The Professional Practice of Teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand
7th Edition. Melbourne: Cengage Learning, 2024
📋 Overview
Now in its seventh edition, The Professional Practice of Teaching in Aotearoa New Zealand (formerly edited by Loughran & Russell, then Hill & Thrupp) is the canonical ITE textbook used across New Zealand's universities. The 2024 edition, edited by Abbiss, Wendt Samu, and Thrupp, comprehensively updates coverage to reflect the refreshed NZC, the Aotearoa NZ Histories curriculum, and contemporary challenges including digital technologies, wellbeing, and post-COVID schooling.
What makes this text distinctive is its explicitly bicultural framing — Te Tiriti o Waitangi is not an add-on chapter but a lens applied throughout. The editors bring together New Zealand teacher educators to write from their own lived and professional experience as Aotearoa-based practitioners, not importers of international frameworks.
For ITE students, this is your core reference text. Treat it as a companion across your programme — not a book to read cover-to-cover, but one to return to repeatedly as your practice develops.
📚 Key Chapter Areas
The 7th edition organises content into five key domains — each reflected in the ITE module structure on this site:
Professional Identity & Practice
What it means to be a teacher in Aotearoa — values, ethics, the Teaching Council Code, and professional obligations under Te Tiriti.
Understanding Learners
Child and adolescent development, diverse learner needs, UDL, and culturally sustaining approaches to knowing your students.
Curriculum, Planning & Assessment
The New Zealand Curriculum, unit and lesson design, assessment for and of learning, and integrating cultural knowledge into curriculum.
Learning Environments
Creating positive, culturally responsive learning environments; classroom management; relationships with students, whānau, and colleagues.
Professional Learning
Reflective practice, inquiry as a professional tool, professional learning communities, and the Spiral of Inquiry as an ongoing career framework.
🎯 Key Arguments Across the Text
- Te Tiriti is not optional. Teaching in Aotearoa requires active engagement with Te Tiriti o Waitangi — not as a historical document but as a living framework that shapes responsibilities to Māori learners, whānau, and communities.
- Teaching is a political act. Every choice about what to teach, how to teach it, and whose knowledge to include is political. The text asks teachers to be conscious of these choices rather than assuming curriculum is neutral.
- Professional practice is relational. Across all domains, the text emphasises that teaching is fundamentally a relational practice — with students, whānau, colleagues, and community.
- Curriculum coherence benefits diverse learners. Drawing on Alton-Lee's BES, the text argues that connecting curriculum to students' lives and making learning coherent is especially important for students who don't see themselves in the mainstream curriculum.
- Assessment must be fair. Assessment practices that reflect only dominant cultural knowledge disadvantage diverse learners. The text advocates for multiple modes of assessment and culturally fair evaluation criteria.
💬 Key Quotes
"Being a teacher in Aotearoa New Zealand means accepting an obligation — not merely a preference — to honour Te Tiriti o Waitangi in your practice every day."— Abbiss, Wendt Samu & Thrupp (eds.), 2024
"Teaching is never politically neutral. What we teach, how we teach it, and whose knowledge counts are all deeply political decisions — whether or not we acknowledge them as such."— Abbiss, Wendt Samu & Thrupp (eds.), 2024
"Effective professional practice in Aotearoa is necessarily relational — with students as individuals, with their whānau, with colleagues, and with the communities you serve."— Abbiss, Wendt Samu & Thrupp (eds.), 2024
🔍 Critical Analysis
✅ Strengths
- Explicitly NZ-specific — not international frameworks retrofitted to NZ.
- Strong bicultural framing throughout (not just in one chapter).
- Updated for refreshed NZC, Tech curriculum, and post-COVID context.
- Written by NZ teacher educators with direct experience in NZ schools.
- Comprehensive coverage — can accompany an entire ITE programme.
⚠️ Tensions
- As an edited volume, quality and depth varies by chapter.
- Coverage is necessarily introductory — deeper engagement requires supplementary texts.
- Secondary focus — primary and ECE contexts sometimes left underdeveloped.
- Some chapters more practically oriented than others.
💭 Discussion Questions
- The text argues teaching is political. In what ways does your subject area reflect or challenge dominant cultural perspectives? How might you address this?
- How does the 7th edition's bicultural framing compare to how Te Tiriti was addressed (or not) in your own schooling? What does this suggest about how the profession has changed?
- Which of the five key domains (professional identity, understanding learners, curriculum/assessment, learning environments, professional learning) do you feel most prepared for entering teaching? Which do you find most challenging?
- The text emphasises relational practice. What does this mean when you are the newest staff member in a school, still establishing your professional identity?
- How does this text sit alongside Bishop & Berryman's Te Kotahitanga ETP? Are they complementary? Where might they be in tension?
🔗 Connected Resources
ITE Modules:
Related Readings:
Mātauranga Māori Lens
Teaching in Aotearoa NZ carries specific obligations to mātauranga Māori and tikanga as tangata whenua knowledge. The Tātaiako framework makes these obligations explicit: teachers must demonstrate cultural competence, affirm Māori identity (whanaungatanga), and support student hauora. Te Tiriti o Waitangi is not optional context — it is a foundational professional obligation.