program.
• Values central to Indigenous Education: trust, autonomy, confidence, encouragement and acceptance.

Political Consciousness:

• Indigenous Education should not be seen as a single activity, or a token preservation of folkways. 
• Indigenous Education is more than Beads to Bannock, Aboriginal education must be woven throughout the curriculum.
• Teachers must be sensitive and aware to the loss and grieving that is historically and politically a significant part of the Indigenous student’s lives.
• Teaching resides in the distance traveled between the head and the heart.
• Develop political consciousness in the very young students.
• Combine critical challenge with issue of importance to Indigenous students and their communities.
• A critical investigative attitude deploys skills such as inference, direct observation, or identifying bias and angles of vision.
• Critical challenges help non-Indigenous learners develop a new appreciation for indigenous sources of knowledge and to discern how the truth is portrayed to the media.
• The ability to relocate: this involves being able to question one’s own cultural background.
• Seeing the act of teaching as a journey toward learning in itself.
• Becoming aware of the privilege that participation in a dominant literacy confers.
• The journey involves creating a new home for the self to dwell in.

Teacher-Student Interactions:

• Acknowledging the existence of a community beyond the classroom to which the teacher is responsible.
• Participate and initiate activities outside the classroom, many involving the local Indigenous community.
• Rely on high, yet attainable expectations.
• Effective teachers demonstrate an openness to other ways of knowing and other ways of valuing how they teach and handle the materials they use in the classroom
• Broaden teacher-student relations outside the classroom to embrace the community.
• Effective teachers were involved in student’s lives.
• Emphasized the importance of forming relationships, making connections and generally being there. 
• Involved students in thinking and valuing what they learned.

Observing the Importance of Relationships:

• Acknowledging the relationships that exist in young people’s lives (family, friends and community).
• Acknowledge the need of students to find a place of belonging within school and community. 
• Recognizing the student’s desires to connect with the curriculum, or how it is being taught. 
• Providing students with opportunities to participate in culture.
• Honoring the many Indigenous ways of knowing and learning. Being there for students: acknowledge them as individuals. Having faith and confidence in them as learners.
• Building on their strengths.
• Participating in extracurricular activities.
• Being a teacher who is easy to get along with.
• Creating a relationship with the local Indigenous communities.

Best Practices of non-Indigenous Teachers

• Develop relationships with students but do not try to co-opt or represent their perspectives. 
• Challenge students to think critically, model this kind of thinking in lectures and class discussions.

Attributes of Successful Instruction:

• Setting high expectations: Kleinfield states that high expectations means a teacher’s genuine presumption of acting as if students are fully capable of being autonomous learners.
• Showing students how to learn.
• Maintaining self awareness: The instructor does not represent himself as seeing through Indigenous eyes. Instead, identifies and critiques his position within a dominant culture. The teacher makes a distinction between the critical tools to be acquired and the perspective or purpose though which these tools can be filtered.
• Encouraging students: when evaluating assignments, the teacher provides concrete, positive and immediate feedback.
• Supporting autonomy: the teacher’s purpose was focused on the independence of the learners. The student’s develop pride and confidence in themselves.
• Develop a warm supportive environment where learning can take place.
• Willing to negotiate.
• Cultivate supportive relationships with students by attempting to see reality from an Indigenous perspective

Personal Characteristics:

• No recipe for success in teaching.
• Taking the time to get to know the Indigenous community. Recognizing students for who they are and where they come from. Acknowledging students as individuals.
• Knowing when and how to let go.
• Communicating confidence in a student’s ability to learn.
• Faith in the student’s inherent worth as an individual and as a learner. 
• Demonstrate an attitude of respect.
• Enjoy being there.
• Personal attributes: kindness, honest, flexibility and persistence.

Understanding Teaching as Living:

• For Indigenous educators, teaching is often a political act.
• Teaching models a consciousness and awareness of educators as Indigenous persons.
• Living the values, belief in forming relationships and modeling the belief in the classroom. non-Indigenous educators speak about being genuine.
• How we teach will communicate how we choose to live and reflect on our lives.
• David Rattray: Abandon the assumption that living and teaching, private and public are separate.

Showing Respect:

• Value respect in relationships.
• Establish a classroom of respect, instances of disrespect are directly addressed.
• Model respectful behaviour and interaction.
• Be sensitive to who your students are and where they are coming from.
• Respecting the complexities of Indigenous identity.
• Accepting where the students are at in relationship to their identity.
• Respect extends to daily interactions, knowing when to let go and when to show concern.

Knowledge:

• Educators accept as a given that teachers should try to connect curriculum to Aboriginal learners. 
• Teachers in this research project stated that teaching critical thinking to Aboriginal students was essential.
• Teachers need to model a questioning stance toward the subject matter by demonstrating their own self knowledge (cultural identity) and an open spirit of inquiry.
• Understand the political nature of knowledge and the political nature of curriculum. General or tribal knowledge comes from a particular perspective.
• Knowledge comes from many sources, which includes emotional and spiritual ones.

Dealing with Conflict:

• Be aware that sometimes outside teachers often bring rules and protocols that don’t allow for backing down.
• Conflict can be inflamed by an inflexible model, and appeased through understanding and openness. Operate on a presumption of trust.
• Be aware of local protocols and processes for resolving conflict.

Evaluating as Part of Instruction:

• Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers practiced similar approaches to evaluation that included evaluation as an extension of classroom practices.
• Collaboration and student involvement were the guiding principles of most classroom activities. 
• Students who devised their own project so perspectives on projects through active engagement provided evidence of their own learning. This is sound practice.
• Evaluation wasn’t treated as a separate practice but as an ongoing feature of classroom life. Communication with parents is also critical.
• Feedback needs to be positive and consistent rather than negative and intermittent. Provide students with meaningful choices.

Summary:

Seeking out ways to turn classrooms into spaces of belonging: those ways may include paying close attention to:

• Instructional approach
• Subject matter
• Critical questioning
• Collaborative evaluative practices Modeling respect

Combining high expectations, particularly of critical awareness and research skills, with a belief in the importance of relationships in establishing trust and respect.

Acknowledging that teachers are also learners...

Adapted from: Best Practices in Teaching Aboriginal Children: From an Aboriginal and Non- Aboriginal Perspective. By Theresa Wilson, (Master’s Thesis: Conversations with First Nations Educators) 2001 UVic